Sotomayor as a College Activist
Few have noted Sonia Sotomayor’s activist past at Princeton University, but they shouldn’t ignore how it gained her mainstream acceptance.
By Emily Rutherford
July 15, 2009
Sonia Sotomayor in the 1970s at Princeton. (The Daily Princetonian)At Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings this week, we’ve heard questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee about Sotomayor’s views on seemingly every kind of case, whether she is a "reverse racist," and what she meant by her so-called "wise Latina remarks." We have not heard much about her time as an undergraduate at Princeton University. But her work there for racial equality tells us something about the kind of justice she might be. Sotomayor’s activism won her recognition from Princeton’s 1970s-era administration, not exactly a radical bunch. Their endorsement, and the context of Sotomayor’s activism, indicates that her desire to diversify her campus was not radically leftist; rather, it was as measured—and effective—as her legal career.
Conservatives are eager to portray Sotomayor as someone who discriminates against Caucasian Americans, using her efforts to diversify Princeton as an example, so it’s understandable that those who support Sotomayor’s nomination have deliberately tried to downplay her four years spent trying to make Princeton a place where she and other Latino/a students would feel welcome. But Sotomayor ‘s work with Latino student groups eventually earned her campus-wide fame and was cited as one of the primary reasons that she was awarded the Pyne Prize, Princeton’s highest undergraduate honor.
As co-chair of a student group called Acción Puertorriqueña, Sotomayor co-led a campaign to get Princeton to hire more Latino faculty members and admit more Latino students. At first, on-campus activism found little success. So in 1974, two student groups, Acción Puertorriqueña and the Chicano Organization of Princeton, filed a formal complaint with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In the words of the Daily Princetonian, they were “charging the university with a ‘lack of commitment’ in hiring Puerto Rican and Chicano administrators and faculty and recruiting students from these minority groups.” The work of the coalition was in part responsible for hiring a Latino as assistant dean of student affairs later that year, with Sotomayor and some other minority students serving on a student advisory committee for the job search. (The committee subsequently asserted that they did not have a large role in the selection process and that their input was merely a formality.)
Sotomayor’s advocacy on behalf of minority students was not limited to this particular issue; concerned that “not one permanent course in this university now deals in any notable detail with the Puerto Rican or Chicano cultures,” she succeeded in convincing Princeton history professor Peter Winn to offer a seminar on Puerto Rican history. She was also on the Governance Board of the Third World Center, which—particularly in the ‘70s and ‘80s—was Princeton’s primary social and cultural resource for minority students. (In 2002, the university wisely decided to rename it the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding.) Beyond her work on Latino issues, Sotomayor was also one of the 39 signatories of a landmark 1976 letter to the editor in the Daily Princetonian that criticized an attack against two members of the Gay Alliance of Princeton, now called the Pride Alliance.
The day after Sotomayor co-signed that letter to the editor, the Princetonian reported that Sotomayor was one of two winners of the “M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize, the highest honor the university confers on an undergraduate.” The article continued, “The prize, given to the senior or seniors who have ‘manifested in outstanding fashion … excellent scholarship and effective support of the best interests of Princeton University,’ carries with it an award equal to a year’s tuition, $3,900 [in 1976].” When asked to comment on the winners, then-University President Bill Bowen said, “We try our best to find people who excel …. There are many ways to contribute—sometimes not through any organized method.” The fact that Bowen viewed Sotomayor’s advocacy for racial equality as one of “many ways to contribute” speaks to the impact she had in carving out a place for Latino students at Princeton.
Sotomayor was the first Latino student to be awarded the Pyne Prize, which is also telling—her agitation on behalf of Latino faculty and students, her service on the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs student advisory committee, her letters to the editor, and her general involvement in student life left no doubt that there was a place for Latino and other minority students at Princeton. This was recognized by the mainstream when the university awarded her the Pyne Prize. When Sotomayor started at Princeton in 1972, hers was only the fourth Princeton class to include women; she was one of a very few Latino members of her class. That she would graduate as the model Princeton student indicates that she both worked within the university’s system and helped to change it.
If confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court, Sotomayor will join the august and yet slow-to-change branch of government as its only Latino member and one of two women. She would also be only the third woman in the entire history of the court at a time when nearly half of law school graduates are women. As at Princeton, her acceptance on the court and in the nation’s perception of the court may be an uphill battle. But instead of downplaying or overlooking Sotomayor’s undergraduate career, we can look to it. It signals clues of how she might interact with those who hold privilege and power, her intelligence and her belief in fairness and justice at work, and a better understanding of the life and work of a woman who is not radical but who would bring the court, like Princeton, much closer to the reality of America and its citizens.
Emily Rutherford is an editorial intern and staff writer at Campus Progress. She is a sophomore at Princeton University. Follow her on Twitter.
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Judge Sonia Sotomayor Souvenir Confirmation Tile
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— frankiebla - Jul 15, 12:27 PM - #Thanks Emily. Excellent article! Thanks for
reporting on what the main stream
media missed. This report provides not only new information
but also outlines a model
for interested student activists
who want to bring about progressive change on and off campus.
Keep up the great work!
I will forward your article to all
interested parties!
Best!
Pamela
Help Students Vote! Chair
Sarah Lawrence College
Bronkville, New York
Massachusetts, New York and New Hampshire Help Students Vote! Coalitions
— pamela julian - Jul 16, 12:09 PM - #pamelasjulian@gmail.com
Help Massachusetts Students
Vote Facebook Group
pamelajulian.com
In the days of student activism at UC Berkely I always argued that students are “America’s only aristocracy” in that they alone are given time to study issues, understand them and activate on them. It used to be that only aristocrats enjoyed such a luxury for the pesants kept them all free of want and burden. In the 1970s era of Sotomayor’s student days Affirmative Action funding kind of made one such an aristocrat, especially if one had good study habits. But what struck me at the downfall of 1960s activism is that it was both ideologically frozen-in and social group specific, indeed so conformist and uncritical as to make the 1970s, not a period of questioning as were the 1960s, but a period of glacial conforming self-interest, mostly socially interests. Though the activism motives were alterior, then invariably the ideology was uniform as would be wearing a club uniform. What really made things worse is that instead of the standard 1950s American college scene, where one looked for a marital partner and future business connections that give one a leg up in one’s career, in the 1970s one looked for mere hedonia patners and social fascilitators that fit one into a “here-and-now fun scene” in social group so that one would not have to face Saturday night alone. The results of this three decades long campus culture— three times as long as the idealist period of the 1960s— is that when one left what in the 60s was called the campus “sandbox,”— one would be a lot more disconnected than in the 50s (unless one joined a fraternity, as in the 50s, and followed building one’s life around those connections) and, within a decade, post-acad would be quite often totally unrecognizable by schoolmates from college. Now that is the generality as I recall it, both as a perpetual student through all those decades of an evolving American campus culture and as the father of 1980s and 1990s students. Many refer to 1970 to 2000 as the period of “me-ism” where personal hedonia in student days matured into material and pecking-order self-interest in the more burdensome days of real-world entrepreneurial cannibalism. So I would say that looking at Sotomayor’s college and post college life one sees self-delution into an ethnocentric set followed by working all the means to get ahead in the professional set. I thus saw her Confirmation Hearings as a typical job interview where you BS and use all the gimmicks you can to compensate for the discomfort an outsider creates by seeking the top job from the WASP elites that think they rule America. Days of listening to the hearings made me feel like it could have all been compacted into an hour if her name were Johson and if she were a typical rubber and formless climber devoted to the amoral anything-to-get- ahead ideology of “entrepreneurship”— a French term meaning the TAKER that stands IN-BETWEEN and collects commissions for getting out of the way. Sotomayor, to my ears, seemed to say: “GUYS, IT’S COOL, I WON’T ROCK THE BOAT AS I’M JUST A LATINNA TRYING TO GET TO THE TOP OF MY PROFESSION.” That may make some Latinos feel good that they get one past the Anglos— the way, I remember, so many Blacks saw the hearings of Justice Thomas no matter how abnoxious his views and habits to them (I especially saw Black women defend him). But for the young Americans that will have to wade knee deep in the sewage to fix the America that the older 1970s generation of Americans turned into a cesspool, I look at Sotomayor, much as I look at Obama: as minority guys that simply say: “look, you haven’t been in my shoe, you don’t know how hard it was getting here so don’t ask me to rock the boat now that I got to the helm….afterall, I’m just a discriminated against minority trying to get by.” So, don’t expect her to be like Justice Greenberg just because she was a campaigner for more Latinos on Princeton’s faculty. Minorities rising to the top SINGLE FILE are today’s way of STILL keeping America in the hands of the “entrepreneurs”— the takers in the middle producing nothing, just taking a fee for getting out of the way. I recall when Mayor Gibson won the mayoralty in Newark. By then the city was a total S—thole and, worse still, many Blacks thought that now they would get special favors as Italians had in the previous mob run city. In fact, NOBODY but the entrepreneurs gets anything— as shown by Obama’s first year, a seameless flow from the Bush-it years. WE can see from the hearings that rigid Ideology replaced the MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE of the 60s as cover for “I’ll do anything to get ahead because this is the only game in town,” so no one would have to think or ask why not gut this damned thing, Wash DC, and start again? This game is played with particular gusto by minorities who were for so long kept down. Sure, I can well understand that. But then I think of all those equal right/civil rights pioneers that put their lives at risk and their bodies on the line so the Obamas and Sotomayors could get where they are. Now, Obama gives to this fecal Congress the task of formulating concretization of the promises that got him elected and Sotamayor wallows in this Congressional sewage of absurd confabulations and insists: “no, no, no, it smells wonderful around here….I feel as if I’m facing men equal to all my Princeton professors, especially the honorable Republican Sentators throwing their feces at me!” Imagine, I’m from the 1960s and if I had been in her seat at the Hearings, soon after Senator Sessions, Republican of Alabama, got started I would say: “It is a great honor for my law career to go to the Supreme Court and that is why I’m willingly to submit myself to the Senate’s probing of me in public. But this little stupid sub-human primate and some of the other Republican chimps on this panel are a bit too much; afterall, I’m not interviewing for a zoo-keeper job…SO TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT, I’ll just go back to academia where you are also knee deep in sewage but at least there are still opportunities to live by standards of intellectual inquiry and get attention with moral appeals.” So either Sotomayor did well in her self-seeking of a Supreme Court slot or she is a real idealist who patiently struggles to do good without disturbing the bad, like Obama. We’ll see if they can violate the morals of physics by going up and down at the same time.
— DE Teodoru - Jul 16, 02:19 PM - #Nothing new here. Used her affirmative action acceptance to bully administration into more people who looked like her rather than who was most qualified. Succeeded in getting b.s. classes inserted under diversity in general ed., which most students hate taking. Affirmative action student; affirmative action judge. No thank you.
— karen - Jul 16, 02:20 PM - #Are you serious Karen? Affirmative action judge? I think you should think about what you are saying.
— Sal Ramirez - Jul 16, 04:43 PM - #Emily,
People like you give me hope in our nation! Long live progressive change! We are the future! Youth unite!
Dave Paul
— Dave Paul - Jul 16, 07:37 PM - #University of Maryland
Well written article, Emily, But you definitely portray her in a much less radical light than she actually was. You should read her full letter to the Prince when she filed the complaint against Princeton for “institutional discrimination” against Latinos, accusing the school of trying to render them into “oblivion.” In addition, you say the administration wasn’t liberal. Are you kidding me? The Dean of Students at the time, who probably had the most influence in choosing Sotomayor for the Pyne Prize, left Princeton a couple years later to become president of Hampshire College.
— P'10 - Jul 17, 01:36 AM - #I enjoyed this article, but I echo the sentiment of the above comment. I think that Sotomayor’s activism at Princeton could in fact be understood as radical, even just going off the information in your article. It seems like she worked really hard to create institutional change at Princeton, in the form of challenges to a culture and system there that largely just supported and recreated white/European success and dominance. The results of her struggles were more highly educated Latin@ people, more job opportunities for Latin@ professors, a supportive community for Latin@ students at Princeton, and the legitimization of Latin@ history and culture as a field of academic study. She may not have participated in sit-ins or bombed buildings, but I think her desire and struggle for change was as far-reaching and went as deep as any of that kind of “radical” student action.
— VW - Jul 19, 10:27 PM - #