Students Learn Vermont’s Ex-Governor Is a Class Act : Education: Madeleine Kunin, at a Dartmouth fellowship program, puts a human face on politics and says that women should play a bigger role.

Teaching for a term at Dartmouth College, former Vermont Gov. Madeleine Kunin felt she had a mission, to show her students that politics can be a worthy calling and that women should play a bigger role.

“When you leave politics, you are let in on a secret you knew, but didn’t acknowledge to yourself, that most people have a very low esteem of politicians and the political system,” says Kunin, who stepped down as governor in January.

“Just the word politician is a negative word. My most valuable role here was to show it can be done, that you can be a political person, have some impact and emerge intact as a human being.”

Kunin, 57, spent the spring at Dartmouth under the college’s prestigious Montgomery Fellowship program, which brings to the campus people who have distinguished themselves in their field, whether it be the arts, politics, or law.

Former President Gerald R. Ford, former British Prime Minister Edward Heath and authors John Updike and Wallace Stegner are among those who have come to the college under the program.

The fellows make their home in Montgomery House, a luxurious home near the campus. Vermont does not have a governor’s mansion. Governors live in their own homes while in office. So the luxury of Montgomery House prompted Kunin to joke: “I finally got a mansion, although I had to come to New Hampshire to get it.”

But her life was anything but relaxed at Dartmouth. She used her time on the campus with almost missionary zeal.

“What I found is that I have done what very few women have done,” says Kunin, Vermont’s first woman governor, only the fourth woman governor elected in her own right nationally and the first woman governor to be elected to three terms.

She taught courses, spoke to other classes and held informal meetings with students and faculty.

“She helped to make politics look good,” says Lynn Mather, a political science professor who taught a class with Kunin. “This is a generation that has a different view.”

“They have seen the worst of it,” Kunin says. “They have seen the scandals. There is a feeling that there is both a personal risk and a questionable gain in getting involved.”

Kunin urged the students to look anew at politics, especially state politics, which she feels has been wrongly tarnished by dissatisfaction and disillusionment with national politics.

“A lot of their views of politics are shaped by national politics,” she says. “There is an enormous difference in terms of effectiveness and what you can get done at the state level.”

Dartmouth students clearly enjoyed their peephole into the world of politics.

“She is a real live person who has done it,” says Kelly Daughtry, a Dartmouth student from North Carolina.

“I had never thought about politics from a woman’s point of view. Unlike the book we were reading, which said that gender doesn’t make a difference, we found out it does.”

That there is gender bias in politics is one of the major messages Kunin brought to the campus. She made her point in dozens of stories.

One day she brought to the campus Elizabeth Bankowski, who was campaign manager in Kunin’s successful 1984 gubernatorial race.

The two women sat comfortably on couches in the living room of Montgomery House, reliving the campaign for an audience of about a dozen students and faculty and staff members.

They laughed together as they remembered how the Republican candidate, then-Atty. Gen. John Easton, had devoted a day a week during the campaign to working blue-collar jobs.

“The jobs were all masculine, macho jobs,” Kunin said.

“There he would be, with shirt off, chest hairs showing, the real masculine thing, climbing telephone poles,” Bankowski said.

“He equated leadership with masculinity,” Kunin said.

Bankowski told the students: “You’re told the way to win campaigns is to have the best candidate, but we found our polls showed that in some people’s minds, it didn’t matter who was best qualified, they put their support with the male.

“We did head-to-head questions in our polls in which people thought Madeleine was smarter and knew the issues better, and that her positions were more similar to theirs, but when we asked, ‘Who would you vote for?’ they said they would vote for John Easton.”

Kunin, the mother of four, seemed much more relaxed as a teacher than she was as a politician.

“I am surprised at how comfortable I was in this role,” she says. “I enjoyed the chance to revisit some of the decisions made in the whirlwind of campaigns and in office, and try to put them into some order.”

Standing in front of a class, Kunin laughed often, detailing the differences between the textbooks and the real world.

She recognizes that it is still unusual for women to be in politics. “The most frequent question I was asked is: ‘How did you get into politics?’

“That is still sort of a mystery to people, why a woman would get into politics. There is a better understanding of why men get into politics, because it is traditional. For women still, by the very rarity of it, it arouses those questions.

“I got into politics as a worried mother. My children crossed the railroad tracks on their way to school and there were no warning lights and I set out to find out how to do that, get flashing red lights. Step by step I got myself involved in the political process, in organizing the community, and eventually got the flashing lights.

“Politics begins out of anxiety, anger, or wanting to change something. You learn the process by necessity.”

After the successful campaign for the flashing lights, Kunin moved on to Burlington city politics and then in 1972 was elected to the state Legislature.

After serving in the Legislature, rising to the chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee, Kunin won election as lieutenant governor in 1978, lost a gubernatorial bid in 1982, and then came back to win in 1984.

She opted against a fourth term in office.

“I don’t think politics is the only way to create change,” she says. “Teaching is another way to create change.”