When Wellesley College invited Barbara Bush to speak at its 1990 graduation, protests broke out on campus. A hundred and fifty students spelled out their objections in a petition to the school’s president at the time, Nannerl Keohane: “Wellesley teaches that we will be rewarded on the basis of our own merit, not on that of a spouse. To honor Barbara Bush as a commencement speaker is to honor a woman who has gained recognition through the achievements of her husband, which contravenes what we have been taught over the last four years at Wellesley.”
They received sympathy from an unlikely source: the then-first lady herself, who with her typical bluntness said she found their complaints “very reasonable.