Letters about the ACLU

March 27, 2002

Thanks for the sidebar on Anthony Romero '87 in the 13 March 2002 PAW. What your readers may not know is that Princeton has an even longer association with the ACLU. Since 1953 we have housed the archives of this organization which now are found at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. This is one of the most important and most used collections in the library. In addition, we house the papers of ACLU leaders including Roger Baldwin, Osmond Fraenkel, and Arthur Garfield Hays. In more recent years we have also added the archives of Freedom House, Common Cause, and the Council on Foreign Relations. For a full list of holdings at Mudd, click here.

Ben Primer
Princeton University archivist and curator of public policy papers

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March 19, 2002

Why is the ACLU’s defense of the Constitution "extreme" ("Civil rights under siege," March 13, 2002)? Who are the "some" who make that claim about the ACLU? Ms. Hobson, the writer, provided no evidence relating to that statement. As a result, PAW turned an otherwise factual profile into a hidden editorial about the actions of the ACLU. Just because PAW is an alumni publication with a semiprivate circulation does not mean that you can forgo journalistic standards and ethics; on the contrary, it seems that you ought to be holding yourselves to even higher standards in light of the recent controversy about university control of PAW’s editorial board. It would be a shame if Princeton alumni develop uninformed stereotypes about the ACLU because of a poor editorial decision.

Chris Beeson ’99
Portland, Ore.

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