“He was then accepted to the post of Senior Lecturer at the prestigious University of Chicago. There again, he didn’t write a single article.”
I haven’t had the time to follow this up ... but I have wondered if the reason Barry went into politics was because he couldn’t get any academic papers accepted to journals? My husband has a Ph.D. and teaches at a university, and it is VERY MUCH “publish or perish.” Professors on the tenure track who can’t get anything published are “disinvited” to return. Is that Barry’s real problem, that he couldn’t get anything published? Is that why he won’t release those records? Was he “disinvited” to return? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
From what I understand of the chronology, Obambi left his community organizing job specifically in order to get elected to something or other. He said somewhere (and I don’t have the direct quote, maybe another FReeper does), probably in “Audacity of Dope” that he felt that community organizing wasn’t big enough for him. That he wanted to run for office so he could make really big changes.
That’s when he went off to Harvard Law.
I’m assuming that at UofC he was just biding his time trying to get his political ducks and sponsors in a row. I don’t think he ever had any intention of remaining an academic.
Well, as you well know, I’m sure, publish or perish, while pithy, isn’t quite the whole picture. Published papers come out of research, and research comes out of grant funding. If you’re not getting grants, you’re not getting published, and if you’re not getting published, you’re not getting grants. Grants are the lifeblood of the academic department. It’s how they pay your salary. If you don’t have grant money coming in to pay yourself and your staff, they may float you for a little while, but not long. Not long at all.
In Obama's case I think it is probably the other way around. He had no interest in publishing papers in journals because he intended from the start to go into politics. He therefore had no need to publish for academic reasons alone.
And perhaps Obama was worried that anything legal he wrote could come back to haunt him as it did with Robert Bork. Of course the senate rejection of Bork occurred before Obama graduated from Harvard Law School.
I'm not a legal scholar but when the exams from some of Obama's courses were published a few months ago I got the impression that he does indeed have a good enough legal mind to write journal articles if that is what he wanted to do. Another thing I notice is that even though he was editing hundreds of law review articles at HLS, no one seems to have ever said, "You are not qualified to be editing my law review article."