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Credit: Steve Goodman
Former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean answered
questions from political science and law
students Oct. 25 at the Eagleton
Institute of Politics.
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Clifford Case earned a reputation for putting principles above politics when he served in Washington, D.C., from 1944 to 1978 as a representative and a senator from New Jersey. One of his friends was former N.J. Gov. Thomas Kean, named this year’s Clifford P. Case Professor of Public Affairs at Rutgers.
“Gov. Kean is the first Clifford Case Professor who not only has achieved national stature for leadership and integrity but also comes from the senator’s home state of New Jersey and knew Clifford Case,” said Ruth Mandel, director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics, which administers the program.
The Rutgers Board of Governors established the Case professorship in 1980. Kean is the 13th Case professor. Previous honorees have included former President Gerald Ford; former Vice President and U.S. Sen. Walter Mondale; and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas “Tip” O’Neill.
Kean gave two public speeches Oct. 24 and 25 at the Busch Campus Center in Piscataway and the Paul Robeson Campus Center in Newark, respectively. But on the morning of Oct. 25 he treated two separate groups – one made up of faculty and one made up of students – to private talks in the Eagleton Institute’s drawing room.
Kean, who served as president of Drew University for 15 years until he stepped down in June, recently made the national spotlight late in his distinguished career as chair of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The group’s findings, “The 9/11 Commission Report,” quickly became a surprise national bestseller.
Kean, a Republican, told faculty members that he led the commission with the same bipartisan spirit with which he tried to live his political life. He insisted that he and 9/11 commission co-chair and former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton always appear together in media interviews. “I thought if the country started seeing us as five Republicans, five Democrats, we’d be like everybody else in Washington and we’d lose our credibility,” Kean said.
Kean told the group of students, many of whom were women undergraduate and graduate students studying political science and law, that local, state and federal government desperately need women leaders. “[Party officials] tend to give seats out as awards ... there’s still an old boys network,” he said.
Kean’s commitment to putting policy above politics made an impression on Johanna Dobrich, a graduate student studying political science. “I was very impressed with his gesture of building bridges across party lines,” Dobrich said. “That can’t happen if you keep a partisan hat on all the time.”
At his talk in Newark, Kean recounted his previously little-known role in meeting with Rutgers-Newark students who had occupied Conklin Hall in 1969 to protest the scarcity of black students, black faculty and minority-oriented academic programs on campus. “Some of my legislative activities stemmed from my talks that day,” Kean said. Those activities included Kean’s legislation that created the state’s Educational Opportunity Fund program.
At the end of Kean’s day at Eagleton, Mandel told the former governor that his influence would be needed in the immediate future of politics. “Whatever it is you’re going to do next, I hope it isn’t golf,” Mandel said. “We need more of you.”
Carla Capizzi contributed to this story.
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