A transfer student from Harding University in Arkansas, Kenneth Starr spent his undergraduate years at GW living life in high gear. He graduated from GW in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a minor in history.

Best known for the Starr Report that led to former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment on charges of perjury, he is now dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Law in Malibu, Calif. But now, in his new life of academia and administration, he declines to talk about those days.

Instead, harkening back to his days as an undergraduate, Starr said he was a commuter student, took 19 credit hours a semester and worked more than four hours a week.

He interned, like many GW students, on Capitol Hill for two years, between 1966 and 1968 and recounted these years with fondness and nostalgia. Starr said he also felt a sense of remorse that the U.S. has not learned from its previous mistakes, referencing the Vietnam War.

“(These were) tumultuous years which made it exciting to be on Capitol Hill – to be in the eye of the storm,” Starr said.

He remembered that at the time of the Vietnam War, the Civil rights movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, there was a “remarkable culture of civility and respect” on Capitol Hill. He said Washington today “would do well to see this restored.”

But unlike the majority of GW students that trudged to Gelman Library on Sunday afternoons, Starr made use of other aspects of the city and studied like a true Washingtonian at the Library of Congress.

The school dropped its football team the year after Starr left, and he said there was already a waning enthusiasm towards the sport when he was a student.

“There was an ambivalence about gee, shouldn’t you be supporting the football team instead of being on Capitol Hill?” he said.

Starr was a member of Delta Phi Epsilon, the professional foreign service fraternity on campus. He said his “life gravitated toward the classroom,” but he also made life-long friends at the place he interned. He was recruited for the chorale at GW, but had to turn down the offer because of his already busy schedule.

Starr had great personal interest in religion and is still friends with the then – dean of the religion department, Harry Yeide. Yeide, now director of the peace studies program, is also a religion professor and said his memories of Starr are not congruous with how he was portrayed in the media.

“He was an intelligent and incredibly flexible man,” Yeide said. “His political portrayal (by the media) is not continuous with my memories.”