Like Al Gore, Nancy Bekavac has for eight years found herself walking in the long media shadow of President Bill Clinton.
Listed among longtime Clinton friends who stayed overnight at the White House, she has been a friend of Clinton's since she loaned him her class notes while attending Yale Law School in 1970. Not surprisingly, Bekavac has found her press interviews over the bulk of the recent decade dominated by talk of the president, with scant mention that she has a presidency of her own.
But Bekavac, who in 1990 became the first female president of Scripps College, a women's school in Claremont, seems more amused than annoyed at the Clintonian focus.
The college president has little to feel insecure about, having carved out her own identity on the local scene: She's an unswerving defender of liberal arts education at a time when many other colleges are scrambling to appeal more to industry. She's an accomplished business law attorney. She's a quick wit who occasionally pens quirky op-ed pieces for the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. And she's the sort of small-school president and dog aficionado whose former students drop by to say hello and sometimes adopt puppies from her.
Peers and coworkers describe her as a charismatic leader who can get results with just her personality and presence.
"It's hard to pinpoint her (management) style," said Brenda Barham Hill, chief executive officer for the Claremont University Consortium, a newly created administrative body for the Claremont Colleges, of which Scripps is one. "She makes it seem kind of effortless."
Hill, who answers to the six Claremont College presidents, was vice president of planning under Bekavac for nearly 10 years.
"She came in at a time of pretty low morale among faculty," Hill said. "Now the institution's confidence in itself and in our own academic strengths is stronger."
Bekavac is highly regarded among the other Claremont presidents, said Jon Strauss, president of Harvey Mudd College.
"No one would dispute that Nancy is a leader. It just stands out in everything she does," he said. "She's a very intelligent, very articulate, very well-read individual with very strong feelings on issues that she isn't at all hesitant to share with others.
"There were some serious concerns (in the 1980s) about the future of women's education in Claremont, but I think she's erased those _ largely through her mere presence," he said.
In the fall of 1970, Bekavac met Bill Clinton while attending Yale Law School.
The Swarthmore College graduate had recently completed a summer stint as a string reporter in Vietnam and decided she didn't want to be a journalist after all.
"I didn't want to report on events, but to participate," she said. "I didn't expect to be a lawyer. I expected to go to Washington (D.C.) and be a staffer."
Clinton showed up more than halfway through the first semester -- having just finished working on a failed senatorial campaign -- and asked to borrow her notes so he could catch up, she related in a 1996 PBS "Frontline" interview.
Bekavac, who heralded from Clairton, Pa., said she identified with him partly because of his rural background and partly because each had losta father. The two remained friends after law school. When he was elected president, she was invited to a post-inaugural bash at the White House, an experience she found strange.
"Twenty-five years earlier, I'm demonstrating in Lafeyette Park. Now I'm inside," she said.
Unlike Clinton --and despite her earlier ambitions -- Bekavac didn't go into politics after law school.
Following the Watergate scandal, she was wary of the corrupting effect a life of politics might have on her, she said. Instead, she joined a Los Angeles law firm, planning all the while to vault from there into a career as a law school professor.
But Bekavac spent 11 years at Munger, Tolles & Olson, becoming a partner in 1980. Even though she taught law on the side at Southwestern School of Law and University of California, Los Angeles, she didn't leave the legal profession behind until 1985. That year she was named executive director of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, which had granted her a fellowship during her college days.
Harvard University professor of sociology David Riesman guided her toward her current calling, she said. During an interview on foundation matters, he told her, "You should be a college president."
She shrugged the recommendation off, but later Riesman arranged for her to meet James O. Freedman, president of Dartmouth College. A few years later, Freedman hired her to be counselor to the president's office. Two years later, she became the sixth president of Scripps College.
Since then, Bekavac has used strategic planning to give the campus a renewed sense of purpose, coworkers say.
Originally published in The Business Press 11/06/00