Obama's Years at Columbia Are a Mystery
He Graduated Without Honors
By ROSS GOLDBERG, Special to the Sun
(originally published in September 2008)
URL:
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/obamas-years-at-columbia-are-a-mystery/85015
Senator Obama's life story, from his humble roots, to his rise to
Harvard Law School, to his passion as a community organizer in
Chicago, has been at the center of his presidential campaign. But one
chapter of the tale remains a blank his education at Columbia College,
a place he rarely speaks about and where few people seem to remember
him.
Contributing to the mystery is the fact that nobody knows just how
well Mr. Obama, unlike Senator McCain and most other major candidates
for the past two elections, performed as a student.
The Obama campaign has refused to release his college transcript,
despite an academic career that led him to Harvard Law School and,
later, to a lecturing position at the University of Chicago. The
shroud surrounding his experience at Columbia contrasts with that of
other major party nominees since 2000, all whom have eventually
released information about their college performance or seen it leaked
to the public.
For better or worse, voters have taken an interest in candidates'
grades since 1999, when the New Yorker published President Bush's
transcript at Yale and disclosed that he was a C student. Mr. Bush had
never portrayed himself as a brain, but many were surprised to learn
the next year that his opponent, Vice President Gore, did not do much
better at Harvard despite his intellectual image. When Senator Kerry's
transcript surfaced, reporters found that he actually had a slightly
lower average at Yale than Mr. Bush did.
Some political observers cite such disclosures as proof that
candidates' intelligence cannot be judged solely by their political
careers or the schools they attended. Grades provide a rare measure of
intellect that is immune to political spin, proponents say.
"We like to pretend IQ doesn't matter, but it really does with a lot
of jobs, including the presidency," a professor at Smith College who
studies the effects of human intelligence on the economy, James
Miller, said. "We can't trust the information that candidates give us,
so it's important to look for objective data that they can't falsify
or distort."
Mr. Miller acknowledged that Mr. Obama displayed academic achievement
at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude and led the Harvard Law
Review. Still, Mr. Miller said, he would like to see information about
how Mr. Obama performed in various subjects at Columbia.
That view is not shared by other election observers, including some
who have themselves indulged the public's interest in candidates'
academic records. One of them is Geoffrey Kabaservice, a political
historian who in 2000 published Senator Bradley's relatively low score
of 485 on the verbal SAT. Mr. Bradley, a Rhodes Scholar who was a star
basketball player at Princeton, was running for the Democratic
presidential nomination.
"It's awfully hard to correlate anything, really, about a person on
the basis of their grades," Mr. Kabaservice said, explaining that he
published Mr. Bradley's score to highlight limitations in intelligence
testing. He said he doubted that candidates' grades have affected the
outcome of any recent presidential elections.
"For people who didn't like George W. Bush, for example, the grade
aspect only confirmed what they thought about him," Mr. Kabaservice
said. "And for everybody else, it made him more of a regular guy."
The Obama campaign declined to comment for this article and did not
offer an explanation for why his transcript has not been released. But
observers speculated that one reason might be the racially charged
nature of the election. Mr. Obama has acknowledged benefiting from
affirmative action in the past, and details about his academic
performance might open him up to critics eager to accuse him, probably
unfairly, of receiving a free ride, Mr. Kabaservice said.
"Anyone who is a minority and who's come up partially through the
meritocracy getting into good colleges, and subsequently good law
schools is going to come under suspicion that there was some kind of
affirmative action boost," he said. "I suspect this is an area of
discomfort for Obama."
In contrast with the rest of Mr. Obama's life story, little is known
about his college experience. He attended Occidental College in Los
Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia in 1981. The
move receives only a mention in Mr. Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams from
My Father," which instead devotes that chapter to his impressions of
race and class struggles in New York.
An article in a Columbia University publication, Columbia College
Today, reported that Mr. Obama has portrayed Columbia as a period of
buckling down following a troubled adolescence. He did not socialize
much, he has said, instead spending a lot of time in the library,
"like a monk." He has also stated that he was involved to some extent
with the Black Students Organization.
Federal law limits the information that Columbia can release about Mr.
Obama's time there. A spokesman for the university, Brian Connolly,
confirmed that Mr. Obama spent two years at Columbia College and
graduated in 1983 with a major in political science. He did not
receive honors, Mr. Connolly said, though specific information on his
grades is sealed. A program from the 1983 graduation ceremony lists
him as a graduate.
More is known about Mr. McCain's experience at the United States Naval
Academy, where he was a self-described troublemaker and graduated in
the bottom 1% of his class. The McCain campaign has declined to
release his transcript, saying that his performance at the academy can
only be viewed in the context of his larger military career.
"His record stands on its own," a McCain spokesman, Peter Feldman,
said. "His time spent in college was part of the transformative years
that made him who he was."
(Published in September 2008 and still applicable - perhaps even more so?)
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Dear Mr. Goldberg: I have never seen proof that Obama graduated magna
cum laude from Harvard Law. It just seems...
susan ferris
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Sep 3, 2008 23:59
I've suspected fraud in this man's college records. I don't trust him
and I think someone else took his classes...
Jessica s, Naples, FL
