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A funny thing happened while I was listening to KMUW this morning. On “All Things Considered” they were talking about, you guessed it, the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. One of the people interviewed was the woman who had the highest grade-point average in Sotomayor’s high school class. What was funny was when she mentioned the year in which they graduated: 1972.
Now, I graduated from high school in 1970. Both Sotomayor and I wound up at Princeton University. Clearly, we were there at the same time, she one year behind me. (I took a year off in the middle and graduated a year later than I should have.) As far as I know, our paths never crossed. And I think I would have remembered a name like Sotomayor.
I mention this to make two points.
First, I have reached the age when the professional people around me are younger than I am. It’s another “official old geezer” moment. As if I needed one.
Second, I’d like to refute Karl Rove’s suggestion that a woman who graduated second in her class at Princeton is either unintelligent or unintellectual.
It’s true that, like George Bush, I got through an Ivy League institution without either turning into a scholar or developing any better idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up than the one I arrived with, which was none. I don’t blame Princeton for that. I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and as I said above, I’m all growed up.
But to graduate summa cum laude, which means with highest honors, and second in her class at that, Judge Sotomayor had to put in a lot of hard work and even that wouldn’t have got her there if she hadn’t had the native intelligence to make all that hard work, work. Like most universities, Princeton is different experiences to different students. If you want to truly excel there, however, you have to take a track that is grueling. And you have to be willing and able to compete like hell.
So tell any of your right-wing friends (Come on, we all have them.) that they don’t have to worry about whether Sonya Sotomayor is smart enough.
She is.
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1 comment:
Cathy is absolutely right.
The sorry excuse for what the media has become has become a echo chamber for monsters such as Rove who couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it.
He spent most of his political career pushing the career of a man who was a legacy student at two Ivy colleges and who seems to have learned nothing useful there. The only remarkable thing he did at Yale and Harvard was to go out as dumb as he was when he went in.
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