In a June 17 article on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's membership in an all-women's club, The Washington Times reported, “Gender politics have proved a minefield for male Supreme Court nominees. The wife of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. broke down in tears after aggressive questions at his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings about his reported involvement in a Princeton alumni group that opposed affirmative action.” In fact, the group in question -- the now-defunct Concerned Alumni of Princeton -- did not merely “oppose affirmative action,” but, as Media Matters for America has noted, actively resisted Princeton's increased admission of women and minorities. In fact, according to The Nation, the executive committee of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton even issued a statement declaring explicitly that the group “oppose[d]” a “sex-blind admission policy” that would abolish limits on the number of women admitted.

As Media Matters senior fellow Jamison Foser noted, a June 11 Washington Times editorial also provided an insufficient description of Concerned Alumni of Princeton -- as well as Alito's participation in the group -- by writing of Alito's “supposed membership in an all-male eating club while an undergraduate at Princeton.”

Founded amid the first enrollment of women to the school, Concerned Alumni of Princeton circulated a fundraising letter in 1973 that claimed: “a student population of approximately 40 percent women and minorities will largely vitiate the alumni body of the future.” Concerned Alumni of Princeton also published a magazine, Prospect, edited by Alito classmate T. Harding Jones, who, according to The Daily Princetonian, wrote in the February 1973 issue that the increasing number of women in the Princeton student body showed that "[t]he makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse." On March 3, 1974, according to People for the American Way, Jones told The New York Times that "[c]o-education has ruined the mystique and the camaraderies that used to exist. Princeton has now given into the fad of the moment, and I think it's going to prove to be a very unfortunate thing."

Marsha Levy-Warren, graduate of the first coeducational class (1973) and former vice president of the student government, told The Daily Princetonian that Concerned Alumni of Princeton was “a far-right organization funded by conservative alumni committed to turning back the clock on coeducation at the University,” according to a November 18, 2005, article in the campus newspaper. The Princetonian reported that the group, during its formation, was co-chaired by Asa Bushnell and Shelby Cullom Davis, both outspoken opponents of coeducation at the university. The campus newspaper described Davis as “a strong traditionalist, firmly opposed to the many of the new directions Princeton was taking, including coeducation.”

According to the Princetonian, Davis wrote in Prospect:

“May I recall, and with some nostalgia, my father's 50th reunion, a body of men, relatively homogenous in interests and backgrounds, who had known and liked each other over the years during which they had contributed much in spirit and substance to the greatness of Princeton ... I cannot envisage a similar happening in the future,” Davis added, “with an undergraduate student population of approximately 40% women and minorities, such as the Administration has proposed.”

Additionally, The New York Times has reported that in the 1980s Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposed the integration of three all-male " 'eating clubs.' where many upper class Princeton students took their meals." From the Times:

By the 1980's, however, Concerned Alumni had added a new cause: the defense of the exclusive “eating clubs,” where many upper class Princeton students took their meals, and especially the three all-male clubs. All now admit women.

As a student, Judge Alito had not joined any of the clubs, taking his meals at a dining hall. But the leaders of Concerned Alumni and the editors of Prospect regarded the clubs as pillars of the university's distinctive social life that were under attack by the Princeton administration.

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.”

Prospect portrayed the proposal as an effort to end the de facto segregation of the campus in which black students were concentrated in one dormitory and mostly did not belong to the clubs. “Doubtless, there will be many who regard this as mere stalling, and prejudice by another name,” an unsigned 1982 editorial argued in defense of the magazine's position. “If realistic approaches to problems must be called dirty names because we do not like them, well, there is no remedy for it.”

The Times also reported that the organization circulated a “pamphlet for parents” suggesting “that 'racial tensions' and loose oversight of campus social life were contributing to a spike in campus crime.”

From the June 17 Washington Times article:

Gender politics have proved a minefield for male Supreme Court nominees. The wife of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. broke down in tears after aggressive questions at his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings about his reported involvement in a Princeton alumni group that opposed affirmative action.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy quit all-male clubs when they were being considered for the Supreme Court in the late 1980s, and Justice Harry Blackmun resigned his membership in the exclusive Cosmos Club in 1988.

The only two women to have sat on the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, were members of the women's networking group, the International Women's Forum, but their memberships did not become a major issue in their confirmation hearings.