Sotomayor ’76 helped shape University’s affirmative action practices

When Sonia Sotomayor ’76 was a sophomore at Princeton, she wrote her first legal document supporting affirmative action.

In the spring of 1974, Sotomayor, a co-leader of the student group Accion Puertorriquena, drafted a formal complaint claiming that University administrators displayed “a lack of commitment” to increasing the number of Latino students and faculty at the University.

Accion Puertorriquena and the Chicano Caucus, another student group, submitted the complaint to the New York office of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) on April 18, 1974. Over the next few years, the University established new hiring and recruitment practices that gradually changed the ethnic makeup of the faculty as well as the student body.

As Sotomayor’s stance on affirmative action comes under close scrutiny during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, her advocacy for affirmative action during her time at Princeton may shed some light on her political convictions.

Sotomayor’s complaint

Sotomayor arrived on campus in 1972, at a time of unprecedented change in affirmative action hiring practices at universities and businesses across the country.

Thomas Wright ’62, a former University vice president and secretary who was serving as the University’s general legal counsel at the time, recalled that when Sotomayor was on campus, there was “a convergence of efforts” that ushered in a new era of hiring practices at establishments across the country.

“Efforts by the U.S. government, by the universities (importantly including Princeton which was unusually active in the overall effort), and student groups” all led to a reassessment of employment norms, Wright said in an e-mail.

But Sotomayor and many of her peers were not satisfied with the University’s progress in this area. While the University was making strides in hiring women and members of some minority groups, the administration showed a “total absence of regard, concern, and respect” for Latinos and their culture, Sotomayor wrote in a letter to The Daily Princetonian in May 1974. She went on to describe the University’s lack of progress in instituting affirmative action practices for Latinos as “an attempt — a successful attempt so far — to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion.”

Joseph Schubert ’74, who became friends with Sotomayor while they were undergraduates, recalled that “the University’s record in hiring Latino faculty and administrators was abysmal in those days,” adding that “students rightly felt that they had to publicize that record and bring pressure to change the situation.”

Submitting a complaint to HEW was Sotomayor’s idea, Frank Reed ’76, the head of the Chicano Caucus around the time when the complaint was submitted, told The Washington Post. She handed him a typed copy of the complaint the winter before, Reed said, and asked him for his support.

The complaint stated that, while Princeton’s official affirmative action plans established timetables of goals for hiring members of some minority groups, no such plan had been established for Latinos. The complaint also asserted that the University offered no courses on Puerto Rican or Mexican culture, that it did not make a sincere effort to recruit qualified Latinos for University positions and that it employed too few Latinos in non-academic positions.

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In the ensuing weeks, news of the complaint sparked debate at the University and across the country. Several Latino groups at other colleges also submitted complaints about the hiring practices at their institutions.

“Princeton in many ways typifies the lack of commitment on the part of universities in general,” Reed told the ‘Prince’ that May, as Accion Puertorriquena and the Chicano Caucus reached out to students at other schools, including the University of Pennsylvania.

The complaint also evoked a critical reaction from some at Princeton.

The Latino groups “feel no compulsion, rational or moral, to prove that there exist qualified Ph.D.s whom Princeton has statistically overlooked,” Robert Segal GS ’84 argued in a letter to the ‘Prince,’ noting that “exceptionally qualified Ph.D.s of less exotic extractions are often treated with indifference.”

A response from HEW came quickly. In May 1974, James Crowley, an employee of the Office of Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Education, met with Sotomayor and other Latino students, as well as then-associate provost Conrad Snowden. Following the meeting, Snowden agreed to send drafts of the University’s affirmative action plan to HEW, Sotomayor and the Princeton University Women’s Organization by the end of June.

Results of pressure from a ‘loyal opposition’

In the two years after Sotomayor filed the complaint, the University marked many milestones in its implementation of an affirmative action program. Luis Garcia, a Latino, was named assistant dean of student affairs in September 1974. Less than a year later, in May 1975, the University submitted a formal affirmative action plan to HEW, and the plan was approved the following September. In the fall of 1975, then-University President William Bowen GS ’58, along with students and other University members, testified before the U.S. Department of Labor on the University’s affirmative action practices.

It is difficult to determine exactly how much of this was done as a result of the complaint, said Wright, who authored the new affirmative action plan with Snowden.

The University was required to submit a plan to HEW “as part of a much larger program by the federal government at the time,” Wright added.

The federal program, which former U.S. president Richard Nixon created in 1971 under Executive Order 11625, required “affirmative action on behalf of ‘under-represented minorities’ in all phases of employment decision making,” Wright noted. The order applied to all “federal contractors,” which included universities, like Princeton, that accepted government money.

Though the University’s new affirmative action plan “would have been prepared and submitted whether or not there had been a student complaint,” student activism accelerated the process “like a constant pressure of the wind on a growing tree, bending it noticeably over time — the work of a ‘loyal opposition,’ ” Wright explained.

Sergio Sotolongo ’77, a friend of Sotomayor’s since their days at Cardinal Spellman High School in New York, said he believed Garcia’s appointment was one of the most immediately tangible results of the complaint.

“Garcia’s job was to help students of color in general, more specifically students of Latino background,” Sotolongo said. “There’s a big difference between having someone in the dean’s office [raising issues of concern to Latinos] and a group of students doing the same thing.”

Another of Sotomayor’s concerns was also addressed immediately: Sotomayor’s thesis adviser, former history professor Peter Winn, wrote in The Washington Post earlier this month that Sotomayor and other students worked with him in the spring of 1974 to create a seminar on the history and politics of Puerto Rico.

Despite the attention that Sotomayor’s complaint brought to the affirmative action debate, Neal Koblitz GS ’74 recalled that progress on affirmative action during the 1970s was “agonizingly slow.”

Koblitz, who wrote a letter to the ‘Prince’ supporting the claims of the complaint, explained that “Princeton had almost no faculty members from the African-American, Latino or Native American communities” since “faculty hiring was usually conducted by the ‘old boy network.’ ”

The report that Wright and Snowden submitted to HEW stated that the University planned to hire 16 minority faculty members by 1981, representing 8.1 percent of total hires — the same hiring ratio that persisted from 1971 to 1975.

The University was stymied in its hiring goals because there was a lack of qualified candidates, Wright said.

“The numbers of [Latinos] having or about to have doctorates were depressingly small,” Wright noted, adding that “even what Princeton projected was probably unreasonably ambitious.”

The University was required by law to target hires “based entirely on availability data,” so if members of a particular group made up a small percentage of qualified candidates, the University needed to hire only a few of them, he explained.

Sotomayor did not note this fact in her letter to ‘Prince,’ citing data on the number of Puerto Ricans and Chicanos living in the United States while offering no information on how many Puerto Ricans or Chicanos held advanced degrees.

“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,” she said in the letter. “While there are 12 million Chicanos in the United States, there were only 111 Chicano applicants and 27 students on campus this year.”

Charles Hey ’77, who led Accion Puertorriquena in 1974 along with Sotomayor, characterized the complaint’s impact as small but significant.

“The University began to make — I wouldn’t say strides — but certainly a little bit of progress towards hiring faculty and recruiting, or being more open to the recruitment of, students,” Hey said.

‘The Princeton way’ and the nation’s highest court

Though Sotomayor’s activism made waves at Princeton, many former students and faculty, looking back on her complaint, remarked that her nonviolent methods were moderate compared to the protests that took place at several other universities during the same period.

Newsweek termed Sotomayor’s decision to submit a complaint “the Princeton way,” claiming that the University teaches its students that “change is to be achieved by working within the system, not by tearing things down.”

“People were taking over buildings, they were getting arrested, in some places they were using violence,” politics professor Paul Frymer said. “Now, we’re looking at it 45 years later, and what Sotomayor did seems somewhat radical, but given the context of the time, it was not.”

Reed told the Post that Sotomayor employed a strategy not previously used by Latinos at Princeton, calling the complaint “different than anything that had ever been done.”

Sotomayor, however, did not entirely disavow the more aggressive tactics of other students. In a 1996 speech, Sotomayor praised Manuel del Valle ’71 and Margarita Rosa ’74, explaining that they “had demonstrated and taken over University buildings” to persuade the University to build the Third World Center, now the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality & Cultural Understanding.

In the weeks leading up to Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, some observers have tried to determine what impact Sotomayor’s demonstrated passion for affirmative action will have on her judicial decisions.

Maureen Martin, writing for The American Spectator, argued that Sotomayor’s actions demonstrate that “there is the risk she would perpetuate racial quotas, with their tragic unintended consequences.”

But Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83, a Supreme Court scholar, said he thought Sotomayor’s actions as a Princeton student would likely have little bearing on her rulings.

Though “at one point in her life” Sotomayor believed the University needed to “diversify its community,” as a Supreme Court justice, she would decide “how to apply today’s laws to today’s circumstances,” Eisgruber explained in an e-mail.

“Justice Hugo Black was once a member of the KKK; on the Supreme Court, however, he was a steadfast vote for desegregation,” Eisgruber added.

Sotomayor’s views on affirmative action have come under even more scrutiny recently. While serving on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Sotomayor and two other judges ruled that New Haven officials had not acted improperly when they threw out the results of a firefighters’ exam in which the African-American participants performed poorly. On June 29, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling in a 5-4 decision.

Sotomayor has also drawn criticism for a 2001 speech at UC Berkeley in which she said that “a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

At Sotomayor’s hearings, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, expressed concern that personal convictions might mean more to the Supreme Court nominee than legal precedent.

“In recent years we’ve seen judicial opinion attune more to the judge’s personal preferences than to the law,” Sessions said. “It’s caused quite a bit of heartburn throughout the country.”

Priscilla Hayes ’75, who testified at the U.S. Department of Labor in 1975 as a member of the USG’s affirmative action task force, said she did not think Sotomayor should be asked to fully separate her personal convictions from legal precedent.

“What should be obvious to everyone is that nobody is totally objective,” Hayes said, explaining that requiring Sotomayor to discount feeling and experience would be unrealistic. “I totally agree with Sonia Sotomayor that a wise Latina woman is probably better,” she added.

Sotomayor’s ability to put aside her personal feelings while judging a case was tested even during her undergraduate years, in a 1976 Committee on Discipline hearing of eight students charged with breaking into and ransacking the room of two gay students who were vocal in pressing the University to establish a written nondiscrimination policy toward gays.

It was Sotomayor’s responsibility, as a student member of the committee, to impartially judge the case, but she made her feelings about the incident public in a letter published in the Feb. 27, 1976, issue of the ‘Prince.’

The letter, which was signed by Sotomayor and 38 others, said that “the entire University community should be angry, and disgusted” at the perpetrators’ actions and called for a “positive response” to the attack that would reaffirm the gay students’ right to express their views.

Though Sotomayor expressed clear and strongly held views about the incident, Sotolongo, who also served on the Committee on Discipline, remembers her as being “very reasoned and thoughtful” during the hearing.

“We were asked to be impartial and in some way dispassionate,” Sotolongo recalled. This task was difficult for some members of the committee, Sotolongo said, but Sotomayor kept her feelings in check.