A David Kirkpatrick report in the Nov. 27, 2005 New York Times on Samuel Alito's background, From Alito's Past, a Window on Conservatives at Princeton, raises some genuine concerns about his understanding of civil liberties and his dedication to equal justice for all. Alito was a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, an alumni-sponsored group founded initially to protest admission of women. Until its demise in 1987, the group fought change at Princeton, "charging repeatedly that the administration was lowering admission standards, undermining the university's distinctive traditions and admitting too few children of alumni."
The position of the group smacks of racism and sexism. The undesirable groups that were being admitted instead were African Americans, Latinos, and women. Concerned Alumni issued a pamphlet suggesting that racial tensions and loose campus life were causing campus crime to surge. Another brochure condemned the administration's goal of increasing women and minorities because it would "vitiate the alumni body of the future." Id. Even Senator Bill Frist (a 1974 Princeton graduate) considered Concerned Alumni's position "distorted, narrow and hostile." Id. The group went on to defend Princeton's socially exclusive eating clubs against administration plans to create general dining halls, claiming that the demise of the eating clubs was an effort to end de facto segregation.
Alito, in applying for a Reagan administration promotion in 1985, provided his membership in Concerned Alumni as evidence of his proper conservative ideology. This evidence of his values is not reassuring--in fact, it suggests that he would not bring to the Court a proper understanding of the Court's role in protecting the very groups that the Concerned Alumni so resented as invading their traditional Princeton domain.
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