A LATINA from a Bronx housing project is probably not what Woodrow Wilson envisioned when he called for “educational democracy’’ as president of Princeton University in 1910. Yet decades later, when Sonia Sotomayor ascended to the top of her class, his idea of an open and accessible university system was on its way to coming to fruition. In Wilson’s day, Princeton admitted no women and Wilson himself is said to have looked with disfavor on the admission of men of color. Nevertheless, educational reform was a springboard for his larger aims of social and political reform and his fight against “the rule of materialism in our national life.’’
Indeed, Wilson would have needed a high-definition crystal ball to foresee Sotomayor’s “incredible journey’’ to become an African-American president’s nominee to the Supreme Court. Yet, as a critical chapter in our country’s pursuit of educational equality, her story of hard work and high achievement is an extension of Wilson’s idea. She represents the positive change that can occur when social institutions - law and education in particular - shed their roles as tools for exclusion and open their doors to those previously barred. It took nearly 220 years for the first Latina justice to be appointed to the Supreme Court, but, in a country constitutionally committed to equal opportunity, it was inevitable.
A lot had to happen before Wilson’s concept could go from insight to fulfillment. (For starters, women had to gain the right to vote, which they did while Wilson was president.) Women were denied education and there was little that could be done about it. And well into the 20th century, the handful of women who had access to legal training could be denied licenses to practice. Even as late as the 1950s, the few women who got into law schools and managed to excel were routinely excluded from jobs. No law firms offered either Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Sandra Day O’Connor positions despite their high rankings in their classes at Columbia and Stanford. Restricted admissions and employment opportunities combined to dissuade most women from pursuing careers in law as late as the 1960s, a decade known for its supposed abandonment of conventions.
In 1970, just 7 percent of the nation’s law school graduates were women. They received only 801 law degrees. In part because of laws that prohibited discrimination in education and employment, the number of women lawyers rose sharply during the decade. In 1979, when Sotomayor graduated from Yale Law School, women, a growing number of them women of color, made up 28 percent of all law graduates. In total, women were awarded over 10,000 law degrees that year. Thirty years later, members of the class of 1979 - some of whom had to overcome gender bias and others who struggled to balance work and family obligations - are at the peaks of their careers.
Women in Sotomayor’s entering class are law school professors, directors of not-for-profit organizations, state prosecutors, or counsels to federal agencies. Two are nationally recognized bio-ethicists and another, a longtime children’s advocate, recently founded a program devoted to racial healing in the black community. One is a prosecutor using modern DNA technology to solve cold cases; another is the founder of a death penalty project at one of the country’s leading law schools. One works to provide teachers, police academies, and community organizations with the means to promote learning in multi-cultural communities. Another, a long-time advocate for the blind, runs her family newspaper. Many draw on their perspectives as trailblazers themselves to enhance representation and inclusion in the legal system.
Sotomayor is poised to prove that the social experiment of the 1970s built on the idea of educational democracy has, thus far, worked. For its full realization, President Obama must correct the documented shortcomings of public schools that weigh most heavily on poor and minority community schools. We can’t be satisfied with one Sonia Sotomayor when we have the potential for so many more. For now, with her confirmation as the first Latina and third woman on the Supreme Court, Obama has reminded us of what egalitarian ideals and the will to pursue them can accomplish.
Anita F. Hill is a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. 
