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Higher Education Loses Two Friends in Congress
Higher education lost two strong supporters this fall. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota died in a plane crash on October 25, and representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii died of viral pneumonia on September 28. Both Wellstone and Mink were recipients of the AAUP's Henry T. Yost Award for distinguished service on behalf of higher education.
Wellstone received the award in 1997, and Mink received it in 2002. Wellstone, who was fifty-eight when he died, was a professor of political science at Carleton College for more than two decades before he won a Senate seat in 1990. He was an advocate for federal support for higher education and for the expansion of the Pell Grant Program. Wellstone and his wife and daughter, along with three staff members, were killed when a charter plane in which they were traveling crashed in Minnesota.
Mink, who was seventy-four, served in Congress for a total of twenty-four years, from 1964 to 1976, and again from 1990 to 2002. She was the first Asian American woman elected to Congress. At the time of her death, Mink was the ranking Democrat on the House panel with jurisdiction over student aid, and had proved a staunch supporter of educational causes throughout her long career. She helped draft Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a major step toward securing equal rights for women in campus athletics. Commenting on that initiative twenty-five years later, she said she had thought of it as a "beginning statement of policy and intent," adding that, "at the moment we were doing it, we didn't think it would have this fantastic momentum and enforcement in the courts." After Mink's death, the Title IX amendments were renamed in her honor. "
Both Senator Wellstone and Representative Mink brought passion and commitment to their work that were inspiring to the rest of us," says Mark Smith, the AAUP's director of government relations. "They made things better, and they will be missed," he adds.
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