Word: depauw
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Influence should have counted at DePauw University, an old Methodist school in northern Indiana with loyal alumni and great institutional pride. Quayle was a third-generation Pulliam at the school, a member of the same fraternity (Delta Kappa Epsilon) to which his grandfather, father and uncle had belonged. His grandfather founded the national journalism fraternity Sigma Delta Chi at DePauw, gave the school many bequests and served on its board. There was a Pulliam Chair in History until just before Dan's arrival on campus. "If I had known he was a Pulliam," says Ted Katula, the athletic director...
Quayle got special treatment at DePauw in one provable case: he graduated with a major in politics without taking the required course in political theory. When he flunked the theoretical parts of the final exam, he was given a special exam without those parts. He was one of two students for whom this was done that year, and the common denominator in their case is not family (the other man was not a Pulliam) but a quarrel between the department head and the teacher of political theory over the size and kind of assignments given in the course...
Quayle, who has refused to release his college and law school transcripts, was certainly no student at DePauw. The teachers who disliked him did so because he was good at getting by on charm. He was serious only about golf, a family passion instilled in him during the long Arizona days of his adolescence. His father, who has a unilaterally disarming candor, admits overstating it when he said of Dan's major, "If he's anything like his old man, it was probably booze and broads." But the minutes of Quayle's fraternity have this entry: "A petition was submitted...
There had not been much war protest on the DePauw campus by the time Quayle graduated in 1969. Quayle's father was writing editorials backing the war in Viet Nam, but his son was not paying attention. As graduation approached, Quayle had to do some shopping around to find an opening in the National Guard. (In 1988 he said he meant to go to law school, but he had not applied to one.) He asked people he knew about the Guard, whom to call, but it is unlikely they did or could rig things for him. His grandfather was semiretired...
During his service in the Guard through much of the academic year 1969-70, Quayle decided he did indeed want to study the law. Admission would not be easy after his admittedly poor academic performance at DePauw, but here a personal contact was helpful. He knew the admissions director of the Indiana University law school in Indianapolis -- through his family, as he knew most older people. This admissions director, Kent Frandsen, was a judge in the little town of Lebanon, outside Indianapolis. Another prominent citizen there was Quayle's grandmother, Martha Pulliam, who was given the Lebanon paper...