The College Fix

Princeton has made an unexpected appearance in Delaware’s Senate race.

Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate, came under scrutiny in recent weeks when political opponents and media outlets said she falsely implied that she pursued a master’s degree at the University.

In 2005, O’Donnell filed a $6.9 million gender-discrimination lawsuit against a former employer, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. ISI is a nonprofit education group dedicated to promoting “the rising generation’s knowledge of our nation’s founding principles,” according to its website. In the lawsuit, in which she claimed that her gender was a factor in her firing, O’Donnell also alleged that ISI had “violated its promise to allow [her] time to take master’s degree classes at Princeton,” costing her time and potential earning power.

O’Donnell noted in the lawsuit that when she accepted the position at ISI, she had already “applied for admission to a master’s degree program at Princeton University, to start in the fall of 2003.” At the time, she had not been accepted into a graduate program at the University and had not yet received her bachelor’s degree, which she completed in August at Farleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.

O’Donnell dropped her complaint in 2008, citing the high cost of the lawsuit, but her political campaign has prompted renewed attention to the action. She has denied ever claiming that she pursued a master’s degree at Princeton, and her campaign manager Matt Moran has said that she audited an undergraduate course here.

Read the full story at the Daily Princetonian.

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