A Stroll Down Close-Minded Lane

When the administration proposed a new system of residential colleges with their own dining halls, Prospect denounced the idea as a potential threat to the system of eating clubs. The magazine charged that, like affirmative action, the plan was "intended to create racial harmony."

—1985 issue of Prospect magazine published by Concerned Alumni of Princeton

Oh no, not that, not racial harmony. Next thing you know, men and women will be seeing eye to eye. If they let that crazy notion out of Princeton into the world, people spending weekends in different temples and across borders might get along too.

Take a look back at From Alito's Past, a Window on Conservatives at Princeton, David D. Kirkpatrick’s New York Times story from November 2005 when Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was being considered for the Supreme Court. November 27, 2005 from David D. Kirkpatrick Seventeen years later it reads like a comic book super-villain origin story with some names we’ve become too familiar with. Zealous missionaries panicked about the possibility of infecting their beloved Christian Ivy League pillar with virulent strains of other gods and, heaven forbid, actual breathing, independent, education-seeking…women.

There is today’s conservative pundit Dinesh D'Souza in a 1984 Prospect piece upset about a Puerto Rican first-year student whose mother sought to remove her from the school after learning that she was having sex with a male student and receiving sex education from the school.

There is a 1985 Prospect editorial concerned about letting black students out of the one dormitory they were concentrated in and allowing them to join the exclusive eating clubs dotting Prospect Street near the university. "Doubtless, there will be many who regard this as mere stalling, and prejudice by another name. If realistic approaches to problems must be called dirty names because we do not like them, well, there is no remedy for it."

And there is Justice Alito in a 1985 government application listing his membership in Concerned Alumni as a reference point for his conservative bona fides although he subsequently sought at the time of his Supreme Court consideration to downplay his membership and condemn the organization’s missions. 2017 Mudd Manuscript Library Blog Post

You likely don’t have to look much past the Kirkpatrick article (and the subsequent 2017 blog post of Princeton University students linked immediately above) to understand how the small group of what we would today call influencers who believe that this country should be Christian and led by white men were honing their non-liberal arts as undergraduates in an otherwise bucolic location in Central New Jersey.