Thread: Grading Sotomayor's Senior Thesis (and PR Nationalism?)

Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Stuart Taylor Jr.: Commentary

Grading Sotomayor's Senior Thesis

Judge Sonia Sotomayor said in a 1996 speech at Princeton University's Third World Center (now called the Carl A. Fields Center) that when she arrived at Princeton in 1972 as her high school's valedictorian, "I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition.... My writing was stilted and overly complicated, my grammar and vocabulary skills weak."

To catch up with her prep school classmates, Sotomayor recalled, "I spent one summer vacation reading children's classics that I had missed in my prior education -- books like Alice In Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice. My parents spoke Spanish; they didn't know about these books. I spent two other summers teaching myself anew to write."

She taught herself well, graduating summa cum laude and winning the prestigious Pyne Prize in her senior year. The prize was for academic excellence and -- Judge Sotomayor said in the 1996 speech -- "because of my work with Accion Puertorriquena, the Third World Center and other activities in which I participated, like the university's Discipline Committee."

These honors reflect, among other things, a high grade on Sotomayor's 178-page senior thesis, La Historia Ciclica De Puerto Rico. The Impact Of The Life Of Luis Muñoz Marin On The Political And Economic History of Puerto Rico, 1930-1975.

We don't know what the exact grade was, as far as I've seen, but an award-winning history professor -- K.C. Johnson of Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center -- who read it at my request concluded that "the thesis would probably receive an A/A minus or an A minus." (Johnson and I co-authored a 2007 book on the Duke lacrosse rape fraud.)

Here is Johnson's detailed assessment:

This is, by coincidence, a topic about which I know something -- I did a biography of Ernest Gruening, a sometimes friend, sometimes foe of Muñoz MarÃ*n, and also did a journal article on Puerto Rico and the Good Neighbor Policy. The thesis is quite good. I'm not sure it's a summa cum laude thesis... but summa grades essentially depend on the competition and the standards at the time.

As for the thesis as a whole, from a historian's perspective: It's solidly researched and fairly well written -- uses lots of data, more or less presents an argument, and has a pedagogical approach (political/economic history, focus on a key political leader in Muñoz Marin) that is very much mainstream. This is basically a pedagogically sound thesis that (with one exception) allows the facts to speak for themselves.

There are also a few jarring elements that contrast to the pedagogical approach. First, I'm curious as to when Sotomayor ceased being a Puerto Rican nationalist who favors independence -- as she says she does in the preface. (The position, as she points out in the thesis, had received 0.6 percent in a 1967 referendum, the most recent such vote before she wrote the thesis.) I don't know that I've seen it reported anywhere that she favored Puerto Rican independence, which has always been very much a fringe position....

Second, her unwillingness to call the Congress the U.S. Congress is bizarre -- in the thesis, it's always referred to as either the 'North American Congress' or the 'mainland Congress.' I guess by the language of her thesis, it should be said that she's seeking an appointment to the North American Supreme Court, subject to advice and consent of the North American Senate. This kind of rhetoric was very trendy, and not uncommon, among the Latin Americanist fringe of the academy.

Third, she had an odd habit of inserting (sic) into quotes not to identify an error but because she disagreed with the (usually innocuous) content of the quotes.

Fourth, she asserted that Muñoz MarÃ*n's economic program, called Operation Bootstrap, failed primarily because Puerto Ricans continued to think of themselves as colonials. This, like the reference to the US Congress as the 'North American' Congress, was 1970s-trendy dependency theory rhetoric, but was wholly unsupported by the evidence that she presented in the thesis (and, indeed, by virtually any evidence that has appeared since that time).

http://ninthjustice.nationaljournal.com ... s.php#more

she arrived at Princeton in 1972 as her high school's valedictorian, "I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition.... My writing was stilted and overly complicated, my grammar and vocabulary skills weak."

So if she was the Valedictorian that must have been one HELL of a HS!

Judge Sonia Sotomayor said in a 1996 speech at Princeton University's Third World Center (now called the Carl A. Fields Center) that when she arrived at Princeton in 1972 as her high school's valedictorian, "I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition.... My writing was stilted and overly complicated, my grammar and vocabulary skills weak."




Oh, I see. But she was SOMEHOW qualified to enter Princeton being barely literate in English language skills.

I think it is Sotomayor's political beliefs, and whether these would intrude into her judicial decision-making, that are the problem here. I think without question her academic achievements are commendable. I went to college with a student from Hong Kong many years ago when foreign students were much more of a rarity. She studied very hard, as did all the non-native English speaking students. When I asked her, she told me it took her an hour to read two pages of English prose. Yet she completed all the heavy required college reading and did well academically. She also did this without complaining and was, in public, at least, always cheerful, and smiling. I found it very humbling.