The warm ovation for Donna Shalala had just subsided, and all that remained of Dartmouth College's convocation program was the address by the student assembly president, a segment often noted mainly for its rich trove of treasured cliches.
But today's speech was to be something different, something more along the lines of, well, a conversion experience.
"Before I begin my speech," Danielle Moore told the audience of students and faculty, "I think it's important you know the changes that have taken place in my opinions and attitudes."
She then sketched her student career. Her initial "rosy" view of the world had been darkened by the difficulties arising from being a Native American woman at Dartmouth, and from learning more about "the history and current state of my people."
All this had filled her with an anger and bitterness that had been reflected in her campaign for student assembly president last spring. She had won by running against a crowded field on what might be called a victims rights platform.
But now she was clearly switching agendas. "After a summer of introspection," she said, "I have been able to leave my anger behind and concentrate on the revolutionary idea of community.
"Separatism and segregation are no longer revolutionary. Daring to try to cross the lines of color, class, gender, sexual orientation and religion to achieve friendships, or at least some kind of understanding, is revolutionary."
She went on to criticize the way students were immediately categorized according to race, ethnicity, gender and so forth, and then found their lives being ruled by the "collective voice" of that subgroup. The voice dictated the clothes they wore, the politics they practised, the way they spoke, and even the people with whom they could associate.
What was needed was a new balance that allowed a wider range of individual expression. It should not be "deemed unacceptable," she said, for an African American to have politically conservative views, or for a feminist to wear makeup. Similarly, a fraternity pledge should feel free to refuse to participate in drinking activities.
This listener was startled and amazed. This was partly because Moore's poised and eloquent speech was so unexpected. On campus to drop off a son, I had come to the convocation more or less by chance, mainly to hear Secretary of Health and Human Services Shalala.
Moreover, Moore's call for "community" is fairly radical stuff to hear on an American campus these days. The required rhetoric is more often aimed at driving people apart, rather than bringing them together.
This is disquieting. After all, if privileged and empowered young people can't work out a better way of living together within the sequestered sanctuary of the campus, what hope is there for the rest of us?
But my favorite thing about the speech, of course, was that I couldn't have agreed with her more. What Danielle Moore was calling for on campus is what ought to take place in America.
A couple of days later I talked with her to find out what the reaction had been, and learn more about the introspective experience that had brought about her change of views.
The reaction, she said, had been "wonderful." Many students and professors had congratulated her; several had asked for copies of the speech.
As to what had changed her views, there had been no single crystallizing experience, though she had been annoyed by the way ideological conformity was enforced during a program for minorities she'd attended early in the summer.
"The word 'sellout' was thrown around a lot," she said, "and that's a painful word." Too often, she said, it was applied without any real examination of the argument being made, or the validity of the supposed sellout's own life experience.
But more important was a gradual realization that "my anger hadn't gotten me anywhere. It was something that alienates, rather than something that makes things move forward."
Looking back , she wondered if perhaps she had gone from the overly optimistic view she'd started with, to bitter radicalism, "without ever testing the waters in the middle."
