Personal history is often the subconscious grist of judicial decision-making.
Samuel A. Alito Jr. arrived at Princeton in September 1968, as a public school graduate who was aware, as he later put it, that “a generation earlier” someone of his background “probably would not have felt fully comfortable at a college like Princeton.”
Sonia Sotomayor arrived on campus in the fall of 1972, after Mr. Alito graduated. Hers was only the fourth class of first year students to include women, and she saw herself at the vanguard of racial change as well.
Their tenures at Princeton — a “time of turmoil,” as Mr. Alito described his collegiate years, followed by a gradual easing of tensions — would illustrate how the social dynamics of campus life can alter forthcoming events on an epic scale. The alma mater of Mr. Alito and Ms. Sotomayor (and later Elena Kagan ’81) would come to play a role in how both jurists understood not just their own educations but the future course of the country.
Mr. Alito’s worldview, which is punctuated by a desire to give legal protection to the social and religious values that marked his upbringing, was sharpened in college. He found a compatible group of friends and a professor who became a mentor. But as he ascended to the Supreme Court, Princeton would emerge as his foil.
“I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly, and I couldn’t help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on campus and the good sense and decency of the people back in my own community,” he said at his 2006 confirmation hearing.
Like Mr. Alito, Ms. Sotomayor had trepidations about Princeton, having been forewarned by an Asian American student who shared her working-class New York City roots that “it’s a bunch of very strange, privileged human beings, and you’re not going to understand any of them.”
By the time of her own graduation, she hadn’t entirely overcome her mixed feelings about the university. But Princeton would continue to evolve, becoming more Ms. Sotomayor’s university than Mr. Alito’s, and proving even further that rifts in society — and the law — can find unshakable roots in campus divisions.
The son and grandson of Italian immigrants, Mr. Alito was fulfilling the dreams of his forebears. He also carried an intense awareness of his parents’ “hard work and self-sacrifice” and their roots, anchored by the Catholic Church, in the Italian American enclave of Chambersburg in Trenton, New Jersey.
The 12 miles of strip malls and highways between the suburban tract house where Mr. Alito grew up and the verdant Princeton campus might as well have been an ocean. Yet the shy young man was intensely eager to prove himself: Princeton would make him the man he wanted to be.
That would be true enough, but not in ways he could have predicted.
Princeton was in the midst of an epochal transformation. Reform-minded trustees and administrators were pushing change on three fronts. Once a destination for prep-school boys drawn by the famed eating clubs that lined Prospect Avenue, Princeton was determined to admit more of its student body from the new meritocracy emerging from public schools. A higher number of incoming freshmen hailed from high schools like Mr. Alito’s than from old-line preparatory schools.
At the same time, the administration hoped to diversify the student body along racial and, more urgently, gender lines. For its entire 222-year history, Princeton had been essentially as much a male enclave as was a Navy ship, albeit with port leave every weekend. Mr. Alito’s would be the last incoming class comprising solely men.
Mr. Alito’s four years at Princeton would challenge the assumptions of his worshipful, achievement-oriented upbringing. After his freshman year, he confronted a social revolution that would ask him to defend his chastity and his Catholic values.
Dating life at the time he came to Princeton centered on formal events, framed by chaste rules of conduct and rigorous curfews; the decision to accept women as students in 1969 brought about a transformation. Suddenly, couples could maintain long-term relationships while seeing each other in casual settings; the campus was consumed by questions of whether to eliminate curfews and allow cohabitation. Next-door New York dramatically expanded access to legal abortions, and providers ran ads in The Daily Princetonian promising expedited services.
These and other realities played out not through politics but rather through late-night discussions; students who adhered to traditional values sometimes felt outnumbered or out of place.
The changes wrought by coeducation would prove to be less dramatic than those engendered by a student strike that followed President Richard Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia in the spring of 1970. The escalation of a war that many had felt was ending hit students hard; about 2,500 crammed into the university chapel to launch a strike. In the coming days, hundreds would surrender their draft cards in protest.
Mr. Alito, the son of a proud World War II veteran, was a member of the R.O.T.C. But that put him in the cross hairs of protesters. The R.O.T.C. was an emblem of the university’s support for the military. Princeton announced that it would ban R.O.T.C. programs, and Mr. Alito was forced to train off campus.
Up to that point, friends saw Mr. Alito as a quiet, studious observer; his focus was on building an academic record. He had conservative values but kept his politics to himself.
What disturbed Mr. Alito, the friends recall, was not only the chaos of the strike but also the ease with which the university decided to cancel exams while it was happening. He had studied hard and was ready to ace the tests. Postponing them seemed an affront to the peaceful, diligent students who played by the rules; they, after all, weren’t born to high position. They needed good grades to prove their worth. Certainly, richer students involved in the protests weren’t ready to cut their less wealthy peers any slack.
These were, presumably, the “very privileged people behaving irresponsibly” whom Mr. Alito would mention at his confirmation hearing. As he elaborated in a later interview, students from privileged backgrounds tended to disagree with their parents’ values and protested as a result. He, Mr. Alito, “didn’t feel that way at all about my parents or my family.”
Some liberal students who were in favor of the strike found fault with the same wealthy students as Mr. Alito did, but for a different reason. In their view, it was the eating-club denizens who were responsible for the apathy and complacency that many were fighting against.
Most eating clubs supported the strike by postponing social events, though one student at the time later insisted that “there were a lot of parties at a lot of eating clubs after that suspension” of exams.
The notion of a common enemy doesn’t seem to have occurred to the two groups, but it attests to the indelibility of class slights, real or perceived, and how such resentments can linger and add emotional weight to peoples’ leanings.
For her part, Ms. Sotomayor would recoil over letters in The Daily Princetonian criticizing “affirmative action students.”
“There were vultures circling, ready to dive when we stumbled,” she later wrote. She said she found comfort among “a circle of friends who shared the same feeling of being a stranger in a strange land.”
In a speech she gave when accepting a student award in 1976, Ms. Sotomayor gave voice to those concerns, calling for “a new era in which Princeton’s traditions can be further enriched by being broadened to accommodate and harmonize with the beat of those of us who march to different drummers.”
That era continues into the present. Last April, Princeton named a building after Justice Sotomayor and dedicated a portrait in her honor. “With this portrait and naming, your remarkable legacy will be memorialized on this campus for generations,” said President Christopher Eisgruber.
The justice responded, “My heart is bursting today with joy and gratitude.” She added, “My unexpected life journey started the day I was accepted to attend this university.”
There is no comparable recognition of Justice Alito, who has remained critical of his time at Princeton. Both Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan have received the university’s top alumni achievement award, while Justice Alito has not.
In the 1970s, Princeton opened its doors to students who felt badly alienated. Women, nonwhite students and those who “march to different drummers” settled in and eventually found a home there. But for some of the sons of European immigrants who fought their own battles to achieve acceptance and recognition, there was little comfort.
The Federalist Society and other conservative institutions that would later welcome Mr. Alito seemed to represent to him a parallel universe in which those who disagreed with a half-century of changes in university life could find support, encouragement and, ultimately, the political backing to achieve their highest goals.
They filled a void that Princeton and its fellow universities did not.
Peter S. Canellos is a former editorial page editor of The Boston Globe and a former executive editor of Politico.
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