It’s spring quarter in 2000, last class of the week: The Presidency and the Press taught by Rahm Emanuel, former Clinton White House aide. The campus is utterly deserted by late Friday afternoon. Cub Barrett (C01, GJ04) remembers well climbing the old marble stairs to the third floor in Harris Hall to a tiny classroom that fit maybe 25 people. It “felt like we were going up to this secret room, apart from the rest of the University,” he says.

The official class goal was “to explore the deterioration of relations between the press and presidency, its cause and the change in style and tactics.” But the class was really “more of an education about the presidency itself,” says Barrett, who went on to work as a senior managerfor public relations at Time Inc. and is now manager of program communications for the Foundation for AIDS Research (amFAR) in New York City.

It was also about “the way Washington works” says fellow student John Gans Jr. (C00) and “how to think about the art of political communication in an era when communication was changing so much.” Gans has since worked in public relations and politics, including a stint as deputy national political director for then–Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s HILLPAC. Today Gans is finishing a PhD in international relations at Johns Hopkins and contributes to the Atlantic magazine’s website.

At that time Emanuel had never held elective office himself — he was two years away from joining Congress — but the diverse group of communications, political science and economics