Stephen R. Dujack
Guest Columnist
Almost 20 years ago, the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) collapsed like a modern House of Usher, so rotten from within from its own deceptions and peculiar madness that it could no longer sustain its own weight. For Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito '72, the reappearance of CAP in the national press last week because he included it on that now infamous 1985 job application must have been as shocking as the reappearance of Roderick Usher's dead twin sister in Poe's famous story.
Or, it should have been. At the very least, Judge Alito will have to explain to the Senate Judiciary Committee why he paid dues to an outfit whose modus operandi was deceit and dirty tricks. He will have to explain how he permitted himself to belong to an organization that was overtly racist and sexist for its entire 14-year existence — at times passionately so, too.
Even today, they lie. The Daily Princetonian reported Friday that CAP's longtime board member Andrew Napolitano '72 denies that the group opposed coeducation! This is like denying that the Catholic Church opposed abortion. Opposition to the presence of women at Princeton was CAP's central precept. Fortunately, your reporter quoted co-founder Shelby Cullom Davis '30 writing in Prospect, CAP's member magazine, in 1973, that he could not "envisage" a future student body of 40 percent women and minorities. More important, according to a 1977 New Yorker article, the group used the same language in its fund raising.
From its founding in 1972 till its unlamented demise in 1986, CAP was an organization that at first openly opposed full coeducation and the representative inclusion of minorities at Princeton, and then when those became "settled issues," continued its opposition to the mere presence of women and minorities at Princeton through tactics ranging from code words to open harassment.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/11/22/opinion/13901.shtml