At the end of May, Princeton had its first Reunions since Covid-19 struck in spring 2020, bringing together multiple generations of Princeton alumni. In town for her 42nd reunion, Sally Frank ‘80 and I sat down in Jammin’ Crêpes to discuss her experiences as a student activist both at Princeton and later in her career.
This article follows Frank’s time at Princeton and the beginning of her anti-discrimination case against Ivy Club, Cottage Club, and Tiger Inn. Cottage prohibited women from joining until the late 1980s while Ivy and Tiger Inn held out until the early 1990s. It also covers her legal battle against the clubs after she graduated.
Frank has served as a legal observer in protests since the 1980s. A legal observer is someone who monitors protests to document instances of police misconduct against protesters to promote accountability. Speaking from these experiences, she shared her insights into policing in America, the legal tools used against protestors, and the role of lawyers in supporting activists. The third part stems from our discussion of important moments in the history of the eating clubs, most notably the Dirty Bicker scandal of 1958, in which Jewish students faced discrimination during bicker. As a result of conducting research for her legal case, Frank has a deep historical knowledge of the eating club system, campus culture, and Princeton’s administration, providing valuable context about Princeton student life in the second half of the 20th century.
Sally Frank: Origins
Growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Bayonne, NY, an industrial suburb of New York City, Frank found her interest in activism and law as a result of the seismic political and legal events happening in her childhood and teenage years. “My first protest was when I was either nine or ten for Soviet Jews, and my parents took me,” she told me. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Jews across America called for Soviet Jews to have the right to emigrate from the USSR in response to the country’s discriminatory policies against them.
Frank’s political awareness grew when she began to follow the Chicago Seven Trial in 1969. “In 5th grade, I had a teacher who had an assignment to watch the news every night,” she related. “Every night I heard on the news the travesty of what was going on in that trial. Binding and gagging a black man in a courtroom because he kept speaking out was not in 5th grade civics.” Inspired by William Kunstler, one of the main lawyers representing the Chicago Seven, Frank decided she wanted to be a lawyer.
Frank described her connection with the ACLU as a result of the political tumult of the early 1970s. In 1973, Nixon attempted to fire the special prosecutor investigating him in the Watergate case, prompting his attorney general and other top legal officials to resign in protest. In response to Nixon’s attempt to circumvent the law, the ACLU took out a full page advertisement in the New York Times, calling for Nixon to be impeached, which a young Frank saw. “I asked my parents for membership in the ACLU for my Hanukkah present,” she concluded.
Culture of Sexism
Frank arrived at Princeton in fall of 1976, already with the goal of being politically active and drawn to the School of Public and International Affairs. While Frank knew a few people at Princeton from her high school and from the Jersey Federation of Temple Youth, Princeton presented itself as a challenging new environment for her, as it does for many students today. “I felt academically overwhelmed and socially a bit overwhelmed, especially my first semester.” Coming from a large public high school, Frank felt disconnected from the prep school culture of Princeton at the time, recalling one incident with her freshman year roommate. “The roommate I was assigned to called me when we got our room assignments. She told me that she was going to try to switch rooms because she wanted to be where all the other preppies were.”
Of course, Princeton was also undergoing a massive shift in the makeup of its student body because it had recently become co-educational in 1969. Instead of introducing women in an even ratio with men in that year, the school chose to increase the number of women undergraduates gradually. This meant that men outnumbered women at a three to one ratio while Frank attended Princeton. The negative aspects of Princeton’s boys’ club culture were still present, especially in the three all male-clubs, Ivy Club, Cottage Club, and Tiger Inn.
“I felt like the club radiated sexism onto the campus, especially the whole concept of imports.” Frank went on to tell me of the eating clubs’ strategy of busing women in from schools in the area for their parties. “That was both kind of a disgusting thought and a worry for some feminists on campus. What if the women come here, and they don’t find a man they want to spend the weekend with? Where do they stay? What happens to them? Is there anything we can do to be of assistance to a woman who came?” While the all-male clubs would not allow women to be members, they encouraged them to come to their parties.
Frank wondered about the long-term impact of America’s future leaders normalizing such discriminatory practices during a formative time in their lives. “What’s going to happen in 20 or 30 years when you’re employing people?” she mused. “Not that they would actively be anti-woman, but when it comes down to the final three candidates and who they are most comfortable with, it’s not going to be the woman. I didn’t have the word for it then, which I have now—unconscious bias.”
Frank was not afraid to confront members of the all-male eating clubs to engage in dialogue about changing their exclusionary policies. In fact, this was how her fight began in fall 1977, when, as a sophomore, Frank went to a party at Cottage for students planning to bicker there that spring. Even though she knew she’d be the only woman at the party, she hoped to discuss her problems with their admission policies with the members. The experience did not go well:
“I’m sitting talking with someone and suddenly beer is poured over my head. Then, about 20 to 30 guys start chanting, ‘Let’s throw Sally into the fountain!’ I waited until it was quiet because I didn’t want them to see I was intimidated and totally freaked out. I called some other activist friends, and they walked me back to my dorm room. I locked the door, which I had not normally done. Maybe an hour later, there was somebody going through the hall, and then I heard someone say ‘The door is locked.’ I obviously know what I think, but I don’t know who it was. I didn’t look, so I can’t be sure. I called [my friends] and spent the night in a different person’s room.”
The school did take disciplinary action against the officers of Cottage and the Cottage members who poured beer on her. However, the root of the problem, Princeton’s culture of sexism, remained and was actively being upheld by the all-male eating clubs.
That spring in 1978, Frank, along with a couple of other female students, proceeded to sign up to bicker at the all-male clubs. Frank simply wrote her name down as “S.B. Frank” and checked “male” on the sign-up form. “That got people upset,” Frank said. “They didn’t want to talk to me, and of course I was dropped the first day.”
The Lawsuit Begins
Frank didn’t realize she could bring her issue to court until her internship with the ACLU office in Newark in the summer after her sophomore year. “At one point I was complaining about how terrible eating clubs were, and the executive director said, ‘Well, why don’t you sue?’” Frank assumed that because the clubs were private entities separate from the university, they had the right to be selective about their membership. However, he was able to convince her that she could convincingly argue that the clubs were public accommodations, subject the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of discrimination in public accommodations.
Frank bickered again her junior semester to build her case. “I still did S.B. Frank, but I didn’t give a gender. It made a better foundation for filing a lawsuit than me lying and saying I was male.” Unsurprisingly, the all-male clubs were still largely unwelcoming. “Cottage said I couldn’t come, and if I came, I would be physically removed. Tiger Inn said don’t come. Ivy said that I could come, but I’d only be talked to if there were no men waiting to talk to somebody, and I had very good discussions with Ivy members.”
Frank filed a complaint with the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights, the body responsible for upholding civil rights laws in New Jersey, in February of 1979. Her council was Nadine Talb, a lawyer working at Rutgers Women’s Rights Litigation Clinic. Legal clinics are programs part of law schools that allow students experience with public interest cases under the direction of a clinical professor. Frank accused the eating clubs of discrimination on the basis of her gender and accused the university of abetting them because of the special relationship the university had with them. This relationship included programs like meal exchange and intramural sports. The university denied that this relationship existed, and the eating clubs likewise pushed back, claiming that they were private clubs not subject to laws applying to public accommodations.
However, Frank had to jump through a few legal hoops before the Division would even consider her complaint:
“At the time, the anti-discrimination agency had a humongous backload. What they decided to do to eliminate the backload is to dismiss complaints without investigating, so they dismissed the complaint fairly quickly.” The ACLU recognized that the Division hadn’t fully considered the case, so they advocated for the Division to hear it again. In January 1980, the second semester of Frank’s senior year, the Division finally relented. While the case stalled as the Division spent two years investigating, Frank’s experience as a Princeton student was quickly altered by her lawsuit.
The Campus Reaction
Initially, Frank believed her case wouldn’t get much attention, “I thought that the only people who would care would be the Prince and PAW [Princeton Alumni Weekly].” Frank knew that the Daily Princetonian would report on the story because many Prince reporters were in the same co-op with her in Brown Hall. However, the co-op members had an off-the-record agreement about everything they discussed at the dinner table together. Tensions had run high in the co-op during Frank’s sophomore year when a Prince reporter leaked information about a sit-in at Nassau Hall to compel the university to divest from apartheid South Africa a week before it was set to occur.
The Prince broke the story only after Frank officially filed the complaint with future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan writing the article. The paper would continue to follow the story closely throughout Frank’s time at Princeton and afterward. “I’d be the filler piece in the Prince,” Frank joked, “I’d see an article that says, ‘Still no news in the Frank case’.”
National news outlets also became interested in her story. “The next day [after the Prince broke the news],” Frank explained, “my phone was ringing off the hook from reporters all over the country. There was worldwide interest in the story, and I was shocked. I didn’t think that anybody outside Princeton would care. There were nights where I had to put my phone in a drawer so I wouldn’t hear it ringing.”
Frank also continued to receive the ire of the members of the all-male eating clubs who resented that she was trying to change their exclusivity. “One time when I was standing in front of an eating club for a newspaper photo, a student walked past the photographer and told me he hopes his camera doesn’t break. It was sort of a day-to-day harassment kind of thing.”
At the same time, throughout the duration of her legal fight while she was a Princeton student, Frank received support from her fellow activists on campus. Frank was involved in Princeton’s anti-apartheid movement, helping to organize the sit-in on Nassau Hall her sophomore year. Frank was also involved in the Women’s Center, newly created in 1971, and was part of the organization’s push to increase their funding.
At the same time, Frank felt that her legal work was different from her activism, which was part of her rationale of why she felt she should carry out her work alone. “Part of why I did it by myself was that I didn’t want to take away from any of the other campus activism. It was something that could be done by one person, whereas a sit-in isn’t going to be very impactful with one person.”
Frank also went onto explain:
“I thought the activist metaphorically, not actually, would rather burn down the clubs rather than actually join, and you had to be willing to join if you’re going to bring the suit, I felt. The people who would generally have wanted to join the club wouldn’t challenge them. I think that’s part of why it took seven, eight years before anybody did, and I consciously decided I was interested and willing to join the club if somehow I won. So the activists definitely supported me in terms of advocating that I shouldn’t be harassed and remaining friends, but I think it took more years for them to get why it was an important issue.”
However, those who were against Frank’s lawsuit did not draw the same distinctions between Frank’s activism and her legal work. Frank explained how the “day-to-day harassment” from the all-male club members continued during her involvement in social movements on campus.
“I think the one I got angriest at was in an African American Studies class. We were passing around a petition on divestment [from South Africa], and one of the club members wrote, ‘asshole’ with an arrow going to my name.” Frank was angry that the other student was mixing issues.
Incidents such as these made Frank want to demonstrate that she was more than the negative caricature created of her. Her senior year, she made an effort to show that her fight with the clubs was not malicious. She called the presidents of the eating clubs to inform them of developments in the case before they would hit the Daily Princetonian so they wouldn’t be blindsided. She also went through the bicker process again.
“My senior year, I bickered Tower and Cap and Gown. The first night I could just tell they were all extraordinarily nervous. I worked in food service with somebody in one of the clubs, and I asked if they could let them know that I had no intent of suing. I was coming because people always say that bicker is a way to get to know other people, and I wanted to diminish the caricature of me. The next night was so much more relaxed. I knew they weren’t going to give me an offer. But it was like, okay, she’s not preparing a lawsuit, so it was just sort of a way to let people get to know me beyond my caricature.”
Frank even made friends in unlikely places like with Ivy Club president, William Ford. Ford is the great-grandson of Ford Motors founder, Henry Ford, and is currently the executive chairman of the company. He was responsible for Ivy permitting Frank to bicker at the club. The two also found themselves on opposite ends of campus politics because Ford Motors had operations in South Africa while Frank was involved in Princeton’s own anti-apartheid divestment movement. Nevertheless, the two remained friendly, doing a meal exchange together. Frank explained why maintaining this connection was important to her:
“While on the feminist side, the personal is political, there’s also a difference between interpersonal relationships and political relationships. He helped me separate the two and not generalize that all members of the all-male clubs were evil or something to that effect because I was being harassed a lot. I don’t know if I could have gone to Ivy or not, but I know having somebody being friendly towards me through a political disagreement helped to reinforce that part of me that tries to keep the two spheres separated.”
Post-Graduation: The Case Drags On
After graduating from Princeton in 1980, Frank explained that the case affected her life differently: “[While I was a student], I was living with it continuously when there wasn’t anything actively going on. Once I left, it was only when action was required that it would become big or when I came back to Princeton.” Additionally, Frank’s own involvement in the case was changing. In fall 1980, she entered the New York University School of Law and would graduate in spring 1983, allowing her to become co-counsel on the case.
Unfortunately, in January 1982, the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights dismissed Frank’s case again. Previously, they had dismissed the case to free up a backlog, and even though they promised to investigate the case again upon the ACLU’s insistence, on the second go around, it was clear they weren’t taking Frank’s claims seriously. “[The Division] spent about 8 hours investigating over two years and dismissed [the case] without even findings of fact,” Frank supplied. The NJDCR agreed with the Ivy, Cottage, and Tiger Inn’s assertion that they were not public accommodations but private clubs. This meant that the NJDCR had no jurisdiction over them, and the all-male clubs were allowed to exclude women from their membership.
Undeterred, Frank appealed this dismissal to the New Jersey Superior Court. Frank argued that she did not receive a fair trial from the NJDCR because they had only allowed her to submit evidence for the investigation without the ability to have a hearing, so she could cross-examine university and eating club officials. In fact, the NJDCR reversed the case because it had been dismissed with no findings of fact. Frank explained, “I missed that when I appealed the appellate division, but that was the grounds they reversed on. If they didn’t make any findings of facts before they dismissed it, then it has to be arbitrary, right? You dismiss something because the facts don’t make a case, but they didn’t have facts.”
Therefore, in 1983, the NJDCR tried her case with hearings. First, they would rule on whether the eating clubs themselves were public accommodations subject to anti-discrimination laws. After two years of fact-finding, the NJDCR ruled affirmatively that the clubs were public accommodations. Services the school provided for the clubs such as snow removal, as well as programs like Meal Exchange or intramural sports, were indicative of a significant connection between the school and the clubs. The NJDCR hoped that Frank and the clubs would be able to come to a settlement out of court, but otherwise, there would have to be another hearing on whether the clubs had actually discriminated on the basis of gender.
Cottage Club voluntarily went coed after the NJDCR ruling on public accommodations, opening up spring bicker of 1986 to women and settling the lawsuit with Frank. The Cottage Alumni Board made an effort to end its legal battle with her on a positive note: “When Cottage’s Alumni board felt it should settle, three members of the board came down to Washington, took me out for dinner and let me talk to them about all the harassment and everything, which was helpful towards healing.” Frank settled with the University soon after, and the institution agreed to pay her attorney’s fees.
However, Ivy and Tiger Inn weren’t going to settle. Instead of waiting for Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Robert Miller to rule on whether discrimination occurred, Ivy and Tiger Inn filed a countersuit in the U.S. District Court in Trenton, challenging their designation as a public accommodation. The case was put on hold but would be weaponized by Ivy and Tiger again in the coming years. The ALJ, however, would not prove to be hostile to the all-male clubs. In 1986, the ALJ at the District Court ruled that instead of being required to extend membership to women, the clubs could simply sever ties with the university (i.e., end programs like Meal Exchange) and thereby put an end to all accusations of being public accommodations. This ruling was non-binding and was delivered as a suggestion to the Division.
As it was no longer named in the lawsuit, the university helped Frank oppose this ruling. Frank remembered Princeton’s president at the time, William Bowen, as being a key player in the University’s decision to publicly stand in support of Frank after the ALJ’s ruling. “Bowen got the university board to object to what the ALJ had done,” Frank explained. “Bowen wrote an appendix to the brief himself. He said that you can’t sever the relationship between [the] university and the clubs.” Shortly after Frank’s graduation, Bowen had made a point of reaching out to Frank and staying on good terms with her. Bowen nominated her in 1990 for the Alumni Council Award for Service to Princeton as the court case dragged on.
With Princeton’s administration coming around to the idea that the all-male eating clubs should change their policies, the Division rejected the ALJ’s non-binding ruling, asserting that discrimination on the basis of sex had occurred in the clubs and that Tiger Inn and Ivy must go coed. In 1987, the clubs responded by appealing this decision to the New Jersey Superior Court. Meanwhile, Tiger Inn moved to cut ties with Princeton, ending its involvement in the Meal Exchange program and intramural sports.
In 1988, the case had another twist when the appellate court stayed the NJDCR’s order for the clubs to go coed, sending the case back down to the administrative law court. The court ruled that because the Division did not conduct an official trial of the case back in the early 80s, only an informal investigation, they had not given the eating clubs a fair trial. Significantly, however, the appellate court did not overturn the 1987 ruling that discrimination had occurred at the clubs. Therefore, it was likely that the Tiger Inn and Ivy would still be forced to go coed after another round of court cases. However, in their comments to the Daily Princetonian after the decision, the eating clubs’ lawyers chose to frame the case around whether their constitutional freedom of association was violated by being designated a public accommodation, rather than the more pressing issue of discrimination. At the same time, Ivy and Tiger Inn would make no promises concerning when they would allow women into their clubs.
At this point, university administrators were solidly pushing for the clubs to go coed voluntarily, seeing this latest decision as an unnecessary delay of the inevitable. University Vice President Thomas Wright commented in the Daily Princetonian in October 1988: “I’m not saying anybody should forfeit their constitutional rights. I’m saying that I hope members of these clubs will conclude voluntarily that they will change their policies.”
Ivy and Tiger Inn Relent
Always persistent, Frank appealed the decision of the appellate court to the New Jersey Supreme Court in January 1990. In July 1990, Frank was delighted to learn that the NJ Supreme Court ruled in her favor, forcing Ivy and Tiger Inn to go coed. Women were first able to bicker at Ivy in fall of 1990.
Tiger Inn, however, had not yet given up the fight. They petitioned for a writ of certiorari asking the US Supreme Court to hear the case. As Frank recounted, “On the day the US invaded Iraq in January ‘91, the Supreme Court denied cert. So a nice little celebration there, but I couldn’t really celebrate because I was busy protesting that the US invaded Iraq.” Tiger Inn changed its policy soon after the Supreme Court’s decision with women bickering in Spring 1991.
Despite Frank having won the fight to make all the eating clubs coed, Ivy and Tiger Inn continued to contest the case against Frank. “I thought they were mostly fighting over not wanting to pay the ACLU’s attorney’s fees,” Frank supplied. Ivy and Tiger Inn revived the case that had been on hold since 1986 over whether their freedom of association had been violated by the NJDCR’s 1985 ruling which designated the eating clubs as public accommodations. This final leg of the fight ended in June 1992 when all parties finally came to a settlement. Frank related her impressions of the day she found out that her long legal battle was finally drawing to a close:
“It settled while I was at Reunions in June ‘92, and I was staying an extra day or two because there was maybe a deposition schedule. I remember I went to New York and Man of La Mancha was playing. I went and saw it, and the end song is ‘To Dream the Impossible Dream’. And I’m thinking, you don’t even know what impossible dream just occurred. I was dreaming that impossible dream on a whole different level beyond what Don Quixote was thinking about.”
Frank presently teaches her case in her Women in Law course at Drake University. Having earned her master’s in Clinical Legal Education at Antioch University, Frank is a clinical legal professor herself, working primarily on family law cases. Frank reflected on the connection between her case and her later career, saying: “I am a rare clinical professor who not only took clinics, but I also am a long term clinic client.”
Conclusions
Frank’s case marked a turning point in Princeton’s campus culture, in that it was a pivotal part of the process of transforming Princeton’s student body from a white, male, and bourgeois clique into a more inclusive community—a process which is still ongoing today.
The eating club system as it currently exists still deserves our scrutiny. The bicker clubs particularly are still implicated in other forms of exclusionary practices in their selection process. Already, social groups at Princeton are broadly separated on racial and class lines, and these divisions are only exacerbated in clubs where members can screen in an opaque process for whom they like best. Bastions of wealth and privilege like Ivy and Cottage still largely pick members who come from the same socioeconomic backgrounds.
At the same time, Frank’s case does show us what is possible when we as students question and contest the harmful aspects of this campus’ culture instead of accepting them as facts of life. Throughout her life, Frank has clearly understood that the law can serve as an important tool to support social movements. Such tools are an essential part of activists’ arsenals that we—like Frank—can not be afraid to use.
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