Explaining this charge and the rest of a complaint filed by university students with the Health, Education and Welfare Department, Sotomayor's letter continued:

The facts imply and reflect the total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture. In effect, they reflect an attempt -- a successful attempt so far -- to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion.

As proof of these charges, Sotomayor said:

The facts of the complaint are these: 1) There is not one Puerto Rican or Chicano administrator or faculty member in the university; 2) There are two million Puerto Ricans in the United States and two and a half million more on the island itself. Yet there were only 66 Puerto Rican applicants this year, and only 31 Puerto Rican students on campus. While there are 12 million Chicanos in the United States, there were only 111 Chicano applicants and 27 students on campus this year; 3) Not one permanent course in this university now deals in any notable detail with the Puerto Rican or Chicano cultures.

Sotomayor's parents had moved from Puerto Rico to New York in search of better opportunities. Those opportunities ultimately came to include her admission to the university that she so sharply attacked. At Princeton, she was, among other things, co-chair of a group called Accion Puertorriquena.

In October 1974, Princeton allowed Sotomayor and two other students to initiate a seminar, for full credit and with the university's blessings, on the Puerto Rican experience and its relation to contemporary America.

Some may see the fact that Princeton awarded Sotomayor a summa cum laude degree and the prestigious Pyne Prize when she graduated in 1976 as evidence of her unparalleled brilliance in overcoming a "total absence of regard, concern, and respect" for people such as her.

And some may see Sotomayor's letter as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities. She now sits on Princeton's Board of Trustees.

Read the complete text of Sotomayor's 1974 letter and a 1974 story about the complaint in which she's quoted.

The Princetonian posts two other letters signed by Sotomayor while a student:

- 'The making of a dean'
- 'Rights of all'

And normal people read Stuart Taylor Jr. and see a smug, mendacious defender of torture, war crimes, and GOP lawbreaking, while conservatives read Stuart Taylor Jr. and see one of their own.

Interesting story, Too bad it depends almost exclusively on the well known expert "Some Say"

Having dealt with your sources, accepting as factual the historical portion, I find your conclusions beyond ludicruous.

How many "Summa Cum Laude" degrees would she need to achieve for you to stop projecting.

Also, although my windbag-to-English translation book isn't handy at the moment, I wonder what "she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities" really means -- perhaps something like, "We let you in -- shut up and be grateful"?

Apparently, uppity women and minorities keep making Mr. Taylor's life uncomfortable by not knowing their place.

Oh, yes.  November 2008.

I note that the seminar came only after the letter.  Perhaps the letter led the university to conclude that she had a point.  Or, perhaps, since she "initiated" it, she decided it was better to do something to address the issue rather than merely to complain about it.

Either way, I have a pretty hard time with the analysis here.  First, it presumes that she should have been so grateful for being granted the boon of admission to Princeton that she should not have complained about any shortcomings she found there.  I'm not sure I can think of a single college student who meets that standard.

Second, I don't see any evidence she was wrong.  That would seem to be relevant to "whether she was predisposed to" anything.  Her admission to the university is not, mind you, a demonstration that she was wrong; as she points out, the total number of Latinos on campus was pretty small, and the applicant numbers don't suggest any meaningful outreach to the Latino community.

Third, she was a sophomore at the time she wrote the letter.  Should we now prowl through everything Mr. Taylor did when he was a sophomore to see if perhaps it was not something he would do now that he's a fully-formed adult?

By the way, using that criteria would have made Thurgood Marshall ineligible. Surely he should have been happy with his place and never tried to make the world more just. For shame, Marshall and Sotomayer.  It is self-evident that accepting racial hierarchy is proof of one's objectivity and lack of bias.  Only those who see anything wrong with the world are non-objective, eh?

No matter how much one may disagree with the Gay Alliance or the policies they are advocating, no matter how repugnant one may find homosexuality, the manner of expressing this opposition should be intellectual. At this university we are dedicated to persuasion by reason, not by brute force.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/05/15/23734/

She stood up against ransacking and invoked reason - scandale!  Why was she out there not appreciating all that was good and great abotu Princeton? What a complainer.

None of these people were worried in the slightest when it was discovered that Alito was a member of CAP, a group formed to keep women and minorities out of Princeton. Why on earth do they think they are going to be take seriously?

Senate Republicans are already running away from this conspicuous racism in droves.

And some may see that Stuart Taylor is just regurgitating GOP talking points in a failed attempt to demonize this intelligent and respected Latina judge as someone who doesn't bow down to the white establishment as is proper.

Personally, I think it's a bit of both.

When colleges and universities admit students they do so with the goal of educating those students to be effective citizens in a complicated democracy and to become leaders of the communities in which they live.  As a college professor (I know, someone by definition disbarred from political. discourse by wingnuts) let me just say that the willingness of Sotomayor to take a leadership role in challenging the university to pursue its own ideals is a sign of that both Princeton and Sotomayor were succeeding.

Your comment, by the way, is my new favorite entry in the "what's the most anti-democractic thing Stuart Taylor can say," derby.

Stuart thinks and feels all that follows "Some may" in his "analysis" piece above. However he knows that those thoughts and feelings  are factually incorrect and also plainly bigoted, so he very cleverly hides behind those unnamed people who have have not been quoted,  have not even been interviewed, are not even aware of that letter from the 1970s, have not even read this "analysis piece" with block busting information and probably would not even feel what Stuart attributes to them. 

But we all know, don't we?

By the way, what does Stuart think of Samuel Alito's membership in CAP?

You seem to believe that Sonia Sotomayor was being in some way ungrateful (?) by criticising what she considered to be insufficient minority hiring and student recruitment at Princeton in 1974. As if by Princeton's willingness to do her the favour of "providing her with so many opportunities" (opportunities she earned through hard work and academic excellence) she has some sort of obligation not to criticise the institution.

It seems to me that this would utterly defeat the purpose of educating her. Or anyone.

If a young Puerto Rican student at Princeton doesn't have the right, to speak her views on issues she feels strongly about, then what good is a Princeton education going to do her anyway? I'm sure you can't see that there is a twisted racial logic to your argument, but I'd ask you to look at it again - according to your argument it would be impossible for any minority student to oppose policies that she believed harmed others who come from a similar background. The first Jew at a university would have no standing to point out unwitting anti-semitism in the teaching staff. The first women admitted to an all male club would have no right to demand facilities more suitable for women.

She doesn't owe them her gratitude. She owes them her truth - the same thing she will owe us all when she is a member of the Supreme Court. I'm glad to know that she stood up for herself (and in such a reasoned, fact base way - with numbers) then, because it gives me hope that she might stand up for each of us on the Court. Every individual is a minority of one, you know.

You know, simply writing "uppity" would have been so much more concise.  But I do admire how this formulation could be used to undermine so many other prominent attorneys who worked to make this country a better place:

"And some may see Thurgood Marshall's advocacy in Brown v. Board of Education as evidence that he was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the country that had afforded him such opportunities....."

"Alito's critics have similarly ignored much evidence that his 15 years of steady, scholarly, precedent-respecting work as a judge tell us more about him than a handful of widely (and misleadingly) publicized memos that he wrote more than 20 years ago."

As Lawyers, Guns and Money says...

"So, if I understand correctly, memos Alito wrote directly about important constitutional issues while applying for an important government job should be disregarded, but letters that Sotomayor wrote as a student are somehow important despite their utter lack of relevance to any discernible constitutional issue. And I must have missed Taylor's series of posts giving Sotomayor's opinions the most moderate possible reading. But I'm sure he has deeply principled reasons for all this!"

Say it isn't so!

Stuart, let's see your letters to the Princetonian. alkoholbehandling københavn Since you're casting aspersions, it might be nice to know what your relation to the university as an undergrad was. 

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I think she's overreacting. I mean discrimination is something bad, but to say that the low number of Puerto Rican student on campus means that they are being discriminated it's a bit too much. I was also a student, I got a human services degree online and I don't think I have heard people complain about something like that.