I didn’t watch today’s hearings, but I’ve now watched many of the highlights (and lowlights) that have been posted here. Many questions about @PeteHegseth’s character have been raised by his opponents, and one counter that I saw by one Republican Senator was to charge the other side of equal levels of immorality and, thus, hypocrisy.

I knew Pete briefly and sporadically during his senior year at Princeton. As an assistant professor, I was assigned a large load of senior theses to supervise, and more often than not I would supervise theses of students who turned to me after they had been exhausted all their other options with the tenured “big names,” and thus, who had never had me in a class, and with whom I had only the most fleeting interactions and of which, at most, the vaguest memories.

I took a much greater interest in Pete, and I think he eventually in me, in spite of his not having had me for a class. The first reason was because I was an avid Princeton men’s basketball fan, and in those years I would take my young sons to as many home games as we were able to attend. The teams were excellent in those years, regularly winning the Ivy title and competitive in the tournament with the brilliance of Pete Carrill’s “Princeton Offense.”  Pete was an excellent sixth man (a “microwave”) off the bench, regularly delivering three point daggers in clutch situations. It’s amusing to note that I also advised Nate Walton, Bill’s son and Princeton’s starting center, and someone considerably more “hippy” than Pete.

Any student who was engaged in varsity athletics at Princeton was quite clearly a tireless worker. Not only did most rise to the challenge of Princeton academics, but they would also be awake before nearly anyone else on campus, either to attend early morning practice or complete homework that was left unfinished because of practices or games. It impressed me that Pete made these sacrifices in spite of spending a fair amount of the game sitting on the bench, but was always ready and at key moments electrifying when he got the call. That was only a harbinger of what really intrigued me about Pete Hegseth, and why I still remember him well after many years, and many forgotten advisees in the mists of time. At Princeton, then and now, almost no students would entertain the idea of entering the military. An older Princeton officially honored students who had served and who had fallen in war, notably in the form of bronze stars outside dorm windows emblazoned with the names of fallen students who had lived in that room. Princeton’s also claimed to be, and to graduate students, “in the nation’s service” (later amended to, “… and in the service of all nations”), but almost no students entered the military, and especially not during the time that I taught there, in the midst of which 9/11 occurred and then the War in Iraq. In fact, most students ended up working in finance and/or “consulting.” In spite of all the claims to be concerned for “service,” Princeton was exceptionally good at producing not men and women of military distinction, but oligarchs who loudly preached their commitment to egalitarianism.