Stephen Dujack, a 1976 Princeton graduate who wrote about CAP for the Princeton Alumni Weekly in the 1980s, writes:
In a best-selling book published this fall, "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton," sociologist Jerome Karabel documented in shocking detail how the nation's elite universities used their admissions policies to help maintain a male WASP aristocracy through most of the 20th century. Eventually even the most selective colleges opened their doors to women and minorities.
. . .[L]ast month, we learned that in the 1980s, Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. belonged to a group created to thwart the reforms that provided equal access to Princeton University, from which he graduated in 1972 with the last all-male class.
. . . Alito [has] tried to sidestep the issue by claiming that he has "no recollection" of belonging to the group. That's simply not credible. He certainly knew he was a member in 1985, when at the age of 35 he highlighted his membership in the group in order to establish his far- right bona fides in an application for a promotion in the Reagan Justice Department.
. . .[W]hy was Alito a member of an organization that ran counter to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, federal laws ensuring equal access to education for women and minorities? How can we be sure that he will view women and minorities as deserving full equality under the law when he once sought to exclude them from his alma mater?
[CAP sought] "a more traditional undergraduate population," warn[ing] that "a student population of approximately 40 percent women and minorities will largely vitiate the alumni body of the future." The group supported a permanent quota that would keep the female student population at only 1,000 out of a total of 4,400. Without irony, CAP simultaneously supported "affirmative action" for athletes and children of alumni.
. . . In 1984 Prospect [CAP's publication] noted that a female coal miner who had won her job through a discrimination suit had died in a mining accident. The item concluded, "Sally Frank, take note." Frank was a former student who successfully sued to open the doors of all-male eating clubs at the university to women.
Samuel Alito touted his membership in CAP at the same time Prospect was pushing these destructive messages. This fact should trouble all who cherish the right to equality before the law. Alito needs to be forthcoming about his involvement in CAP, and the Senate must carefully examine this record. Otherwise, Americans won't have the information they need to judge for themselves whether Alito would uphold the rights of all.