The deeply offended Stuart Taylor discovers that as a student, Sotomayor was very concerned about violence and intimidation of gay students on campus, as she wrote a letter to the school newspaper after the rooms of two gay students were ransacked. She also signed a letter criticizing the search process for a new assistant dean of student affairs who would deal primarily with issues involving students of color. The student committee tasked with evaluating the candidates was frustrated that it only saw applications from black and Latino candidates, and never saw any applications from Asian, Native American or other minority groups. She also urged the school to make good faith efforts to hire Latino faculty and offer courses on Latino culture and history. Scandalous.
Most disturbing however, is Taylor's revelation that Sotomayor was chair of a group called "Accion Puertorriquena," (Puerto Rican Action) which I assume was a SOC group devoted to the concerns of Puerto Rican students at Princeton. She was very critical of how Princeton treated its minority students in 1974, which is absurd, because America passed the Civil Rights Act only nine years earlier and Princeton had started admitting women five years earlier. Therefore, sexism and racism were then nonexistent at the university, where certain affiliated groups were despondent with the possibility of more women and minorities on campus.
In 1973, just a year before Sotomayor engaged in her racist crusade to destroy white men at Princeton, Cullom Davis, the founder of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, wrote mournfully in the group's magazine of the days when Princeton was "a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds." This was apparently fairly typical fare for CAP, which was opposed to having more women and minorities admitted to Princeton. Incidentally, the group later boasted a current Supreme Court Justice among its members. If you have a subscription to The Nation, I urge you to read the rest of Eyal Press' report on the subject.
One can very clearly imagine Taylor's counterpart in 1967 bemoaning the racialist legal background of the newest justice to be appointed to the court.
UPDATE: Interestingly enough, Mr. Taylor graduated from Princeton in 1970, just a year after the school started admitting women.
-- A. Serwer
