Seriously, folks. How can this be? Was he actually a student there?
He was in a foreign country, being “groomed”.
Do you realize how utterly implausible that is? If you shared a class with someone who later became President, you’d darn well remember it.
sounds like “manufactured history”
cia?
“Was he actually a student there?”
Good question. I’ve always had the feeling that obama is a fabricated candidate. I remember David Axelrod saying the Jimmy Smits character on West Wing was modeled after obama, but I think it was the other way around. I don’t see how someone can go through high school, college, and law school and be an activist, no less, and leave absolutely no trail.
It could be. Columbia is huge, most students live off-campus, and he was only there for two years. Plus NYC is a pretty impersonal place. And Barry Obama may well have been doing whatever hanging out he was doing, with a small clique of young black adults, who weren’t necessarily all Columbia students or even all students. If he’d been an exceptional student, holding leadership positions in campus organizations, etc., I’m sure some people would remember him, but from what little info is available, he was nto exceptional, either academically or in any other way.
I’ve been taking classes at City University of New York for the past 6 years or so, while working full time. I know 2 professors would remember me by name, but only because I went out of my way to interact with them (in order to take incompletes when work had interfered with my studying too much, but other topics came up that would have made me memorable). I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you couldn’t find a single student who would know my name now, though a few would have recognized it within a few months of the course ending. I’m in a fairly small class right now (about 20 students), and only know a couple of students’ first names (and don’t know how to spell them), and I don’t expect that to change by the end of the course. And just a couple of weeks ago, I bumped into a student who’d been in a course I’d taken a couple of years — we recognized each other’s faces, and remembered chatting before and had a nice chat, but I don’t have a clue what even her first name is, and I assume she doesn’t know mine.
If you’re not interested in making a big city university a central part of your life, it will afford you the same anonymity that the big city generally does. What I’d be interested to know is whether Obama was already being groomed by mentors of some sort, who set him up with off-campus jobs and social/political networks. It’s quite likely, since he was a capable black student, and somebody had almost certainly made an effort to get him transferred from Occidental to Columbia. My guess is that there are quite a few people in NYC who remember him from his Columbia days, but that they aren’t and weren’t affiliated with Columbia . . . and they aren’t talking, quite possibly because they were affiliated with radical leftist groups that wouldn’t look good on a POTUS’ resume.