Obama's Columbia Years (Could you spend 2 years at Columbia without classmates remembering you?)

American Thinker ^ | 08/08/2012 | Michael Iachetta

[SeekAndFind]

My fellow Columbian Wayne Allyn Root may well be correct when he suggests that President Obama transferred to Columbia in fall '81 as a foreign exchange student, and I support his challenge to the president to prove otherwise. At the same time, I'd like to provide some context that may explain how Barack Obama could spend two years at Columbia without Mr. Root or a random selection of 400 classmates remembering anything about him.

The first thing to note is that Columbia was a male-only school in those days (the first co-ed class was the class of '87). This means that it was a far less social place than most colleges. Mr. Root was no doubt more outgoing than I was, but in my experience, the time period when it was easiest to meet friends at Columbia was during freshman orientation and during the first semester of freshman year living in a dorm. As someone who transferred to Columbia as a junior, Barack Obama would have missed out on those opportunities. This is in addition to the obvious point that there wasn't much reason for anyone to spend a lot of time hanging out on campus with all of Manhattan a mere subway ride away.

Classes at Columbia typically had 40-100 students in those days, with a few classes having as many as 150-200 students. In my experience, the norm was for students to come to class, sit down, listen to the lecture, take notes, and leave. I only recall one instance of a student asking a question in class in all of my time there.

Consequently, I didn't get to know many English majors just because they were English majors. The only exceptions to this pattern were the required core courses in Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization,

[tired&retired]

Bingo!

[Scoutmaster]

I looked up that case note and I can’t find anything that authenticates it as his own work.

You wouldn't find anything in the Law Review itself; case notes never acknowledge authorship because they don't contain any original thought or analysis. It's just somebody announcing an 'important' decision and presenting the court's opinion in his or her own words.

It's perhaps more embarrassing that Obama wrote a case note and only a case note that it would be to say he wrote nothing at all. Both scenarios suggest he was lazy and wouldn't put in the time, but the case note suggests that he didn't have the analytical skills to write an article requiring critical legal thought and originality.

It's as if he was president of some academic graduate student physics honorary at MIT and, when all of the other members presented original and complex experiments as demonstrations, Obama showed up with a baking soda and vinegar volcano.

And, no, I've never seen a copy of the letter from Harvard Law Review.

[JewishRighter]

I am familiar with the anonymous publication of case notes. My point was to say that we have no verification, other than some political hacks, saying they saw a letter about it. If it turns out he doesn’t even have this to his credit, its all the more embarrassing and preposterous how this charlatan got as far as he did with the most prestigious law school and law review in the country. Extending your MIT analogy, it would be like he showed up wearing knickers and knee-hi’s and said “aw shucks, I don’t have nothin’, but kin I play wit you’all anyway?”

One more bit. To get on law review at any law school, you usually have to submit a thoroughly researched original legal memorandum on a topic selected by the qualifications committee. I can’t say for sure if Harvard had anything like that at the time, but isn’t there anything with his name on it that they could have dug up?

[Scoutmaster]

There doesn't appear to have anything else with Obama's name on it, unless Harvard kept Obama's submission to write onto HLR.

HLR already had a process in place to make certain a sufficient number of female students made it onto law review - things were not done with total anonymity.