It was a long time ago. Most of the professors are probably retired or dead. And records that old are buried in archives somewhere, not readily accessible because they were never computerized. He went by “Barry” back then, which is an unremarkable, unmemorable name. And the reality of many large urban universities is that students simply have no reason to get to know people in their classes. Even some students who are very involved in campus life may not really know anyone in their classes, though they have active friendships with students involved in their extracurricular activities. A lot of students are just focused off campus, with family, jobs, old friends in the neighborhood they grew up in and still live in, etc. In Obama’s case, it seems more likely that he was involved in off-campus political groups and/or off-campus jobs arranged for him by someone who was mentoring him, and trying to get him ready to get into a law school like Harvard. Hard to say why he doesn’t want to make public information about his Columbia years. Could be the radical nature of some off-campus groups he was involved in. Or could be that he had fairly prestigious off-campus jobs or internships that were arranged for him by a mentor because he was black, and that going into the details would show that a white student who had comparable credentials wouldn’t have been able to get those positions. Could be he was living with a girlfriend whose subsequent activities were such that news of the relationship would be wild tabloid fodder. Who knows. Maybe we’ll eventually find out, maybe we won’t. But I don’t buy into the conspiracy stuff, claiming he wasn’t even there, etc.
Obama went to the liberal arts part of Columbia... Columbia COllege. I dont think it has more than a few thousand students.
I find it inconceivable that no one would remember him. Something is definitely fishy.
I went to college years before he did and any number of my professors are still alive.
Obama was using the name Barack Obama during his Columbia years.
Here’s more:
Wayne Allyn Root says, “I don’t know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me. I don’t have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever! ... Nobody recalls him. I’m not exaggerating, I’m not kidding.
Questioner: Were you the exact same class?
Root: Class of ‘83 political science, pre-law Columbia University. You don’t get more exact than that. Never met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he was... the guy who writes the class notes, who’s kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange? It’s very strange...
When asked about his undergraduate training at Columbia University, The New Times states that Obama “declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.”
Many of his classmates don’t remember Obama. He’s not in the yearbook. Columbia couldn’t find a picture of him at school.
What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him. He had transferred from Occidental College in California after his sophomore year because, he told the Boston Globe in 1990, “I was concerned with urban issues and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities.”
In 1981, you would at least remember every biracial kid you ever saw because they were rare.