ok, so this was a letter to the editor in the dialy princetonian this week, in response to the filibuster...it is quite brilliant.....

matters: Being the loyal opposition
By Catherine Rampell
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/05/02/opinion/12829.shtml

In my last column, I took some (easy) jabs at Bill Frist '74. In
response, my father, Sen. Frist's classmate and fellow Cottager, laid on
the Jewish guilt pretty doggone thick. "There goes my shot at Secretary
of the Treasury," he said. A loyal alum who believes in the loyalty of
fellow alumni, he was only half-joking.

I have written in the past about the University's defensible fealty
to its alumni, which I had previously conceptualized only as a nebulous
body of legacy-spawners. Suddenly I began reconsidering our duty toward
specific, individual alumni; in particular, those private persons with
public faces. What do we owe those who give Princeton not just their
enthusiasm and their paychecks, but their reputations as well?

Every group that alleges a common experience, territory or gene pool
loves to bask in the glory of its externally-exalted stars. This is the
whole basis of Adam Sandler's Chanukah song. As the saying goes, success
has a thousand fathers, and Princetonians are quite paternally prolific.

We Princetonians presume ourselves to be cut from the same cloth as
our accomplished alumni and claim success by proxy. The same orange and
black blood that coursed through Jimmy Stewart '32's veins must flood
ours, too.

Of course, we don't brag about our more "embarrassing" matriculants.
Our Orange Key tour guides don't point out the hallways Lyle Menendez
'93 traversed or the dorms he inhabited. They're not supposed to, in any
case. It makes sense that we wouldn't want to associate ourselves with a
brutal double murder. But we are not so much embarrassed by our
association with him, as we are dismissive of the relationship between
his exposure to Princeton and his crime. In general, we assume the good
things Princetonians do are consequences of their going to Princeton,
and the bad things Princetonians do are irrelevant to their days at Old
Nassau. We convince ourselves that Princeton nurtured a talent or
provided an opportunity that led to fame and fortune. We are proud of
Princetonians for the respect they get from others -- evidenced by
awards, offices and fame. Yet in doing this, we end up claiming that we
are proud of these Princetonians for their Princetonianess.

Accomplished Princetonians do their school and alumni a favor by
allowing us to bask in their glory and share their good repute. Many of
these alumni not only don't mind that Princeton mooches off their
success, but even welcome said mooching. Like former Senator Bill
Bradley '65, Frist has publicly honored Princeton, and for that I am
sure both the admissions office and Annual Giving are quite grateful.
But is a university -- as an institution or as a body of alumni --
obligated to reciprocate this devotion?

The answer is yes, if you believe in loyalty of the "loyal
opposition." As Princetonians, it is our duty to be more critical of
those decrying orange and black. Frist's Harvard Medical School class
seems to agree with me; according to Newsweek, 31 of these 165
classmates wrote Frist a letter saying he had used his medical degree
improperly when he diagnosed Terri Schiavo from afar. Princeton alumni
often follow in a similar vein. Many of the alumni letters to the editor
in PAW accuse him of "tarnish[ing]" Princeton's reputation, perhaps
exaggerating how much Frist publicly chalks up his legitimacy as a
public servant to his days at Old Nassau.

Be at ease, dear reader, if you cringe at the thought of carping on
an alumnus as renown as Frist. After all, one might ask the likes of
George W. Bush, who did his utmost to distance himself from Andover and
Yale, if gleaning support from an "elitist" alma mater is a political
priority, or even desirable. By eschewing relationships with their alma
maters, both Bush and Frist try to prove they haven't been infected by
the famously liberal Ivy League and thus get their bona fides with the
hard right -- which Frist's "Justice Sunday" remarks were clearly aimed
at.

In other words, criticizing Frist is a win-win situation, since the
greatest show of loyalty we can offer him is our disloyalty. I wonder,
though: If Frist's rightist pandering rappels him much further away from
the shamefully liberal Ivory Tower, at what point will he reach the
critical mass of un-Princetonianess such that our loyal disloyalty (or
our disloyal loyalty) becomes a lost and forgotten cause?

In other words, at what point does he become Lyle Menendez? Or worse
yet, when does he become Donald Rumsfeld '54?

Catherine Rampell is a sophomore from Palm Beach, Fla. She can be
reached at crampell@princeton.edu.