As James Cole ’12 shook hands and slapped backs in the uproar of Ivy Club pickups, he thought of more than just the meals, parties and friends that his new home would offer: He remembered how his father, too, had been cheered on at Ivy pickups roughly three decades ago.

On June 1, 1958, the Alumni Council of Princeton University distributed a pamphlet to dispel a rampant misconception among Princeton men of the era: that their sons received no priority in admission.

“The Princeton son does not have to compete against non-Princeton sons,” the Alumni Council assured. “No matter how many other boys apply, the Princeton son is judged from an academic standpoint solely on this one question: Can he be expected to graduate? If so, he’s admitted. If not, he’s not admitted. It’s as simple as that.”

For Richard Golden ’60, the small envelope addressed to his daughter was an unconscionable insult. “My daughter got her rejection letter from Princeton yesterday,” Golden fumed in a letter to Princeton Alumni Weekly in April 2003. It was not right for alumni to be “blindly loyal to the university,” while Princeton merely “[paid] lip-service to the values of Tradition and Loyalty” in its “mindless drive towards social engineering,” he wrote.