A Self-Taught Princeton Scholar, Lorraine Atkin Explores Three Obscure Treaties that Changed the World

Princeton, NJ -- “Mightier than the Sword: How Three Obscure Treaties Sanctioned the Enslavement of Millions and the Exploitation of Continents for More than 400 Years” is a recently published non-fiction book of commentary and analysis by Princeton resident Lorraine Kulick Atkin, a professor at Princeton? Harvard? Yale? Rutgers?

How about none of the above and none at all. Unaffiliated with any university, the 82-year-old Lorraine should be dubbed a professor at the University of Insistent and Persistent Learning.

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She is an “autodidact” in the words of Princeton University scholar Stanley Katz. With a degree from Thomas Edison State University and hundreds of hours of independent learning in law and history, Lorraine is “living proof that autodidacts can become scholars,” says Professor Katz, one of the scholars providing review blurbs for the book.

At a fundraiser a few years ago at her home in the Mountain Avenue neighborhood, Lorraine casually mentioned to me that she was writing a book, but I never got a chance to find out the topic of the book. At that time and at every other time I had met her, I was always struck by her intellectual curiosity, energy, and eagerness to learn. This quality was evident no matter where she was or with whom she was talking, even at family and social gatherings connected with being the wife of retired Princeton pediatrician Dr. David Atkin and being the mother, grandmother, and great grandmother in a very large family. She is the mother of seven children, plus Dave’s two children; grandmother of 12, plus Dave’s four grandchildren; and great-grandmother of one. But the daunting family obligations and inevitable dramas never thwarted Lorraine’s efforts to research and write this book.

I assumed the book would be either a non-fiction autobiography or perhaps a work of fiction drawn from her life’s experiences of learning, survival, and perseverance – the College of Hard Knocks. Responding to a suggestion from Princeton author and editor Landon Jones that I write about her, I ordered a copy of the book. When I opened the package and saw the title, I thought they had sent me the wrong book.

Her name was on the book as its author, but the title indicated that the book had nothing to do with Lorraine’s personal life - other than perhaps reflecting her passion for learning. “Mightier than the Sword” is Lorraine’s perspective - formulated through considerable scholarly research -- on the roots of societal inequality with which we live today. She posits that treaties written over the course of hundreds of years are the infrastructure institutionalizing land dispossession, slavery, and the subjugation of indigenous people.

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To quote Lorraine in the book’s introduction, her goal is to describe “how, from the 15th century to the very early 20th century, predominantly five European countries -- Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and Germany -- agreed to partition all the continents of the known world, (and by doing so) subjugating millions to their own rule.

“The difference between this view of history and others is that rather than focus on armed conflicts,” Lorraine writes, “I outline just three treaties to uncover this monumental but infamous achievement. These words written on paper achieved the conquerors’ goals, giving them the permission or the sanctioned rationale to decree that what they were doing was legal and just.”

As compelling and instructional as Lorraine’s book may be for scholars, political leaders, and regular citizens committed to civil rights, I find her personal story equally compelling and instructional. She has managed to deflect the slings and arrows that life has thrown at her to become a widely known and respected New Jersey public policy authority, an elected official, and most recently a published author on a scholarly topic that never would have entered my consciousness without reading her book.

“I had no interest in writing a book about the personal details of my life. It does not interest me. The book I wanted to leave my children, my grandchildren (and now great-grandchild) was one that reflects how I think, my beliefs and values,” she says.

Although born in Westchester County, New York, she was raised in Little Falls, New Jersey, which, when she moved there, had a population of 4,000 people living in a “Donna Reed perfect American family environment. There was a picture-perfect main street with a market, department store, movie theater, soda fountain, and moms who were cheerful, stay-at-home housewives,” Lorraine says, referring to the late 1950s and early ‘60s television sitcom.

“But my family life was more comparable to something out of Charles Dickens. Both of my parents were alcoholics, and my life never resembled the Donna Reed television existence,” she says.

Lorraine believes that it was when she lived in Little Falls and felt out of sync with her surroundings, she developed a sensibility to inequality and discrimination in a perfect 1950s American small town with six Protestant churches and no diversity. She was aware of no Jews and only a small number of Blacks living in their own part of town away from the whites.

“I started to become indignant about discrimination and that indignation grew as I got older, as I learned and observed more of the world,” she says.

She escaped her family environment at 18, when she married, had seven children, and tried to make a family life with a husband who, as it turns out, was an alcoholic. When she divorced, she was a relatively young single mother of seven, with no college education or professional training. She cleaned houses, signed up for welfare programs like Food Stamps, and enrolled in classes at her local community college (Brookdale Community College).

Enrolling at Brookdale Community College turned out to be the key to transforming her life. Even with the overwhelming duties of raising seven children, Lorraine’s interest in law and history became increasingly intense. Taking a law course at the community college gave Lorraine the opportunity to connect with one of the guest speakers at the class -- a prosecutor with the Mercer County Prosecutor’s office. He told the class about a new internship in his office for paralegals. Lorraine applied immediately, got picked for the program, and within a short period of time her analytical skills and administrative abilities (raising seven kids helps) led to a full-time job in the prosecutor’s office.

“My supervisors were terrific.  I had the flexibility I needed to leave work early to be home for my kids after school,” says Lorraine, whose child-rearing and full-time job never interfered with her education. She received a paralegal certificate, an associate’s degree from Brookdale, and a bachelor’s degree from Thomas Edison State University. And even though she never earned any more degrees, she was compulsive about self-educating. She took many law classes at Rutgers Law School, as well as social science and public policy graduate classes at Rutgers University.

Her work with the county prosecutor’s office gave her the experience and confidence leading to a variety of public policy opportunities. She served as mayor (first female mayor), deputy mayor, and township committee member for Manalapan Township. She became a founding member of the Citizens for Public Good, a bipartisan citizen advocacy group of former state and federal legislators and policymakers engaged in issues such as campaign finance reform and property taxes. The governor appointed her to a three-year term as commissioner to the New Jersey State Parole Board (directly related to her expertise with the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office). And she secured the job for 10 years as executive director of the Princeton-based New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police.

When Lorraine moved to the Princeton area for her police chiefs association job, she also searched for a way to keep on learning. And that is when Lorraine and I first met. I was director of the Princeton University Office of Community and State Affairs, the department that founded and subsequently managed the Princeton University Community Auditing Program. Lorraine was able to audit classes, some of which inspired the thesis of her book.

“Those classes were pivotal to the success of my writing this book,” she says.

She was able to research her book by becoming a “friend” of both Princeton University’s Firestone Library and the Institute for Advanced Study library. And she recently became program chair of the Friends of the Princeton University Library in charge of the monthly meeting programming.

When I asked her how this personal story ends, she says she has no intention of ending her journey of taking classes and studying history and coming up with a new area of academic inquiry. For the sake of all those offspring, she feels compelled to figure out a better future for them by analyzing the past. It is all part of her curriculum at her university of insistent and persistent learning.

For more information about Lorraine and her book, visit her website, lorraineatkin.com .

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