Student Activist Elena Kagan Nominated to Supreme Court
For the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama has chosen a former student activist to sit on the Supreme Court.Solicitor General Elena Kagan, like justice Sonia Sotomayor, went from the public high schools of New York City to an undergraduate career on Princeton University’s New Jersey campus. And like Sotomayor, Kagan became involved in student organizing while there.
In her junior and senior years Kagan served as the “editorial chairman” of the Daily Princetonian, in which capacity she oversaw the writing and selection of editorials attacking the military draft, calling for an end to single-sex social clubs on campus, and urging the university to create a women’s studies department. One editorial published during her tenure harshly criticized the university’s policy of limiting students’ freedom to bring controversial speakers and organizations to campus.
Each of these editorials was unsigned, and though Kagan surely wrote many — perhaps most — of them herself, there is no way of knowing which. In the spring of her senior year, however, Kagan lent her name and her energy to a prominent student organizing effort on campus when she became part of the “Coordinating Council of