Alma matters: Being the loyal opposition

In my last column, I took some (easy) jabs at Bill Frist '74. In response, my father, Sen. Frist's classmate and fellow Cottager, laid on the Jewish guilt pretty doggone thick. "There goes my shot at Secretary of the Treasury," he said. A loyal alum who believes in the loyalty of fellow alumni, he was only half-joking.

I have written in the past about the University's defensible fealty to its alumni, which I had previously conceptualized only as a nebulous body of legacy-spawners. Suddenly I began reconsidering our duty toward specific, individual alumni; in particular, those private persons with public faces. What do we owe those who give Princeton not just their enthusiasm and their paychecks, but their reputations as well?

Every group that alleges a common experience, territory or gene pool loves to bask in the glory of its externally-exalted stars. This is the whole basis of Adam Sandler's Chanukah song. As the saying goes, success has a thousand fathers, and Princetonians are quite paternally prolific.

We Princetonians presume ourselves to be cut from the same cloth as our accomplished alumni and claim success by proxy. The same orange and black blood that coursed through Jimmy Stewart '32's veins must flood ours, too.

Of course, we don't brag about our more "embarrassing" matriculants. Our Orange Key tour guides don't point out the hallways Lyle Menendez '93 traversed or the dorms he inhabited. They're not supposed to, in any case. It makes sense that we wouldn't want to associate ourselves with a brutal double murder. But we are not so much embarrassed by our association with him, as we are dismissive of the relationship between his exposure to Princeton and his crime. In general, we assume the good things Princetonians do are consequences of their going to Princeton, and the bad things Princetonians do are irrelevant to their days at Old Nassau. We convince ourselves that Princeton nurtured a talent or provided an opportunity that led to fame and fortune. We are proud of Princetonians for the respect they get from others — evidenced by awards, offices and fame. Yet in doing this, we end up claiming that we are proud of these Princetonians for their Princetonianess.

Accomplished Princetonians do their school and alumni a favor by allowing us to bask in their glory and share their good repute. Many of these alumni not only don't mind that Princeton mooches off their success, but even welcome said mooching. Like former Senator Bill Bradley '65, Frist has publicly honored Princeton, and for that I am sure both the admissions office and Annual Giving are quite grateful. But is a university — as an institution or as a body of alumni — obligated to reciprocate this devotion?

The answer is yes, if you believe in loyalty of the "loyal opposition." As Princetonians, it is our duty to be more critical of those decrying orange and black. Frist's Harvard Medical School class seems to agree with me; according to Newsweek, 31 of these 165 classmates wrote Frist a letter saying he had used his medical degree improperly when he diagnosed Terri Schiavo from afar. Princeton alumni often follow in a similar vein. Many of the alumni letters to the editor in PAW accuse him of "tarnish[ing]" Princeton's reputation, perhaps exaggerating how much Frist publicly chalks up his legitimacy as a public servant to his days at Old Nassau.

Be at ease, dear reader, if you cringe at the thought of carping on an alumnus as renown as Frist. After all, one might ask the likes of George W. Bush, who did his utmost to distance himself from Andover and Yale, if gleaning support from an "elitist" alma mater is a political priority, or even desirable. By eschewing relationships with their alma maters, both Bush and Frist try to prove they haven't been infected by the famously liberal Ivy League and thus get their bona fides with the hard right — which Frist's "Justice Sunday" remarks were clearly aimed at.

In other words, criticizing Frist is a win-win situation, since the greatest show of loyalty we can offer him is our disloyalty. I wonder, though: If Frist's rightist pandering rappels him much further away from the shamefully liberal Ivory Tower, at what point will he reach the critical mass of un-Princetonianess such that our loyal disloyalty (or our disloyal loyalty) becomes a lost and forgotten cause?

In other words, at what point does he become Lyle Menendez? Or worse yet, when does he become Donald Rumsfeld '54? Catherine Rampell is a sophomore from Palm Beach, Fla. She can be reached at crampell@princeton.edu.