My four years as an undergrad at Columbia in the early/mid ’80′s overlapped Obama’s two years by just one – he was a senior when I was a freshman. Perhaps the distinction between a “full” student and a transfer are significant enough to account for the differences, but his account (or lack thereof) of that time sounds contrived to me. Yes, NYC was a den of iniquity at that time – Mayor Koch had a laissez-faire attitude about enforcement and there were many seamy areas around Morningside Heights. We avoided Morningside Park day or night. Nightly, we looked out the windows of East Campus to watch the fires burn into the Harlem sky, hearing the voices from the park shout things like “walk away or I’ll cut you, man”.
Obama was living off campus – but where? In Harlem? The WSJ says that they contacted 400 of his classmates and none of them remember him. At that time, he would have been in a class of about 800 college plus 250 engineering students. I checked the 1997 alumni directory in my den, Barack Hussein Obama CC ’83 – only his grandparents address. No personal information. That tells me there was no one in his class that he wanted to connect with at that time. He didn’t want to share information about his success in Harvard Law School or his work as an associate in Chicago with his classmates. Odd.
As a working class kid from the MA suburbs, I had been raised a near socialist, liberal Democrat – there was no other way. The combination of what I saw on the streets of NYC in 1982-86 and the lessons I learned from the Columbia Core Curriculum changed all that. I entered the campus a passionate liberal, but walked out of there a more rational conservative. I’m entirely sure that is exactly the opposite of what my professors intended. So, what did Obama study while at Columbia? Will we ever get a glimpse of his transcript? I don’t doubt that he received excellent grades. After all, being admitted as a transfer student is no mean feat! And we know his grades must have been quite good to find himself eventually admitted to Harvard Law.
All we know is that Obama graduated without honors with a degree in Political Science. What classes did he take? Is that what he is hiding? Was he immersed in Middle Eastern studies? Electoral Politics? I took two such courses during my years and they only convinced me that choosing engineering was the best path. The first was on American Electoral Politics, which was a full semester of Reagan bashing in the fall of 1983. The second was a Peoples of the Middle East class, which was a Palestinian propaganda vehicle. Is this the kind of curriculum that Obama immersed himself in during his two years at Columbia? Is that what he is hiding by refusing to release his transcripts?
