Former President Bill Clinton was a man of many faces.
He played saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show, presided over one of the nation’s biggest economic booms, tried to broker peace in the Middle East and also had one of the most publicized affairs in the history of the Oval Office.
Now, a new class at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock will examine Clinton’s presidency and the legacy he left behind.
The Clinton Presidency course will cover a variety of issues, including the 42nd president’s Arkansas background, political style, health care plans, foreign policies and impeachment. Political science Prof. Margaret Scranton plans to make extensive use of the information from the new presidential library in Little Rock, as well as opening the class to guest speakers involved in the impeachment process.
The first class took place at 7 p.m. Friday night. All sessions will be broadcast on C-SPAN.
Scranton said studying Clinton allows Americans to examine an era of their own history.
“We’re very much interested in ourselves as Americans,” she said. “When you’ve got eight years of American history and eight years of transitionary time that we’re still trying to figure out, you get a bit of a draw.”
Northwestern Prof. Lee Huebner said he takes the same perspective in teaching his class, “The Rhetoric of the American Presidency,” which this quarter focuses on Richard Nixon.
“I use the person as a way to look at the era,” Huebner said. “Sometimes you can get a better feel for an era in history by looking at it through the prism of a key personality.”
Huebner sees Nixon and Clinton as similar subjects.
“At one level, people remember the scandal and forget everything else,” he said. “Two challenges come out of that: to look past the scandal at the broader record and to look at what the scandal represented.”
Scranton said she expects more universities to offer Clinton courses in the future.
“I’d probably be interested in seeing what it’s all about,” said Katie Althen, president of NU’s College Republicans. “As long as they were doing it from a fair perspective, I would not have a problem with it.”
College Democrats President Tina Valkanoff said a Clinton course would be a welcome addition to NU’s curriculum.
“I think studying one figure in depth is pretty interesting, and his administration certainly had a lot of material for a class to work with,” said Valkanoff, a Weinberg senior.
For now, Scranton’s greatest challenge is the freshness of the information.
“Hindsight always improves our view of the presidency,” Scranton said. “As long as we realize that in 20 years we’ll know a lot more than we know now, we’ll be OK.”
