Lewis urges grads to reject administration assault on intellectualism, democracy

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Levering Lewis challenged the 340 members of Wheaton College's Class of 2003 to ''make history come out the right way'' after attacking the rise of the radical right in American culture and accusing the Bush Administration of an assault on democracy.

''Yesterday we had a republic; today we have a Homeland Security state,'' Lewis told graduates. ''The right has seized the banner of the left, and the radical right has emerged as a powerful vote-getting synthesis of antithesis--populism bonded to plutocracy.'' [Full transcript available online.]

''The Class of 2003 goes out into an America whose profound racial reconstruction will be marked next year by celebration and contemplating with a 50th anniversary of Brown versus Board of Education,'' said the biographer of civil rights figure W.E.B. Du Bois. ''The considerable social gains of the last 50 years are only as authentic and as enduring as your vigilant guardianship makes them. Your generation is facing not only concerted assaults through the federal courts upon minority advancement in secondary and higher education and women's reproductive rights, you and we confront the most formidable and latest assault of very possible of economic democracy in this country since the late 1890s.''

''Indeed, when President Bush famously asked 'Why do they hate us?' many were encouraged to believe there might be an earnest and prudent, informed search for an answer to that pressing question. Regretably I think it might be conceded that such a commendable mindset has been overwhelmed by a simplistic, puerile war on terrorism whose objectives are grotesquely ecumenical and of indefinite duration.''

Among the nearly 600 alumnae/i who participated in Reunion Weekend was Barbara Berry Nelson, member of the Class of 1928, who celebrated her 75th reunion. Also returning to campus today are: Lesley Stahl '63, "60 Minutes" anchor; Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Todd Whitman '68; and honorary degree recipients Esther Newberg '63, joint head of International Creative Management in New York, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros '69, philanthropist and champion of Latin American art and education programs, and Catherine Keener '83, Academy Award-nominated actress.

Seven Wheaton students won prestigious national scholarships this year. Four members of the Class of 2003 won Fulbright scholarships to work and study abroad. Sabrina Denault, a Balfour Scholar from Fairhaven, Mass., plans to teach the English language and American culture at a school in France; English major Emily Hyde, a resident of New London, Conn., will spend 13 months teaching English in a Korean school; Megan Luce, an English literature major from Burlington, Vermont, will teach in an elementary or junior high school in Taiwan with the support of her Fulbright; and Kirsten Stajich, a Balfour Scholar and double major in English and french from Hillsborough, North Carolina, will travel to the Orleans/Tour region of France to teach English to primary school children.

Three other Wheaton students won prestigious national scholarships this year: Adar Cohen '04 of Peterborough, N.H., won a Harry S. Truman Fellowship; Jared Duval '05 won a Morris K. Udall Scholarship; and alumna Anna Venishnick '02 also won a Fulbright to teach English language and American culture in Germany.

Lewis is a University Professor at New York University and one of the nation's leading historians. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and others. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including King, A Biography, When Harlem Was in Vogue, The Race to Fashoda, and a two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, for which he won two Pulitzers.

Wheaton is a highly selective college of the liberal arts and sciences with a student body of 1,550. It is a member of the Twelve College Exchange, which also includes Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke, Trinity, Wellesley and Wesleyan.