Alito And CAP

by hilzoy

The fact that Samuel Alito was a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, and cited that fact on his 1985 job application, has been in the news recently; and it occurred to me that since I was a Princeton undergraduate (class of '81) while CAP was active, I might be able to provide some useful background on this one.

CAP is generally described as 'a conservative group'. But this is as misleading as calling the John Birch Society a 'conservative group' would be. There are lots of conservatives who are thoughtful and intelligent, and who have real intellectual integrity. Conservatives like this did not tend to join CAP. CAP was dedicated to finding outrages that it took to be caused by the horrible fact that women and minorities were being admitted to Princeton. The need to find outrages generally came first; any encounter with facts came later. For this reason, CAP tended to attract not conservatives per se, but the sort of conservative who is forever getting deeply hysterical about some perceived threat to a supposed previous golden age, who sees such threats everywhere, and who is willing to completely distort the truth in order to feed his (and it generally was 'his') obsessions.

(I mean: just ask yourself: what sort of person would devote time and energy to a group focussed entirely on combatting trends at his undergraduate institution, trends that the actual undergraduates of the time had no problem with? We used to wonder: don't these people have lives?)

CAP did a number of things to combat Princeton's slide into mediocrity and decadence, otherwise known as its decision to admit women and more than a token number of minorities. It published a magazine, Prospect, devoted to lurid stories about all that decadence and mediocrity and outraged editorials calling for a return to the halcyon days of the 1950s. These stories had the same relation to reality as the views of those fundamentalists who imagine that a life without Christ is necessarily composed of mindless and sordid sexual episodes, punctuated by periods in which one drugs oneself into a stupor, carried out in an attempt to avoid having to recognize one's own appalling inner emptiness: they were just plain false, and reveal more about the person who believes them than anything else. We used to read stories in Prospect aloud to one another for laughs. (CAP was very well funded, and copies of Prospect were everywhere.)

But CAP also did other things. The Daily Princetonian cites two:

"-- In 1973, CAP mailed a letter to parents of freshmen implying that their sons and daughters were living in "cohabitation," rather than simply coeducational dorms.

— In 1975, a CAP board member tried to disrupt Annual Giving by writing to alumni in the business community to consider whether their gifts were "being used to undermine, subvert, and otherwise discredit the very businesses which are helping fund private education.""

They really did mail letters to the parents of incoming freshman trashing the university, and they really did try to disrupt annual giving. These are serious things to do. About CAP's tactics generally, I agree with Stephen Dujack, who was Associate Editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly during the period when I was an undergrad:

"So in 2005, we know that in 1985, Alito belonged to a group that was dedicated to pointlessly interfering with the functioning of a university because its student body had representative numbers of women and minorities, as required by law. A group which, for its entire existence, used as its only tactics dissembling and dirty tricks; the list above doesn't begin to do justice in describing the organization's destructiveness. A lot of people were hurt in the process. A great university was damaged."

CAP would have been just a destructive joke had it not been for what the joke was about. Princeton only started to admit women in 1969. Moreover, Princeton had traditionally been the school where Southerners who wanted their sons to get an ivy league education sent them. Why? Because for a long time Princeton did not admit blacks, and until (iirc) 1967, admitted them only in very, very small numbers:

"A significant development, more recently, concerned blacks and other minority groups. Although a few blacks studied privately with President Witherspoon as early as 1774, and although, beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, black students occasionally earned University degrees, the first appreciable influx did not begin until the 1960s when the University adopted an active recruitment policy for minority students."

To understand CAP, you really have to understand that until the late 60s, the almost total absence of black students at Princeton was a feature, not a bug. It was one of the reasons people went there.

Consider, against this backdrop, the following quote:

""Prospect" was founded in October 1972 by the then-newly-formed CAP, which was co-chaired by Asa Bushnell '21 and Shelby Cullom Davis '30. The latter, who was the University's largest donor at the time, was a strong traditionalist, firmly opposed to the many of the new directions Princeton was taking, including coeducation.

He wrote in "Prospect": "May I recall, and with some nostalgia, my father's 50th reunion, a body of men, relatively homogenous in interests and backgrounds, who had known and liked each other over the years during which they had contributed much in spirit and substance to the greatness of Princeton," according to an account in "The Chosen," a book by Jerome Karabel on the history of admissions at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

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

And:

"An alumnus wrote in 1974 in CAP’s magazine that “We had trusted the admissions office to select young men who could and would become part of the great Princeton tradition. In my day, [Dean of Student Affairs] Andy Brown would have been called to task for his open love affair with minorities.”"

For a sense of Prospect's general level of discourse:

"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."

About coeducation, try this

"T. Harding Jones, Alito’s classmate and CAP’s executive director in 1974 (two years after they graduated) told the New York Times that “Co-education has ruined the mystique and the camaraderies that used to exist. Princeton has now given into the fad of the moment, and I think it’s going to prove to be a very unfortunate thing.”"

And this:

"CAP supported a quota system to ensure that the vast majority of students would continue to be men. Asa Bushnell, then chairman of CAP, told the New York Times in 1974 that “Many Princeton graduates are unhappy over the fact that the administration has seen fit to abrogate the virtual guarantee that 800 [out of roughly 1,100] would continue to be the number of males in each freshman class.”"

And for those conservatives who oppose affirmative action on the grounds that we should pay no attention to gender or ethnicity:

"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.""

CAP was not about opposing affirmative action. It supported quotas that favored white men. CAP was about opposing the presence of women and minorities at Princeton. Period. Moreover, its tactics were despicable. In retrospect, it was one of the first instances of what has now become a familiar pattern: an extremely well-funded organization dedicated to spreading lies about some opponent in an effort to force that opponent to change course through the sheer volume of vitriol and harassment that a lot of money can buy. Samuel Alito pointed with pride to his membership in CAP in 1985. What relevance this should have now is open to debate; I just wanted to clarify what exactly it was that he was proud to be a part of.

Comments

[Anarch]

What's surprising to me is that, as far as gender goes, that story is almost literally incomprehensible to the present undergraduates of Princeton. It makes no sense. I mean, we all ran into various alumni who remembered the days of male-only education, sometimes even fondly... but that was so foreign it might as well have been another country.

It caused no end of cognitive dissonance when we realized that Princeton's last bastions of all-male privilege -- the single-sex eating clubs, sort of like our fraternities/social venues -- didn't crumble until 1992 when Sally Frank's lawsuit against Tiger Inn was finally resolved. [TI sort of went coed in the spring of 1991, the next school year.] I was an undergrad at Princeton in 1994 and again, the transformation was so complete that it was almost literally impossible to imagine that a few years earlier women -- my friends, for God's sake! I knew at least three female TI members! -- wouldn't have been admitted to the clubs.

Insane. Just insane.

OTOH, Princeton and minority issues... well, that's an ongoing process. Haven't been back in a while, tbh, but when I was there it was pretty much all-white with minimal prospect for change. Here's to hoping they've done something about that in the past five years -- or, if not, then in the very near future.

ObAlito: Yes, CAP was vile, and any associations to that organization should count as a black mark against him -- doubly so for pimping his association to get a job. And triply so if it actually worked.

[rilkefan]

"(I mean: just ask yourself: what sort of person would devote time and energy to a group focussed entirely on combatting trends at his undergraduate institution, trends that the actual undergraduates of the time had no problem with? We used to wonder: don't these people have lives?)"

Umm, this seems way too sweeping - I think I could come up with McCarthy-era comparisons, or foreign comparisons, of a small band of students fighting a rising tide of intolerance or evilness.

[rilkefan]

I started at Cornell in 1985. It's surreal to think about Princeton having such kookiness going on at the same time frats on my campus were organizing safe-sex-info slip-n-slides in summer.

[rilkefan]

Oops, 85 was the application. Ok, still surreal that the atmosphere at Cornell ten years after was so radically different.

I wonder if my dad steered me away from Princeton on the basis of its earlier reputation.

[jayann]

A friend was at Princeton in Ye Olde Days; went there as, yes, a Southern Republican, but luckily got subverted there.

I can't resist posting this Jane Cooper piece:

john berryman asked me to write a poem about roosters.

elizabeth bishop, he said, once wrote a poem about roosters.

do your poems use capital letters? he asked. like god?

i said. god no, he said, like princeton! i said,

god preserve me if i ever write a poem about princeton,

and i thought,

o john berryman, what has brought me into this company of poets

where the masculine thing to do is use capital letters
and even princeton struts like one of god's betters?

[hilzoy]

rilkefan: yeah. That was what the 'trends that the actual undergrads had no problem with' qualifier was supposed to block (e.g., repression by the university of its undergrads would be ruled out, I hoped.) Clearly, it's not enough of a qualifier.

That said, though, I think the idea of focussing on this problem, given all the other problems in the world, really does raise the question: don't these guys have lives?

[hilzoy]

And Anarch: we had sort of the same feeling about the eating clubs when I was there. It really wasn't that long before that all the eating clubs were selective, and that the most socially elite (e.g., Ivy) were at the top of some heap or other. By the time I got there, most of the eating clubs were non-selective and co-ed, and existed just because they had such nice houses in which we could throw parties.

Ivy was still all-male, and at the time maintained such customs as: everyone rising whenever a woman entered the room. They also prided themselves on admitting only 'the right' sort of people. But the crucial change was: they were just a joke. No one took them seriously at all. We used to crash their parties and behave badly for fun, because they were so full of themselves. (Though, iirc, they had a very good bar.) It was unimaginable to us that they had ever not been some sort of vestigial relic.

(OT: were you in an eating club? I was in Terrace.)

[Amos Newcombe]

From one of my ancient programming books, I learn that

The September 1987 Princeton Engineer used this graph to report the (alleged) responses to the question "Is Princeton too homogeneous?"

The graph is a pie chart, solid black, with the caption "No  100%".

[dmbeaster]

An additional wrinkle worth noting is that Alito may have joined CAP after he graduated, since it as founded in 1972 which was the year that he graduated, per the linked article.

In other words, he was one of the alumni nuts rather than one of the on-campus nuts, which may be a fact slightly in his favor.

But to list it 13 years later in 1985 as exemplary of his conservative mind-set is very telling. He must have done so knowing full-well what its posture had been over the prior 13 years, and he must have done so because he thought it reflected not only what proper conservatives should think, but that it would stand him well with the Reagan administration.

I think it pegs him as one of those conservatives who think the good old days were when white males were privileged. Its disingenuous to pass it off as simply being whiny about co-ed schools or affirmative action -- he was for white male privilege.

He should have to repudiate that view explicitly now in order to be considered, althouhg who knows with today's Republicans. Problem is, he already has a history of mouthing such words without honoring them later in order to get the job.

Is this what conservatives believe is good for America?

[Anarch]

[Ivy] also prided themselves on admitting only 'the right' sort of people.

Still did when I was there.

(OT: were you in an eating club? I was in Terrace.)

Yep, Quad.

[hilzoy]

Ah, Quad: in my day, the official geek club. (Terrace was the official drug club, though in fact it had both more people with alarming drug problems and more people who didn't do drugs at all than any other. Our reputation was enhanced, as I found out only after I left, by the fact that one of our short-order cooks was dealing out of the kitchen. iirc, we also had more summas, more people who went on to serious careers in academics and the arts, and more lots of stuff than anyone else. What we chiefly lacked was moderation. None of which prevented the Yearbook from depicting us as flying people, kitelike, off the roof.)

What made Ivy funny was that none of the people I knew who they would have regarded as worthy of them had any interest at all in joining.

[Anarch]

Ah, Quad: in my day, the official geek club.

In my day, a club in transition... but my presence there does tend to confirm your previous viewings, yes ;)

(Terrace was the official drug club, though in fact it had both more people with alarming drug problems and more people who didn't do drugs at all than any other.

Still was in my day. In fact, wasn't it burned down a few years after you in an event involving (depending on who's doing the telling) cocaine, heroin, hashish or a combination thereof?

[Anderson]

Alito is going to have to pretend to be Completely Clueless about a great many things to weather his hearings.

Do people have the same high tolerance for (ostensibly) clueless Supreme Court justices that they used to?

Guess we'll find out.

[hilzoy]

Anarch: I didn't pay attention to Terrace after I left (I tend to recycle their pleas for money unopened), so I don't know. That would have been one way of dealing with the massive structural damage I'm sure we inflicted after we discovered that the pinball machine (located on the second floor) gave free games if you picked it up a foot or two and dropped it.

I never knew anyone in college who had used heroin. Just about the only drug I can say that about. (Having been the only person not using drugs at a lot of parties, I was, for a while, really good at nursing people through really bad reactions.)

[DaveM]

Hilzoy, Anarch:

Just to connect the dots, I was class of '88, and your characterizations of Quad and Terrace sound about right. One other thing Terrace had going for it that Hilzoy neglected to mention though was the food -- it was actually good, unlike most of the other clubs.

If Anarch feels that the transition to a more balanced gender climate was complete by '94, it certainly wasn't in the mid-80's. The all-male eating clubs were still hanging on, the Sally Frank case was still in the news, and the tension was pretty thick. On the other hand, although I remember that Prospect magazine and CAP existed, both were viewed as unimportant relics.

Here's a small example of the transition pains. I was a member of Dial for one year before going independent. Dial was a focus of some of the tension due in part to an ugly incident that occurred there early my junior year (ironically, between two non-members). After the incident, Dial became the terminus of a "Take Back the Night" march and was featured in a short Times article. The article might have been larger and featured more pictures if I hadn't walked by the club before the march and noticed that some idiots had put up a sign reading "The Night Belongs to Michelob -- You Can't Have It." My roommate and I went in and took it down, avoiding the idiots.

I have a feeling Hilzoy wouldn't at all be surprised at that sign, but Anarch would be. As I said, it was a time of transition.

I've been back a few times, and I like the changes I've seen in class make-up -- guess that would make me ineligible for CAP.

[hilzoy]

DaveM: Luckily for me, I grew up in a family in which sexism was unknown, and was also both unpopular and completely baffled by my peers in school. which meant (a) that I had no clue what was going on around me, and (b) that when people said things that I found inexplicable (including basically all seriously sexist remarks), that was just par for the course: more people saying baffling things.

Thus it was that I arrived in college without it ever having crossed my mind that there was any systematic bias against women, at least not among anyone I knew. (I had read about such things, but didn't connect them to the world I lived in.) So a lot of it just went by without my noticing. Plus, I wasn't in one of the first classes to be coed. And the situation of women was ameliorated to some extent by the fact that since we were only 1/3 of the class when I was there, guys tried to stay on our good side.

The one thing I did really notice was sexual harassment. I have no idea how widespread it was generally, but I encountered a lot. And I assume that that was partly due to the fact that people hadn't yet figured out how to deal with having women around, really. It was really annoying, though.

[rilkefan]

Check out Brad DeLong's blog - he quotes this post in its entirety with approximately 0.0% value added.

[Anderson]

Oh, you can get DeLong's blog to load? Tell us your secret!

[hilzoy]

Anderson: I had the exact same problem; I haven't been able to get DeLong to load for ages. Having read rilkefan's comment, I tried again (and again, and again), and after repeated failure, went to Sitemeter and noticed a whole new url for it, which -- get this -- actually works. Here it is:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/

Enjoy!

[rilkefan]

The "/sdj" is unnecessary at the moment.

Sorry for your troubles.

[liberal japonicus]

he quotes this post in its entirety with approximately 0.0% value added.

OTH, there is an interesting post on Tacitus by a Princeton grad with this last line

Interestingly enough, one of my Thanksgiving guests works with a retired (liberal) judge who graduated from Princeton in the late 1950s. And Judge X's take was the same as mine.

I wonder what is the general consensus of Princeton grads on Alito and if there has been any concerted effort on that front.

[Jackmormon]

I can second the recommendation for the delong.typad etc. url. The earlier urls took impossibly long, but this one seems to do the trick.

I know almost nothing of East Coast Ivy League snobbery, having entered into that system in 2000 in the ranks of grad students who were almost all foreign. The current novelistic representative of elitism in Princeton seems to be The Rule of Four, which is an okay thriller/paranoid campus tale. Set in Princeton, though, and Eating Club politics are front-and-center.

And as to the most serious point, these alumnai groups have an outsized influence on university politics, much more so than the campus groups do. The latter make more noise, but the former tend to influence money flows; which groups, would one guess, do the university trustees listen to?

The fact that Alito continued to tout his association with this alumnai group, well after his graduation, really does speak to how he wanted his Princeton pedigree to be understood. Touting a CAP affiliation was tauntamount to proclaiming that one was involved in Ye Olde Tradition, and that one was opposed to the liberalizing (in the old sense) trends that were going on.

I can say that at the Ivy League University I've taught at, my freshman students want so desparately to believe that they're there because they deserve to be there on the basis of their merit that the CAP argument will probably strike them as profoundly wrong.

Limiting quotas for women and minorities? That's not exactly an ego-booster for the white men who make it through, no matter how privileged... Why does Alito hate smart kids?

[CharleyCarp]

I hope you Easterners understand just how alien this whole thing is to Westerners. If someone had told me when I was a freshman at Cal that this kind of foolishness was still going on -- in 1976 for God's sake -- I would have been plenty surprised. And if only I'd known when my brother was at Princeton (79-83) -- I'd have ragged him mercilessly.

This particular Alito story isn't going to resonate beyond those who's support is already hopelessly lost. It's too much inside baseball. Sorry.

[hilzoy]

CharleyCarp: it was completely alien to us, too. Mercifully.

[Jackmormon]

CC, I tend to agree--but.

A lot of the media and politcal elite know or suspect what these sorts of universities look like behind the scenes. This is the kind of story that can resonate among the insider-baseball types until it becomes conventional wisdom.

The fact of the matter is that Alito was part of an alumnai association that sought to limit access to worthy students on behalf on some crackpot "homogeneous" ideal. The organization to which membership he touted supported ceilings--only so many minorities/women, no matter how qualified. Read through the related post at Tacitus: Alito supporters want to read the CAP affiliation upside-down as a long-term commitment against quotas. That talking-point, in the face of what hilzoy and others present CAP as being, won't stand.

Insider Baseballl can make me frustrated too: I was on UC scholarships in my undergrad and ended up on fellowship in the grad-school Ivy League by sheer chance. But really, it's positive that people from "within" are posting for the public, I hope. (Not that I've ever particularly felt like I was "within"; I lack the pedigree and the seriousness.)

[Francis / BRGORD]

Dartmouth '86 -- dinesh d'souza was there for a while(he was an '84, i think) and the Review was in its heyday. cocaine was really really popular.

dartmouth has always had an odd relationship with its greek system. since the campus is in the middle of nowhere, frat houses (which tend to be owned by the fraternal organization) necessarily form the backbone of social life.

that said, frats also form the backbone of the worst kind of reactionary whiteboy privilege. it took a very patient girlfriend to take a beltsander to the worst of my sensibilities. (apparently my culinary skills plus a few faint signals that i could be turned into a functioning human being** kept her around.)

dartmouth also has an oddly active alumni, who still fight about the direction of the college. the question "don't these people have lives" could well be directed at this group. (see, eg, volokh.com)

** my sole defense was that i went to boarding school (Groton, if anyone cares) at age 13 as the smallest kid in my class -- mostly i was raised by wolves.

[hilzoy]

Francis: in my day, the Dartmouth frats had a fearsome reputation, not just for their own obnoxious behavior, but for having a stranglehold on the social life of the college. I quite liked Dartmouth when I went to visit, until I talked to some women students, at which point I decided: no.

[DaveM]

Charlie Carp:

As a West Coast, small city kid, the whole East Coast establishment thing was pretty foreign to me, too -- the reactionary wing of the East Coast establishment even more so. Luckily, it was not a major part of the experience; but it was there.

I agree with your "inside baseball" critique, but wish I didn't. The only defining characteristic of CAP was its reactionary world view -- so to tout membership can have no other purpose than to give a wink and a nod to like-minded individuals.

[dr ngo]

These stories had the same relation to reality as the views of those fundamentalists who imagine that a life without Christ is necessarily composed of mindless and sordid sexual episodes, punctuated by periods in which one drugs oneself into a stupor, carried out in an attempt to avoid having to recognize one's own appalling inner emptiness: they were just plain false,

Speak for yourself, Hilzoy! This strikes me as profoundly true. Except for the bit about the sex. And the drugs.

Sigh. I can't even do atheism right.

(Sorry to wander so far off topic, but I went to a West Coast small college and all of this stuff is as foreign - and fascinating - to me as the power structure among the matrilineal Menangkabau of central Sumatra, so I have nothing on point to add.)

[Anna in Cairo]

CharleyCarp writes about this organization at Princeton,

This particular Alito story isn't going to resonate beyond those who's support is already hopelessly lost. It's too much inside baseball. Sorry.

Is American discourse really debased to the point that anyone who has not personally experienced something is incapable of learning about it? Are all Americans born with their minds made up? What is the point of going to school, Princeton or otherwise, at all then? Why even learn to read?

It seems to me that it is not that hard to learn what this particular club was and what it did in the historical context that Hilzoy has taken the trouble of providing.

I am from the West Coast, graduated from an East Coast school in 1990 in which I saw nothing of this kind of racism/sexism, and YET I could understand/grasp Hilzoy's post. Gasp.

It seems to me that American anti-intellectualism has reached a real peak. I hope it starts lessening a bit, because it should not be POSSIBLE for people to make these types of statements.

[liberal japonicus]

This particular Alito story isn't going to resonate beyond those who's support is already hopelessly lost. It's too much inside baseball. Sorry.

I don't know. A lot of it may depend on how it is played. I think there is a remarkable amount of unfocussed anger towards elite schools that could be harnessed if the right buttons were pushed, and if the correct soundbites popped out. (not saying that it should be, just that it can be) And given the current circumstances, there is definitely blood in the water, so it could play out. Could, but it would depend on a lot of things coming together, and it is difficult to now if certain answers would have the effect of revving up the base, or raising alarm among the moderates.

A lot of it would depend on how clearly one could juxtapose Alito's views (and I wonder if there are more memos, letters, etc. to be found out there) with the views of the times. If he makes a statement in the confirmation and a completely contradictory statement surfaces from 30 years ago, and he ends up having to discuss why his views have changed and gets flustered, well, one never knows. If this does flare up as an issue, I hope you'll give me proper credit and if it doesn't, kindly forget that I ever noted it ;^)

[Anarch]

DaveM: I was a member of Dial for one year before going independent. Dial was a focus of some of the tension due in part to an ugly incident that occurred there early my junior year (ironically, between two non-members).

Was that the incident that eventually led to the merging of Dial with Elm and Cannon to form DEC? By the time I was an undergrad, all three clubs were just a distant memory -- and DEC itself folded shortly after I graduated.

The all-male eating clubs were still hanging on, the Sally Frank case was still in the news, and the tension was pretty thick.

I actually had dinner with Sally Frank in '94 by pure coincidence (she was grabbing a bite to eat in my dorm cafeteria while I and my friends were eating dinner there) and it was, in retrospect, hilarious: she was being all radical and triumphant and stuff -- women in eating clubs! the last bastion of all-male privilege fallen at last! -- and we simply Did Not Get It at all. And why would we? For all we knew they'd been coed for eternity (i.e. every eating club class then at Princeton was coed) so it was just the environment we grew up in. The thought that it had been otherwise, and so recently... that was (to our credit) simply incomprehensible.

I do fondly remember, however, having some kind of formal dinner with an alum from the mid-60s a few years later. [Some kind of Alumni Day thing.] As we talked of education and the future, he asked me as an aside: "So, you have women in your classes now, right?"

"Yessir," I replied.

"You're so lucky," he said, with a tear of joy in his eye.

Somehow, I think there might have been more than pure egalitarianism in that remark.

I have a feeling Hilzoy wouldn't at all be surprised at that sign, but Anarch would be.

Nah, idiocy is eternal. I'd've been surprised if it had stayed up for any length of time, though.

Mind you, I don't think anyone would have dared put that sign up when I was there, lest the women's rugby team come by and rearrange their faces....

[Anarch]

LJ: OTH, there is an interesting post on Tacitus by a Princeton grad with this last line...

Interesting post, but I'm holding you responsible for the brain cells I lost reading the comments.

[liberal japonicus]

I'm holding you responsible for the brain cells I lost reading the comments.

Makes you appreciate here though, eh?

[Ginger Yellow]

"For this reason, CAP tended to attract not conservatives per se, but the sort of conservative who is forever getting deeply hysterical about some perceived threat to a supposed previous golden age, who sees such threats everywhere, and who is willing to completely distort the truth in order to feed his (and it generally was 'his') obsessions."

Must...resist...temptation...

[Dantheman]

"LJ: OTH, there is an interesting post on Tacitus by a Princeton grad with this last line...

Interesting post, but I'm holding you responsible for the brain cells I lost reading the comments."

And yet Tac regularly sees fit to lecture us on our close mindedness. The famous line on glass houses appears to apply.

[liberal japonicus]

and yet Tac regularly sees fit to lecture us on our close mindedness. The famous line on glass houses appears to apply.

Actually, the site seems to have gotten away from him, especially with the election of some folks to keep the peace. (btw, this is not a backhanded shot on Tac, I think the fact that he didn't pull the plug on it when it moved away (if a site with a diverse membership can be said to 'move') is quite admirable)

[Lee Scoresby]

Rlikefan... re: Brad's cut-and-paste job. This is an ongoing complaint about the way Brad supplies">http://republicofheaven.blogspot.com/2005/06/aggregation-or-annexation-case-of-brad.html">supplies regular content at his blog. Does the new address end the "invisible window" problem that he refused to fix?

[hilzoy]

I have no problem with Brad reprinting stuff in its entirety, at least when it's stuff I wrote. The windows thing is irksome -- especially since, when you try to bookmark an interesting article you get to via his blog, you end up just bookmarking his blog. But that's exactly the sort of technical detail I can imagine myself having no clue how to fix -- I only learned the most basic rudiments of html after I started posting here -- so I cut him slack on that one.

Anarch: Sally was a year or two ahead of me, and I always thought that she managed to embody more or less the entire negative stereotype of feminists all at once. That said, she was a decent person and her heart was absolutely in the right place, and I was never sure that some one who had more of a sense of humor or perspective would actually have accomplished what she did.

[Dantheman]

lj,

Given that the ones doing most of the pettifogging are people who were longtime Tac commentors (Timmy/Ken White/Macallan/etc.), I think it is a fair statement on the merits of commentors at the place Tac built.

[liberal japonicus]

Dantheman, fair enough, but I do think that to suggest that the site is a stand in for Tacitus might be a hair unfair (though keeping it eponymous doesn't give much wiggle room, I suppose)

[Anderson]

but I do think that to suggest that the site is a stand in for Tacitus might be a hair unfair (though keeping it eponymous doesn't give much wiggle room, I suppose)

Yeah. I quit Tacitus.org for a while ... went back ... and then had an epiphany that I didn't really need to be hanging out at a site whose eponymous poster acts like, um, the way Trevino acts some of the time.

I think they had the page black-bordered for a while after my decision, but it seems to have gone back to normal now ...

[Francis]

hilzoy, re your Dartmouth comment:

chicken.

to be fair, i can understand why you chose princeton; the courage of the first several classes of dartmouth women can hardly be understated.

(nothing quite like a pasty intoxicated young man already getting his second [or third] chin due to chronic beer consumption complaining about the physical attributes of his female classmates. dude, look in the mirror; it's not like you're going to be getting any.)

[Dantheman]

lj,

I'm not saying that, any more than Tac's comments about the commentors here reflect on the collective kitten. On the other hand, Tac has said that the commentors here are sufficiently closed-minded that it is pointless for him to engage us in debate, thus justifying ad hominem abuse. Given what passes for commenting there, again I return to the glass houses line.

[liberal japonicus]

Dantheman,
gotcha. Sorry for picking on that nit, but I've always been amazed at how blogs develop internally as I'm trying to get my students to start blogs and get the notion of participating in a conversation on them.

[DaveM]

Anarch:

Nah, I don't think that specific event had much to do with Dial merging then closing. Most of the clubs had up and down cycles, and Dial just got caught in a down cycle that lasted longer than its finances could support. By the time I graduated, the event I referenced seemed to have faded into the collective memory banks, and the merger happened a couple of years later.

[fred]

Why has no one mentioned the coed nude olympics (outdoors in snow & 20 degree temperatures with lots of booze, etc.)?

I thought I remembered that catching CAP's wrath. Or maybe not. Maybe they thought it was that or nude uni-sex olympics.

[Anarch]

I thought I remembered that catching CAP's wrath. Or maybe not. Maybe they thought it was that or nude uni-sex olympics.

You'll have to check with the old-timers -- ;) -- but the version we heard was that the Nude Olympics were specifically an attempt by the anti-coeducational factions to disrupt, disturb and ultimately drive out the women who'd invaded their precious space. Needless to say, it didn't work; and in fact, my year, the female runners were (en masse) by far the more, um, enthusiastic than the males (at least of my acquaintance).

[negropontedeathsquads.com]

It seems Bush and the power elite use 'traditionalists' like Ailito to maintain the status quo of their own power, they don't actually believe this shit themselves...

[pj]

Rilkefan--

Your comment about frats at Cornell handing out safe sex info at slip and slides brought back memories.

We did that slip and slide for years, which featured a sperm and egg obstacle course. Candidly, we thought its best feature was getting to watch freshman girls dive into mud and water in t-shirts, and then wrestle each other for a balloon. Then in the mid 80s the University told us it was "sexist" and banned it. In response, we went to the health clinic, and pitched our event as sexual, not sexist. They agreed it was educational, and encouraged us to hand out safe sex literature. With the health clinic backing us, we had the Dean of Students boxed in -- not only were we not sexist, we were pro safe sex, and educational! After that, the University caved. By handing out safe sex literature, we got to continue ogling young women in wet t-shirts.

Those were strange times -- there seemed to be battles like that at least once a semester. Finding a way to pitch the old frat boy ways as pro-feminist/pro-safe sex/or something similar was always the trick.

[Jackmormon]

Finding a way to pitch the old frat boy ways as pro-feminist/pro-safe sex/or something similar was always the trick.

That explains so much.

[Neal Traven]

I graduated from Dartmouth in 1972, making me what Alito and CAP would undoubtedly call one of the last of the real Dartmouth men ... the College went coed the next fall. So I predate the reprehensible Dartmouth Review days, though I heard a lot (too much) about them. CAP sounds like the Review without the veneer of "respectability" they got from their big-money backers, like what they would have done if they hadn't been so damn successful.

Apropos of nothing, I knew Sally Frank when she was in junior high or high school. Knew a couple of her older sisters much better, sort of dated one of them. Ate dinner at their family's table, stuff like that. Sally was a pistol, even at that tender age.

[SER]

I was a '94 grad who was in the second class of women in TI. A couple of things stand out in my mind that perhaps could be attributed to CAP members, now that I think about it.

First, I was working behind the tap one football weekend, when some - ahem - older TI alumnus took the beer I served him and then informed me that "TI never should have admitted women." I smiled and went back to the tap.

Second, do you guys remember an amazingly offensive letter in the PAW a few years back? It took some digging, but I found a reply to the letter that I remembered. The reply was from Lillian Pierce, valedictorian of the class of '02, Rhodes Scholar, and now current math PhD student back at Princeton. Yeah, she's smart - and yeah, she's a she. Here's the text of her letter:

February 8, 2002

I would like to thank PAW for printing the letter by Hugh M. Lewis ’41 (January 30) in which he recommended that "the trustees promptly convert Princeton to a single-sex female university and be done with it," in light of "lady" Tilghman's installation.

I have felt subdued in the days since reading Lewis's letter, which I now have on the wall above my desk. Yet even though reading the letter made me sad, I am glad I saw it. First, counter to its intent, it has only provided me with more energy to be the best student, thinker, and Princetonian I can. Second, the letter damned itself with gratifying effectiveness.

Lillian Pierce ’02
Princeton University

[Stacy Rosenbaum]

But he was just a kid when he was attending Princeton, it doesn't mean anything.

[larry]

In the '80's (I believe) T. Cullen Davis, obviously a relative of the Davis mentioned, shot his wife, Priscilla 'Rich Bitch', her boyfriend Stan Farr, and her daughter. I think only Priscilla survived. Davis then took out a contract on the judge, getting caught in a sting, and had some phoney conversion to religion. It's a sick, twisted family.

[Richard Schwartz]

I was there at Dartmouth when the Dartmouth Review was founded. I shared classes with some of the founders. I know what they believed in, and I know what they did. The deliberate outing of closeted gay students, the destruction of a group of shanties erected by students to demonstrate against endowment investments in companies with connections to South Africa... these are the most well-known incidents, but there were many more... and they were getting loads of press coverage as the supposed new mouthpiece for "young conservative Ivy Leaguers". The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal ran articles about it, as did many national magazines.

The Review's founders realized that the more notorious they became, the more their wealthy benefactors were contributing and the more attention they were getting as a group in the national press and as individuals in Washington. Dinesh D'Souza was at the center of it all. As a Dartmouth '82, I still refer to him by the name that the college humor magazine pinned on him: Distort D'Newza.

It says a lot that CAP brought on D'Souza (and also according to some sources Laura Ingraham, but I can't verify that anywhere). By 1985, the reputation of the Dartmouth Review staffers was well-known within conservative pundit circles and within the Reagan Administration. Several of the early staffers gained junior White House staff jobs as a result of the connections they built through the Review. Any serious conservative Princeton alumnus at that time would have been aware of the attention that was being paid to the Dartmouth Review.

They were also certainly aware that the Dartmouth Review's tactics were actually working to slow down or even reverse the gains that Dartmouth had been making toward becoming more accepting to women and minorities. The publicity that the Review received caused quite a few women and minorities to think twice about whether they really wanted to go to Dartmouth.

D'Souza's role at CAP was, without a doubt, to do the same thing at Princeton: to turn back the clock on Princeton and deter applications by women and minorities by bringing in the visibility and notoriety that the Dartmouth Review was getting, and to help

The only conceivable reason for Alito to have even mentioned CAP was to get some of that notoriety to reflect on himself.

[Miracle Max]

These stories had the same relation to reality as the views of those fundamentalists who imagine that a life without Christ is necessarily composed of mindless and sordid sexual episodes, punctuated by periods in which one drugs oneself into a stupor, carried out in an attempt to avoid having to recognize one's own appalling inner emptiness . . .

Don't knock it till you've tried it.

[hilzoy]

Miracle Max: would that be Christ or sex?

[ztp]

My husband and I entered grad school at Princeton in 1972 and I remember the rantings of CAP. To me, a midwestern girl who had gone to a midwestern college that had been coed from day one (in the nineteenth century), the fogies were both hilarious and frightening. Is this what a Princeton education led to? One of their big bugaboos was the decline in men's standards of dress. Apparently the admission of women was to blame for deplorable grooming of the 1970s - the decline (nay, disappearance) of the tweed sports jacket and tie, the rise of disheaveled hair, jeans (!!!), sandals and other garments of disrepute or at least low status. It would be funnier, of course, if the CAP type of man didn't still run so much of the country.

[Andrew J. Lazarus]

JTFR, I'm the author of the cited thread at Tacitus. I was in Wilson junior year and an independent senior year ('79).

So, Hilzoy, did I know you? And, I would add, although your cook may have been a drug dealer, he was a mighty fine bridge player and I spent some quality time in your club's kitchen improving my play.

[hilzoy]

Andrew: Good post. As to whether I knew you, I'd say 'I don't think so', but I have a terrible memory for names. If yours is better, you can find my not-so secret identity revealed here.

If you play bridge, did you know Mark Ginsburg, or any of the other chess people?

[Andrew J. Lazarus]

I alternate bridge and chess, then and now. I knew Ginsburg from before college—he was one of the very top HS chess players in the country and attended a rival high school. I was not even the best player in my homeroom, but I ran the Princeton chess club one year (and the UC Berkeley club for many years, became an active tournament director), so I also met Kenny Regan, Jonathan Edwards, and other top players. That's my standard email address if there's anyone specific you wonder about.

We did meet once, maybe twice, I think. Did you have an older sister at Princeton? One who was rumored to have punched out CAP's editor? If so, I believe she introduced us.

[hilzoy]

My cousin, Abby. I think she threw a pie in his face.

[Andrew J. Lazarus]

Then your cousin did introduce us. Obviously, I didn't know her well either. That may have been the only time we met.

An officer of then all-male Cottage Club (I omit his name, on the off-chance he has found new widsom) was quoted in the Daily Prince saying, "Women are like pizza. When you want one you send out for it." Shortly thereafter an ad appeared in the Prince: Cottage men are like pizza. By the time you get one home it's cold.

[fullnelson]

Very interesting thread. Being an African American female at Princeton in the mid-70's, I felt the hostility generated by CAP more acutely than most. When I entered PU, the first class of women were in their senior year; it was still pretty much weird to be a woman on campus--some professors made it known that they thought it inappropriate for women to be in their classes! And being Black....geez...most eating clubs were still selective and would NEVER have thought of admitting a minority member; most minorities ate in Commons, at "Black tables," where we could support each other and debrief. It was pretty exhausting most of the time, and the frequent assaults from CAP didn't make it any easier. Frankly, I felt like I was under attack most of the time, and it was a huge distraction. But many of us hung in there, just to spite CAP.

Consider that by the time Alito joined CAP, co-education had been in place for several years; by the time he listed it proudly on his job application, it was a fait accompli. Why were these white men still beating this dead horse? Did they realistically think Blacks and women would turn down admission to Princeton because CAP thought we shouldn't be there? Was it their way of burning a cross in front of Old Nassau--to send a warning to uppity folks like me who might dare to enter? Why continue to carry the torch for a proposition that had been soundly defeated? Why tout this as a proud affiliation? Go figure....

[Slartibartfast]

How out of touch I am at this time is exemplified by my confusion as to what Alito and Combat Air Patrol have in common.

[Richard Schwartz]

re "did they really think Blacks and women would turn down admission to Princeton because CAP thought we shouldn't be there?"

I say, yes, in the mid 80s they almost certainly did think that. There was anecdotal evidence that the Dartmouth Review's tactics were having that effect, at least to a small extent, at Dartmouth.

[Francis / BRGORD]

i can attest to that -- there were a number of ugly incidents at dartmouth surrounding the review (a mock lynching; publication of notes from a gay / lesbian association meeting) that led at one point for classes to be suspended for a day for a series of workshops on ending racism / sexism / homophobia. the raw anger displayed by many minority students was a real eye-opener.

[Eric Muller]

Can any Princeton alumni shed a little more light on the story I link to here?

Seems like a nasty little bit of business, and it made (bad) national press for CAP just a year before Sam Alito boasted of membership...

[John Lopresti]

Mr. Alito forgets about these turbulent times and his selected way of addressing change. Where is my copy of Huxley's tale of college. Later I could be more direct in reply to an obviously provocative article of your's hilzoy; you are on target with this thread.

[hilzoy]

Eric Muller -- hi, and welcome. Unfortunately, I can't help -- I graduated in '81 and didn't particularly follow Princeton news after that.

[Gary Farber]

I'm pretty entertained by the whole "men are like delivery pizza" metaphor, myself. There are as many choices as there are, after all. (Don't order mushroom, I guess.)

[big dave from queens]

Can you say PERJURY? (Which is a crime) Somebody should place this man under arrest in that chamber.

Alito is sitting there as Ed Gillespie is giving him signals by coughs on when and when not to comment.

At first Alito says he doesn't remember the group. OOOPS.

Then someone gets a hold of his resume. OOOPs

So all of a sudden Alito remembers but then comes up with the ROTC story.

Now the ROTC story has been disproven by Mark Dwyer, Alito's college roommate. ROTC was not mentioned on Alito's profile.

So now ALITO is backpedaling from that.

This man claims he can't remember when it gets into these damaging areas. But you'll notice how wonderful his memory is when Republican Senators ask him questions. The man, despite being indecent is not stupid. He has an INCREDIBLE memory and can recall the smallest details from cases 15 years ago. If he can recall those details, he can recall bigger things like what he highlights on his resume.

But Alito is a sick liar and an evil man. He is the most right wing judge in America; there is no one more extreme than he. But he's lying through his teeth on these issues as June Cleever drowns in crocodile tears for the camera. (Or was she finally realizing the truth about her husband?)

Yes Sammy is a bigot, a fascist, a corporatist, a man who believes that ANY govt official should have total immunity to abuse others. The DEMS must filibuster this. Any Dem who doesn't vote for a filibuster needs to be held accountable in a primary. You can't get a judge worse than this one.

[richard Cook]

Yeah Hilzoy they where full of themselves. One of them is being considered for Supreme Court Justice and you are..........?

[richard Cook]

Yeah Hilzoy they where full of themselves. One of them is being considered for Supreme Court Justice and you are..........?

[Jackmormon]

A tenure-track professor in a cutting-edge field at an important university.

[PatrickInBeijing]

Just an aside, great blog, very informative in terms of how some folks who went to Princeton think. I wandered here by way of Buzzflash, FWIW. I do have an out of place question, I am teaching English in China and some of my students are interested in Princeton for graduate school (some brilliant, vibrant math students), but they want to know what the situation for Chinese (and non white students in general) is, and how are females regarded intellectually?

Should I reccoment the school to them, or tell them to go elsewhere?

In some ways this is off topic, but your running discussion of mores at Princeton makes me dare to ask...

BTW, FWIW, the fact that after thirteen years Alito listed CAP on his resume should be enough to damn him. But in the current era of cowardly media and even more cowardly so-called "opposition" politicians, it won't be. Sad.

Thanks in advance.

[Dobby]

What a surprise! convicted sex offender Richard Cook posts twice, with the same trollish drivel.

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