He talked about a diverse student body being educational in itself, but that sort of wishful thinking supports the notion that self-esteem is more important than physics. Better to try to achieve equal outcomes from the bottom up. A President can't do much about race relations, but if Clinton got off the affirmative-action barricades and on to programs that ensured equal education opportunities for kids, we might get closer to where Martin Luther King Jr. originally dreamed us. Yet it was less important, at least to me, that this old argument got nowhere on the panel than that the feeling created among the President and the other panelists, largely strangers to one another, was familial. At a time when similar meetings have ended either in donnybrooks or in savage politeness, this was unusual.
People always call a debate civil when they mean useless.
But there was more than civility on the panel. There was active goodwill. It was clear that we wished one another well. We wished the President well. As for him, he could have gone on talking well beyond the hour, and in fact he stayed 45 minutes after the taping, going back and forth with us.