Hillary Clinton is scheduled to speak at Rutgers University on Thursday, mainly on her role in women’s political history in America. Rutgers confirmed that Clinton is to be compensated — via an endowment — a sum of $25,000, which she reportedly intends to donate to charity.
In the years leading up to her failed 2016 presidential campaign, however, Clinton commanded a much higher price tag. A 2015 Business Insider report listed speaker fees well into six figures, and although different media outlets clashed on the exact amounts, it was clear that the range was from $125,000 to $335,000. All told, it was estimated that she earned close to $12 million in speaking fees in the years after she left the State Department.
Clinton’s planned speech at Rutgers was also criticized by the university’s College Republicans, who said that allowing Clinton a platform when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been disinvited amid protests was evidence of hypocrisy.
Ruth B. Mandel, director of Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics, was very complimentary of the former first lady.
“Eagleton is proud to host the most important American political woman of our time,” Mandel said. “As a public leader, Hillary Rodham Clinton has crossed traditional boundaries, making both history and headlines. This visit will afford our students and the Rutgers community an opportunity to witness a conversation with the person behind the media fog.”
In contrast, a Rutgers faculty council voted to rescind Rice’s invitation to speak at commencement in 2014, saying, “Condoleezza Rice … played a prominent role in (the Bush) administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction. And she at the very least condoned the Bush administration’s policy of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ such as waterboarding,”
The College Republicans also made it clear that they were not interested in getting Clinton’s event canceled. “We are not protesting Secretary Hillary Clinton’s right to speak on campus, as was regrettably done to Secretary Rice.” Their goal was simply to showcase the disparity in the way each was treated on the Rutgers University campus.