In his new column he writes:

Sonia Sotomayor had bad timing. If she’d entered college in the late-1950s or early-1960s, she would have been surrounded by an ethos that encouraged smart young ethnic kids to assimilate. If she’d entered Princeton and Yale in the 1980s, her ethnicity and gender would have been mildly interesting traits among the many she might possibly possess.
But she happened to attend Princeton and then Yale Law School in the 1970s. These were the days when what we now call multiculturalism was just coming into its own. These were the days when the whole race, class and gender academic-industrial complex seemed fresh, exciting and just.
There was no way she was going to get out of that unscarred. And, in fact, in the years since she has given a series of speeches that have made her a poster child for identity politics. In these speeches, race and gender take center stage.

Now, I’m too young to say from experience whether this overall trend — assimilation, identity politics, identity politics lite — took place, but it squares with what I’ve read elsewhere. Therefore, I think it’s fair to say that any given student was less likely to become obsessed with her group identity if she attended college after the ’70s (relative to during that decade).

But I’m a little bit skeptical that Sotomayor herself would be much different had she attended college later (an assertion Brooks doesn’t quite make, but I think implies). I graduated in 2006, and there were still plenty of students like her around, and plenty of race-based student groups and ethnic-studies classes to support them. Given how fervently Sotomayor was tied to this cause — and given that decades later, she’s still on a tear about it — would a campus where other students’ fervor has died down a bit have tempered her enthusiasm? Again, I’m skeptical.

Another interesting question: Did the identity politics I saw represent a resurgence since the ’80s, roughly the same thing that was happening in the ’80s, or a continuation of the downward trend between the ’70s and the ’80s?