(FORTUNE Magazine) – The biggest story out of commencementland this year was the chilly reception given by Wellesley graduates to Barbara Bush, petitioned against by maybe one- quarter of the graduating class because she is famous only on account of her husband's accomplishments, not her own, and has therefore flunked Role ! Modelism 101. We kept hoping that Wellesley's managers would respond to the protest by substituting Jeane Kirkpatrick. Alas, they did not have the guts. As we go to press, the Wellesley kids seem to have been mollified by the addition of Raisa Gorbachev, whose career highlight was lecturing at Moscow State on the wonders of dialectical materialism. It does take guts to put an American conservative or foreign-policy hard- liner on a commencement platform in 1990, which is possibly why none are visible. At least, none are at the best colleges in the U.S. (with ''best'' defined as those in the ''most difficult'' admissions category according to Peterson's Guide to Four-Year Colleges). Leaving out a few special cases like music schools and military academies, we end up with a list of 33 superior institutions. One or two had speakers not readily identified with any issues agitating student radicals these days; Harvard, for example, got Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany. There were nine black speakers, none conservative. (A Tom Sowell would arguably need even more police protection than Kirkpatrick.) The list was dominated by left- liberal characters in the ideological vicinity of Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund (Stanford and Yale), environmental fanatic Helen Caldicott (Smith), Archbishop Tutu (Wesleyan), and Michael Dukakis (Williams). One assumes that Mike felt free to mention the fateful ''L word'' he kept forgetting in 1988.