an analysis from S.Sailer earlier today.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080225_michelle_obama.htm

"If she'd gone to, say, the University of Illinois or wherever she would have gotten in without affirmative action, she wouldn't have spent four years knowing that she was below the student body average in intelligence; she wouldn't have spent four years worrying that everybody else was noticing she wasn't as smart as the average; and she wouldn't have spend four years, plus the next 22, hating them for noticing it."

I'll comment on this first because the rest of his pseudo intellectual style for a conservative institute is shockingly overtly racist.

First of all affirmative action at Princeton helps the school and the student body average in intelligence does not prove that Michelle Obama had less of it. Legacy students would not be turned down at the time that she was at Princeton and I simply did not encounter these better than average in intelligence in the ten years that I lived there (with perhaps the exception of Cornel West who was teaching in the Dept. of Religion). One hand washes the other, parents of legacy students provide tuition upon which taxes have to be paid because the tax code did change under Reagan-Bush; affirmative action did in the past help to reduce those taxes.

Sailer jumps to a lot of conclusions about Michelle Obama not being as smart as the average; as far as being self-conscious this is not a rare thing at Princeton for reasons he may not even suspect. He presumes she spent four years hating, plus 22 for something being noticed that he can not materially prove.

To make my point about the better than average in intelligence when it comes to racial savoir faire or savvy, the school (following the period when Michelle Obama left for Harvard some five years before I arrived in town) waited but a few more years before hiring Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Toni Morrison to teach under the guise of literature what, for want of a better term, I shall refer to as "racial sensitivity training". Not for the non-white students; the girls in her class, occasionally shown to good effect for some occasions as an appearance on Oprah,struck me as rather like those in a finishing school for young ladies. Princeton of course already has such a school and has had for some generations in the town itself. I think the university realized by then that sensitivity in matters of social consciousness would be essential.

When Sailer mentions the eating clubs at Princeton as central to adjustment, that's ironic as he apparent forgot Sally Frank's suit to have the right to have her meals for which she had already paid. "In 1979, undergraduate Sally Frank filed suit against then all-male clubs Ivy Club, Cottage Club, and Tiger Inn for gender discrimination. While Cottage chose to coeducate during the intervening years, Ivy Club and Tiger Inn both became co-ed organizations in 1991 as a result of the lawsuit, 22 years after Princeton first admitted female students.

The eating clubs have attracted significant controversy, being viewed as elitist" see,Princeton eating clubs,wikipedia

Sam Alito, who could not remember writing essays for the Alumni Magazine disapproving of the acceptance of "outsiders" changing the tradition Princeton campus lifestyle, when Bush tapped him,provides but one example. When I arrived in the town of Princeton,five years after Michelle went to Harvard, the old Revolutionary Colonial town was still quite racist in atmosphere but you would have had to know what to look for or at least recognize, wouldn't you? Some of the writers at The Packet truly acknowledged the history but many of the towns-people wanted their cake without unwanted guests at the party.