Jason Kissner recently
questioned President Obama’s whereabouts
in spring 1982, and also discussed in passing some of the courses
Obama took while at Columbia. In response, I would like to try my hand
at reconstructing the Columbia part of Obama’s
college transcript based
on the published record and my own knowledge of Columbia’s
requirements as an ’84 graduate of the college. This reconstruction may
be of interest to those who are curious about this part of Obama’s
undergraduate education, and it may also shed light on where Obama must
have been in spring 1982.
Columbia College is
well known for its rigorous core curriculum. Students must not only
study masterpieces of literature, philosophy, music, and art, but also
take courses in science, a foreign language, and even physical
education. These requirements add up to a total of 48
credit hours.
Based on a typical student load of 16 credit hours per semester, a
student would need to spend three semesters taking nothing but core
courses in order to complete the requirement. (In practice, students
typically take most of these courses in the first two years of study,
perhaps getting to a few of them over the course of the next two
years.) As will be seen below, as a transfer student with only two years
to complete the core requirements, most of Obama’s coursework must
have been devoted to taking courses in the core.
The
Political Science major at Columbia requires
21 credit hours in Political Science plus two 4-credit hour seminar
classes. A maximum of 12 credit hours in Political Science are accepted
from transfer students, and since Obama is on record as having taken a
lot of Political Science at
Occidental,
it is reasonable to assume that he received the maximum amount of
transfer credit. Obama thus would only have needed to take three
Political Science classes at Columbia, in addition to the two required
seminars, in order to graduate as a Political Science major. Finally, a
student needs 124 credit hours to graduate from Columbia with a B.A. If
my guess is correct that Obama would have taken 70 credit hours in his
four semesters at Columbia, Columbia must have accepted a total of 54
credit hours from Occidental (including the 12 credit hours in
Political Science).
As one reconstructs Obama’s Columbia transcript, perhaps the most
striking thing is how few Political Science classes Obama must have
taken while studying there. In addition to required classes in the core
and in Political Science, the published record of Obama’s coursework
(based on recollections from former classmates and professors),
indicates that he took an English class, a class in
Comparative Literature,
and a Sociology class. As will be seen below, this does not leave room
for much more than the minimum requirement of three additional classes
in Political Science plus the two seminars.
I made several assumptions as I reconstructed the transcript. First,
I assume that Obama must have taken the maximum four semesters of a
foreign language, in his case Spanish. Columbia required me to take all
four semesters of the language requirement, even though I had taken a
decent amount of French before I got there. Obama has admitted that he
does not speak
any foreign languages,
so I am assuming that he did not place out of the requirement. Second,
I assume that Obama took between 16-19 credit hours per semester. This
would be a typical and reasonably heavy load for a motivated student,
and Obama is described as having been serious about his studies. He is
also remembered as playing plenty of pickup basketball and soccer,
attending student group meetings, and spending time at local hangouts,
so I do not assume that he took more courses than that. Classes that
Obama must have taken as requirements, but for which there is no
written record, are placed in brackets. Where there is a written
record, I indicate the sources in parentheses or by hyperlink. Finally,
where there is no written record of when Obama took a certain required
course, I placed it where it made most sense to me based on my own
experience at Columbia.
A few concluding thoughts. I was in one of the classes that Obama took at Columbia, the course in Modern Fiction with
Edward Said.
It is worth noting that my recollection of that class does not square
with some of the details recounted by Obama’s friend and roommate Phil
Boerner in Maraniss (449-450) and elsewhere. It is true that the class
was held in a large lecture hall, without much opportunity for
interaction with Said, and that Said never spoke in class about his
political views. But Said’s lectures in this course were not devoted to
discussions about
literary theory,
as Boerner claims: “We didn’t have a good reaction to the class. Said
seemed to be really into literary theory. And I’m more into, and Obama,
too, into judging works by themselves and not getting caught up in
various feminist-leftist-whatever interpretations. And Said seemed to
be really into that” (Maraniss, 449). Very much to the contrary, Said’s
lectures (as I recall) were devoted to a careful analysis of the texts
we were studying, without any reference to literary theory that I can
recall. When Said lectured about Conrad’s
Nostromo, he dwelled on the meaning of the cracks in a vase. When he lectured on Kafka’s
Metamorphosis, he explained that the word that Kafka uses was the same word used in the gospels to describe Christ’s transfiguration.
| DESCRIPTIVE TITLES |
COURSES |
POINTS |
GRADES |
|
|
|
|
|
AUTUMN TERM 1981 |
16 |
|
|
|
|
|
| [EURPN LIT-PHILOS MASTRPIECS I] |
HUMANITIES |
4.0 |
? |
| ELEMENTARY COURSE I |
SPANISH |
4.0 (Maraniss, 433) |
? |
| [PHYSICAL EDUCATN ACTIVITIES I] |
PHYS ED |
1.0 |
P |
| [A SCIENCE CLASS] |
SCIENCE DEPT |
4.0 |
? |
| [A POL SCI CLASS] |
POL SCI |
3.0 |
? |
|
|
|
|
|
SPRING TERM 1982 |
19 |
|
|
|
|
|
| [EURPN LIT-PHILOS MASTRPIECS II] |
HUMANITIES |
4.0 |
? |
| [ELEMENTARY COURSE II] |
SPANISH |
4.0 |
? |
| [PHYSICAL EDUCATN ACTIVITIES I] |
PHYS ED |
1.0 |
? |
| [A SCIENCE CLASS] |
SCIENCE DEPT |
4.0 |
? |
| [MASTERPIECES OF THE FINE ARTS] |
HUMANITIES |
3.0 |
? |
| [A POL SCI CLASS] |
POL SCI |
3.0 |
? |
|
|
|
|
|
AUTUMN TERM 1982 |
18 |
|
|
|
|
|
| MODERN FICTION I |
COMP LIT |
3.0 (Maraniss, 449-450) |
? |
| CONTEMP WESTRN CIVILIZATION I |
CONTM CIV |
(Maraniss, 456) |
? |
| AM FOR POL I |
POL SCI |
4.0 (Maraniss, 459) |
A |
| [INTERMEDIATE COURSE I] |
SPANISH |
4.0 |
? |
| WORLD POLS |
POL SCI |
3.0 (Maraniss, 458) |
? |
|
|
|
|
|
SPRING TERM 1983 |
17 |
|
|
|
|
|
| AM FOR POL II |
POL SCI |
4.0 (Maraniss, 459) |
A |
| NOVEL AND IDEOL |
ENG |
3.0 (Davis, HP) |
? |
| [MASTERPIECES OF MUSIC] |
HUMANITIES |
3.0 |
? |
| [A SOCIOLOGY CLASS] |
SOCI |
3.0 |
? |
| [INTERMEDIATE COURSE II] |
SPANISH |
4.0 |
? |
Boerner also mentions a letter that Obama wrote to him several
months after the class ended, in which Obama complains that Said had
not issued grades “until a month into the new term” (Maraniss, 450). I
actually have a vivid memory of receiving my grade for this class, and
my recollection is that grades were issued right after finals week, as
was typical. The reason why I remember this so vividly is that I had
decided midway through the semester to take the class pass/fail, and I
was angry when I checked my grades and discovered that I would have
received an A- if I had not made that decision. While we are on the
subject of Obama’s grades, Maraniss quotes Obama as saying that he
graduated from Columbia with a 3.7 grade point average (Maraniss, 465).
Based on my own experience, he would have graduated with honors if
that were the case. But since we know that he
did not, his GPA was probably lower than that.
Finally, in regard to Obama’s whereabouts in spring 1982: all I can
say is that there is no way that he could have graduated from Columbia
in spring 1983 if he had not been taking a full load of classes at
Columbia in spring 1982, of the sort I have indicated above.
The Democrats thought no one would notice. Amid all of the pomp and
circumstance at the Democratic National Convention, do you know what
they projected on their huge screens? Shown in vivid display were Russian warships and Turkish jets! This newest revelation about the jets was reported by the Daily Caller today in their article, “NOT JUST THE SHIPS: Fighter jets in Dem convention’s military montage were Turkish, not America.”
