The Daily Princetonian
By Mendy Fisch Senior Writer
Published: Monday, September 14th, 2009
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 that of the student body.
As Sotomayor’s stance on affirmative action came under fire during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings this past summer, her advocacy for affirmative action during her time at Princeton helped shed light on her political convictions.
The 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. It asserted, moreover, 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.
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.”
HEW responded quickly to the complaint. 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 in hiring. Luis Garcia, a Latino, was named assistant dean of student affairs in September 1974. Less than a year later, the University submitted a formal affirmative action plan to HEW, and the plan was approved in September 1975. Around that time, 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.
Full Story: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/09/14/23770/
No comments:
Post a Comment