Boston. THE GIFTED students who attend Stanford University often require special accommodation. But this semester may be the first time a new student needs two rooms - one for herself and her roommate and another for the Secret Service agents who protect her 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Chelsea Clinton starts classes next week and the university is trying to keep her time on campus as uneventful as is possible for the only child of the leader of the free world.
Miss Clinton, 17, is to be treated just like each of her 1,660 first-year classmates on the private campus south of San Francisco, university officials said. The school refuses to discuss where she will live, what classes she will take or any other details of her education, although the White House has disclosed she plans to major in pre-med and hopes eventually to go to medical school and become a doctor.
"What a university has to offer in terms of interaction between the faculty and students requires a certain calm environment, and colleges do whatever they can to supply that," said Mark Nichol, spokesman for Brown University, the alma mater of John F. Kennedy Jr and former president Jimmy Carter's daughter, Amy. "I'm sure Stanford is mindful of that."
Yale University had to provide more than the normal student services to the actress Jodie Foster when she attended there in 1981. The university furnished round-the-clock security when the actress was found to have been stalked by James Hinckley, the man who shot then-President Ronald Reagan.
But spokeswoman Cynthia Atwood said the excitement surrounding celebrity students generally dies down after the first few weeks of classes.
Ms Atwood said:"There's usually some interest again at graduation, but in between they blend right in."
Stanford last experienced presidential progeny when Alan Hoover, son of then-president Herbert Hoover, went there in the 1920s. Today, the actor Fred Savage of television's The Wonder Years is an upperclassman. US Olympic gold medal-winning gymnasts Dominique Dawes and Amy Chow start this fall.