Robert Reich Admits His Student Party 'Humiliated' Women

A former U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton admitted he "humiliated" women he invited to socialize with fellow freshmen while a student at Dartmouth College.

Writing a mea culpa in his daily newsletter on Tuesday, Robert Reich, who also served in the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, revealed his experience during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, as well as his attempts to mix while attending the then-all-male institution.

The political commentator has described himself as a male feminist and has spoken out about gender-based wealth and income inequality. In 1989, he wrote: "I became a feminist the day my wife was denied tenure."

Reich, who attended Dartmouth between 1964 and 1968, graduating summa cum laude in history, wrote that in his freshman year, he was elected as class president to "make the place more liveable." He described the New Hampshire university as a monastery prone to incredibly cold winters.

After being elected, he said his fellow freshmen "had only one thing they wanted me to do as class president: Invite busloads of young women students to Dartmouth for the weekends."

Reich described organizing for dozens of buses to arrive one Friday night a few weeks after his election containing more than 400 women "from every women's college in New England."

He wrote that only freshmen were allowed through a makeshift fence he had erected around the area where the buses were unloaded, and pointed klieg lights—powerful lamps used in filming—at the bus doors.

"Unfortunately, this had the effect of forcing each young woman to make a rather theatrical entrance onto the campus from her bus," Reich said, "prompting my freshmen constituents to holler numbers from 1 to 10, reflecting their judgments about her looks.

"The spectacle made me cringe," he added. "It was worse for the young women. Many were humiliated. Some even refused to get off the bus. Several convinced the bus drivers to take them home."

Prior to addressing the college incident, Reich said that he "still feel[s] ashamed" about it and that his "weak defense" was that the norms of the early 1960s were "quite different" than those in the latter half of the decade, after the sexual revolution.

According to the New York Times, while attending Dartmouth, Reich went on a date with Hillary Clinton, before going to Oxford University on a scholarship along with Bill Clinton. The three then went to Yale Law School, where Reich has said in previous interviews he introduced the two.

Reich worked as an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general under Ford before being appointed by Carter to a position in the Federal Trade Commission. He served as Clinton's labor secretary through his first term before resigning in 1996.