A long distance from Princeton

Democratic National Convention

Courtesy of Asbury Park Press

By TOM BALDWINGANNETT

More than two decades ago, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson — now Michelle Obama, wife of the presumed Democratic nominee for president — wrote in her senior thesis at Princeton University that she never felt accepted because she was black.

With the possible future first lady introducing herself to the nation, detractors may try using her themes from 1985 to show her husband is not right for a U.S. electorate in 2008.
It's not clear whether anyone clings to opinions espoused more than two decades after the collegiate experience. But the closer one ventures to the realm of her theme — a black woman from Chicago's hard South Side landing on leafy Old Nassau — the more one realizes that most anyone from any socioeconomic billet can feel awed and marginalized at Princeton.

This is a university that has schooled six heads of state, including three U.S. presidents, almost 20 governors and U.S. senators in each category, nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, scads of Nobel-winners and six astronauts.

"I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong," wrote Michelle LaVaughn Robinson.

"Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second," she penned.

Gov. Corzine says he sympathizes with such thoughts, saying he felt intimidated as a downstate Illinois farm boy when he marched into math classes at the University of Chicago. "I didn't know what the heck I was doing," he said.

"I think it's a normal reaction when someone is moving from one phase of their life to another," Corzine said.

A New Jersey convention delegate here, former Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal, who took graduate degrees and taught at Princeton, said, "They used to call Princeton the northern most of the southern white schools."

Assemblyman Herb Conaway Jr., D-Burlington, was a fellow African-American in Michelle Obama's class at Princeton — 1985. They knew each other but were not close.
"I have never felt marginalized in any situation I have been in. But that's me," Conaway said, adding he believed Obama's unease could be quite normal.

"I was a middle-class kid, and I was afraid I was going to go to school with all these rich people," Conaway said. "Fear is born of ignorance, of not knowing what a particular situation is. That often passes. I did not feel off-put surrounded by people who, on average, had more than I did.
There were people who had less money than I did."

Other minorities, either ethnic or religious, who ascended through intense educational or professional modes had their own tools to get by.

"The housing project I grew up in was largely Jewish, so I thought the whole world was Jewish until I got to Vassar. . . . It was certainly a place that did not have too many Jews. I could empathize with her," said Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, D-Middlesex, a convention delegate.

Assemblywoman Amy Handlin, R-Monmouth, a Harvard graduate, who is Jewish, said in an interview last week, "Harvard was as pure an Ameristocracy as I have ever experienced. At that time, there were far fewer female role models, and those of us coming up had to make our own way and learn assertiveness in a way that many of our male classmates had absorbed in their high-school years or by watching the many powerful men who dominated in every field of endeavor at that time"

"It is how you deal with the change. Different people deal with it differently," said Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula, D-Middlesex, who emigrated from India. "I have been many places where I was the only one with brown skin. I take the initiative and mingle with people, to mingle and become the ambassador from where I come."

Assemblyman Eric Munoz, R-Union, a physician, was the rare Hispanic in high school, college and graduate schools, where he earned medical and business degrees. "If you come from a minority background, it is only a passage of time before you will realize what goes on with wealth and tradition at a place like Princeton," he said last week in an interview.

"It is the ultimate transient town . . . There are very few native Princetonians," said convention delegate Assemblyman Reed Gusciora, D-Mercer, who lives in Princeton, adding of the students, "There is a lot of pressure because it is so competitive."