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The former secretary of state received a cool reception in her first public forum with students at Stanford. Some students are calling for the university to end its relationship with a woman whom they call a war criminal.
After eight years in Washington serving as one of President Bush's closest advisers as national security chief and later as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, now 54 years old, has returned to California. She has reassumed her tenured position as Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a post that she held before going to Washington at the beginning of the Bush administration.
The Hoover Institution is famed as a conservative think tank on public policy issues. Among the Hoover Institution fellows are prominent political and social conservatives such as Clint Bollick, Thomas Sowell, Harvey Mansfield, George Schultz, and Shelby Steele.
Rice's return to Stanford illustrates how an academic perceived as an active participant in an unpopular war and a supporter of torture policies does not easily return to a quiet life behind the ivy walls.
In the 1990s Rice was provost at Stanford. Her performance there met with uneven appraisals. Provost Rice cut services, fired administrators, and reduced funding for the university's ethnic theme houses. She set in place a new core curriculum and reinstated the failing grade. Multicultural studies were downgraded in favor of establishing a solid base in traditional Western studies.
Responding to criticisms at that time that the university was not representative of the nation's population, Rice responded, "I am completely opposed to die...