Princeton's cancer: Concerned Alumni's many sins

The following op-ed ran in the Sept. 18, 1986 edition of The Daily Princetonian. Dujack's Nov. 22, 2005 op-ed, published after the nomination to the Supreme Court of Samuel Alito '72, a former member of Concrned Alumni of Princeton, can be read here.

In contemplating the possible demise of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton and its irresponsible magazine, Prospect, it is tempting to find the appropriate metaphor for the organization.

Perhaps it is an infection that has run its course, having produced a fever in its host but leaving it essentially unchanged. But infectious diseases, according to biologist Lewis Thomas '33, are the result of failed negotiations over a possible relationship of symbiosis. Though Prospect promised in its first issue that CAP's goal was "not to interfere but to be of genuine service," it demonstrated from the very start that it had been conceived as a pathogen.

No, CAP is more like a cancer, a small group of cells within an organism that turns on the whole group and seeks to destroy it. And, as with cancer, one can never be sure when the disease may recur.

Whether it is still alive or not, there is a certain sadness in the 14-year life of CAP, for it could have been a legitimate vehicle of conservative dissent. All alumni and all students have a right to express their views on the nature and actions of the university and to strive to change them. CAP has some good points to make about the vitality of conservative thought on campus, about the rapid changes Princeton has made over the last two decades, about the university's responses to the changing social fabric within which it exists.

But instead the group has used the most sordid of tactics to try and undermine the very institution that it claimed to be seeking to improve. It has used ad hominem attacks, scandalous innuendos, distortions, and outright lies.

In 1973 it wrote a letter to all freshman parents that portrayed the campus as a bordello and the administration as a madame because of the existence of coed dormitories.

In 1975 it tried to damage the annual giving campaign by writing a letter to alumni in business asking whether their gifts might be "used to undermine, subvert, and otherwise discredit the very businesses which are helping to fund private education."

1n 1982 Prospect charged that President Bowen had "not taken even the smallest step toward initiating some rapprochement" with the organization, despite the fact that its founders had cancelled every appointment Bowen made with them in the early years of CAP's existence and told the president that he could instead travel to Switzerland to confer with co-founder Shelby Cullom Davis '30, then U.S. ambassador to Bern but a frequent visitor to campus because of his chairmanship of the history department's advisory council.

And just last year it savaged incoming football coach Ron Rogerson in an attack printed in Prospect, in which the author didn't even use his real name.

In addition to its outrageous tactics, CAP is an organization that is blind to its own contradictions. For example, CAP fought against equal access of women to Princeton and it fought against the university's efforts to matriculate representative numbers of minorities. It declared in 1973 that "a student population of approximately 40 percent women and minorities will largely vitiate the alumni body of the future."

One can pine for the good old days of This Side of Paradise and take issue with the bad effects that affirmative action may bring, but it is hard to square the organization's contempt for these social values with its repeated cries that the university recruit more conservative professors, hire more alumni administrators, and admit more alumni children.

Other contradictions abound in the pages of Prospect and the actions of its publisher.

CAP's catalog of sordid tactics and contradictions is only excided by Prospect's journalistic breaches. It has had to print retractions of assertions of fact that were just plain made up.

In 1980 it had to apologize that a piece it had printed by then-Yale president Bartlett Giamatti not only was not written for the magazine but had been excerpted from a speech without the author's permission.

In 1984 it printed a diatribe against Sally Frank '80 that committed plagiarism — an honor offense at Princeton.

In responding to my article about CAP that appeared in the Princeton Alumni Weekly last spring, Chairman David Condit '73 fulfilled my prophecy that CAP would use its usual tactics in its rebuttal. He charged that a "journalist has been engaged" by the university to write the article.

How did he know this? Nobody engaged me; it was my idea; I wrote it myself — and for free. In fact, I haven't communicated with any university official or any surrogate in more than six years. In other words, Condit made it up.

Condit also accused me of having failed to interview a member of CAP's board, despite the fact that I had interviewed Condit himself.

It has become obvious that CAP is an organization that is so convinced of the self-evident rightness of its cause that no means to achieve it is out of bounds. Its principal means of late has been its organ, Prospect.

The magazine has had seven editors in the last ten years, all non-alumni who can accurately be described as mercenaries, hired guns who come into town for a year or two to shoot up Nassau Hall and then depart.

To their credit, no alumni have seen fit to put their name on the magazine's masthead in more than a decade, since co-founder T. Harding Jones '72 left the editor's post.

This would be indicative in itself if not for the cosmic irony that CAP was founded in part to protest the naming to the presidency of a man who was not alumnus of the undergraduate school — though he was of the graduate school and had been on campus for 17 years.

In one of the many contradictions that have become emblematic of CAP, William Bowen GS '58 is not an alumnus but George Will GS '68 is.

So the last of the hired guns have left town, leaving their pistols and typewriters behind in a dusty office decorated with rent-due notices. What is left of CAP is a few angry men who are upset at the changes in society of the last two decades and feel that somehow Princeton could have avoided them, could have stayed all-male, all-white, all-Ivy.

They have claimed as many as 4,000 supporters as recently as a year ago, but refused to give a list; their financial hard times would appear to belie that claim. Whether CAP will come back in a few weeks or a few months or a few years depends on the cancerous nature. Meanwhile, like Tennyson, perhaps we can trust this illness will result in some good.