By Matthew Keenan
April 18 (Bloomberg) -- Former President Bill Clinton, one of the most coveted and elusive commencement speakers at U.S. colleges, spurns dozens of invitations each year.
This spring, he's stepping up his schedule as his wife, U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, runs for the office he once held. He will triple his recent annual average and talk to graduates on six campuses, led by Harvard University and the University of New Hampshire, the biggest school in the state that hosts the nation's first presidential primary.
``Whenever he's in the news, she's in the news,'' said Dean Spiliotes, 43, research director at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. ``It's a good thing for her.''
Bill Clinton, 60, tops the list of politicians, celebrities, intellectuals and business leaders speaking to graduating seniors this spring. In an annual ritual, the 4,000 degree-granting institutions in the U.S. scout for achievers and orators who can shine attention on their campuses and inspire their graduates.
President George W. Bush will speak at schools including the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. On April 26, Vice President Dick Cheney will be at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, a visit that has drawn a protest petition from faculty and students.
Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester will welcome Senator Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton's Democratic presidential rival, on May 19.
Immelt, Wagoner
General Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt will speak at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. General Motors Corp. chief Rick Wagoner is set to address his alma mater, Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, on May 13.
At Howard University in Washington, television talk show host Oprah Winfrey will be the star attraction May 12. Winfrey, worth an estimated $1.5 billion, donated $58.3 million last year, mostly to her foundations whose causes included a girls' leadership academy in South Africa, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Most speakers and educational institutions haven't disclosed the topics of this year's addresses.
Bill Clinton's talks will center on ``the importance of citizen service, the Clinton Foundation and its work, and all the great things that the young people who are graduating can do with their lives to make a positive impact on the interdependent world that we live in,'' said Sarah Hamilton of the William J. Clinton Foundation in an e-mail message.
The New York-based fund works on AIDS treatment and prevention and global warming. After making six spring commencement speeches from 2004 to 2006, Clinton got more than three dozen invitations this year, Hamilton said. Clinton's first appearance will be April 28 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
`Remarkably Popular'
A USA Today/Gallup poll last month showed 70 percent of Americans say Clinton will have a positive effect on his wife's candidacy. A month earlier, the same pollsters found 63 percent had a favorable opinion of him. Clinton has hosted fund-raising events such as one on March 21 in Washington that collected $2.7 million, helping Hillary Clinton raise $26 million in the first quarter this year.
``Bill Clinton is just remarkably popular now,'' said Karlyn Bowman, 59, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington.
$7.5 Million in Fees in 2005
Clinton earned $7.5 million for speaking 43 times in 2005, an average of $174,419 a speech, to audiences including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to disclosure forms Hillary Clinton filed with the Senate. Graduation speeches are customarily given free of charge.
``Ex-presidents have about as much visibility as you can have, and Bill Clinton, being a damn good speaker, brings a double whammy,'' for colleges, said Carlton Sedgeley, 67, president of New York speakers' agency Royce Carlton Inc.
Clinton will make addresses in May and June at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, Vermont's Middlebury College and Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.
At Harvard, which counts seven presidents as alumni, including Bush, Clinton accepted an overture from graduating seniors to speak at Class Day, the day before commencement in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The June 7 graduation address will be given by Harvard dropout and Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, who will receive an honorary degree. Clinton's foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest charitable fund at $33 billion, have worked together on AIDS in the developing world.
Clinton, Bush
The Gates foundation set aside $1 billion in 1999 for the Gates Millennium Scholars program to underwrite education for U.S. minority students, and set up the Gates Cambridge Scholars program, resembling the Rhodes Scholarships, with $210 million.
At the University of New Hampshire in Durham on May 19, Clinton will accompany George H.W. Bush, his Republican predecessor and father of the current president. Voters in New Hampshire cast primary ballots in January.
Clinton and the elder Bush collaborated on fundraising after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in the U.S. South, and shared the stage at Tulane University's graduation in New Orleans in 2006.
Clinton graduated from Georgetown University in Washington and Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, and was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford in the U.K.
To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Keenan in Boston at mkeenan6@bloomberg.net .
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