Alito CAPS His Bid

By Eyal Press, The Nation. Posted November 30, 2005.

Campus newspapers aren't generally known for making waves inside the Beltway.

Recently, however, the Daily Princetonian published a story that merits attention from senators gearing up for the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, George W. Bush's nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. As Chanakya Sethi reported in a November 18 article for the paper, in 1985 Princeton graduate and conservative Republican Alito sought to impress his colleagues in the Reagan Administration, where he was applying to become deputy assistant attorney general, by touting his membership in an organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

Launched in 1972, the year Alito graduated, CAP had an innocuous-sounding name that disguised a less benign agenda, which included preventing women and minorities from entering an institution that had long been a bastion of white male privilege. In a 1973 article in Prospect, a magazine CAP published, Shelby Cullom Davis, one of its founders, harked back to the days when a gathering of Princeton alumni consisted of "a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds."

Lamented Cullom Davis: "I cannot envisage a similar happening in the future with an undergraduate student population of approximately 40 percent women and minorities, such as the Administration has proposed."

Another article published that same year bemoaned the fact that "the makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse" in recent years -- Princeton had begun admitting women in 1969 -- and wondered aloud what might happen if the university adopted a "sex-blind" policy "removing limits on the number of women."

In an unsuccessful effort to forestall this frightening development, the executive committee of CAP published a statement in December 1973 that affirmed unequivocally, "Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy."

By the time Alito was readying his 1985 job application with the Reagan Administration, the admission of women and minorities was well established at Nassau Hall, but this did not stop CAP from lamenting the consequences.

"People nowadays just don't seem to know their place," fretted a 1983 Prospect essay titled "In Defense of Elitism."

"Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children."

By this point the editor of Prospect was Dinesh D'Souza, who brought to its pages a new level of coarseness aimed at those who did not know their place. "Here at Princeton homosexuals are on the rampage," complained a 1984 news item in Prospect -- this after a gay student group had dared to protest being denied permission to hold a dance at a campus club.

Eyal Press is a Nation contributing writer.

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