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Fiona Hill holds out her hand with a pre-emptive wince. She’s shaken so many hands over the past week, congratulating graduates of Durham University, that her own is hurting. It’s an occupational hazard of being the university’s chancellor, a post she has held since 2023, but it’s one she bears cheerfully.
Presiding over Durham’s graduation exercises earlier this month held deep meaning for Ms. Hill. She grew up in Bishop Auckland, a down-at-the-heels former coal-mining town, 11 miles from Durham. Education, initially at St. Andrews University in Scotland, was her ticket out, the first step on a journey that began in 1984 when her father, a miner turned hospital porter, warned his ambitious daughter, “There’s nothing here for you, pet.”
She landed, instead, in the United States. From Harvard to the Brookings Institution, from the White House to a congressional committee debating whether to impeach President Trump in 2019, Ms. Hill scaled the heights in her adopted land.
Testifying to lawmakers in a distinctive northern burr, she became that rarest of species: a celebrity foreign-policy analyst. Her damning description of Mr. Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr. — she called it a “domestic political errand” — was a riveting moment.
Yet for all that, a part of Ms. Hill stayed back home, in the rust belt of England’s northeast. When Durham University came calling, she readily accepted, taking on the mostly ceremonial post of chancellor.
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