Condoleezza Rice is coming back. The former professor and provost has dispelled any lingering doubt that she might stick around Washington after her long tenure in the Bush administration as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State. “I am going back to Stanford, back to California, west of the Mississippi,” she said on April 8, according to a report by the Associated Press. “I very much look forward to watching this campaign and voting as a voter.”

Periodically over the course of the Bush administration, there have been whispers that Rice was positioning herself for a vice presidential candidacy, and much has been made of her potential as a running mate for John McCain this fall. Despite her many denials, a former administration spokesman, Dan Senor, told ABC last week that Rice was “actively” campaigning, and Grover Norquist, head of the influential conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, told the Washington Post that he thought Rice would be “great” as president or vice president.

This created some intense beltway uproar, prompting Rice to try once more to definitively quash the rumor. “I don’t want to be, don’t intend to be, won’t be on the ticket,” she said on April 15.

So barring any jolting Trent Johnson-esque reversals, Condi could be here by spring quarter 2009. What will her return mean for Stanford? Will there be protests like those that met Donald Rumsfeld’s temporary Hoover Institution appointment? Will she teach? Will there be protests during her teaching?

For some reason, I keep seeing this image of naked body-painted protesters storming the classroom or auditorium during Rice’s first class. Maybe they will even be naked, body-painted and on a hunger strike at the same time. This could create an epic standoff, as Rice is famously unflappable. When a Code Pink protester rushed her with fake blood-coated palms last fall at the Capitol, Rice not only didn’t flinch, she asked the Capitol Police to take it easy on the woman.

On the other hand, Rice does not provoke quite the same enmity as Rumsfeld, so maybe the arrival will be quieter. Every official biography I could find — including the White House, State Department, Hoover Institution and Political Science Department — proudly notes that, while teaching at Stanford, Rice won the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. This suggests she knows how to connect with students.

Another question: if Rice does return to teaching, will her classes focus on her old specialties of politics in the Soviet Union and nuclear arms strategy, or will she have some new subject based on her diplomatic tenure?

Unfortunately for those of us graduating in 2009, we may not be around to find out the answers to these and other questions, like whether Rice will have office hours. In an interview with the Daily last May, current Provost John Etchemendy said that if Rice elects to teach, it will probably not be immediate. “My guess is that she will not teach in her first year back, since anyone who holds a job as overwhelming as hers needs at least a year to decompress,” he said. “She will probably spend that year recording her reflections about her terms as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State.”

If (at only age 53) Rice does take the memoirs route, her account of her time in office will be interesting to compare with the harsher versions of others. “She presided over a dysfunctional security apparatus, never able to pull together the warring Defense and State Departments and regularly outmaneuvered by Rumsfeld,” wrote London Guardian writer Jonathan Freedland in a review of “Twice as Good,” a 2007 Rice biography by Stanford alum Marcus Mabry. “It’s also clear that she ignored repeated warnings of both the seriousness of the Qaeda threat and the risks of an Iraq invasion,” Freedland added.

In an interview with the Washinton Times at the end of March, Rice refused to back away from the decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, describing the wars as “both right and both necessary.” This view and her tireless defense of Bush may not be popular with many students and professors, but especially given the constant screaming that all professors are to the left of Marx — my good buddies at the Stanford Review will tell you all about it — Condoleezza Rice should have a solid place at Stanford.

Maybe she won’t come back, and maybe she will hole up in Hoover if she does, but I hope not. I’d show up for her class, or even a guest lecture, and I probably wouldn’t even have fake blood or body paint.

Did you know that in 1993, Chevron named a 129,000-ton supertanker SS Condoleezza Rice? Send your fun Condi facts to wilkerson "at" stanford.edu