Sonia Sotomayor appears in a newspaper clipping during her college years.

The nominee's sense of racial identity as a central political category were formed in the unlikely crucible of Princeton. | POLITICO Staff

Princeton key to knowing Sotomayor


But for the second time in the Obama era, the stodgy Ivy League academy has emerged as a key to understanding the identity of a central player on the national stage — this time, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who graduated from Princeton nine years earlier.

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The first lady weathered intense storms during the campaign, many of which focused, directly or indirectly, on her race, before settling into a traditional and popular public role in the White House. The Sotomayor nomination is dragging both the judge and the Obama White House — largely against their will — back onto that charged terrain.

Foes of Michelle Obama (Princeton '85) sought to tie her most pointed recent comment on race — that her husband's campaign made her proud of her country "for the first time" — back to that Princeton thesis, where Obama's sense of aching racial exclusion came through powerfully.


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It's where she was the moderate leader of a Puerto Rican activist group and where she graduated with the school's highest award, the M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize, based in part on her activism. One friend from the time, Joe Schubert, dismissed the notion of Sotomayor as a student radical as "laughable."

"She had too much to lose to be the type of person who was out bombing ROTC buildings — and that happened at Princeton," Schubert said. "'Sonia' and 'radical' don't fit in the same sentence."






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