Isn't that a bit different than being a full-time student during your early 20's, either right out of high school or as a 2-year transfer?
-PJ
In NYC and certain other big cities, it’s not as different as it would be at most colleges. There are so many people and organizations that are readily accessible in a city like this, that many students (especially those who see themselves as headed for greatness of one sort or another) tend to think of college-based stuff as being beneath them. And at least at CUNY, there also appears to be much less going on in the way of campus-based activities, than is normal at non-urban colleges. The number and variety of flyers advertising meetings of student groups and student social activities is a tiny fraction of what was (and is) routinely posted around my alma mater, a small liberal arts college in a suburban setting.
As noted in the NYT article, at least one professor and a student in the same class, remember him very clearly. There may well be others who just prefer not to run their yaps to the NYT. I know if the NYT called me asking about a college classmate of mine from 20+ years ago, who’d recently beome world-famous, they’d be lucky to even get a “no comment” out of me before I hung up.
Also, as a transfer student, Obama may well have needed to take a number of courses to meet distribution requirements, due to differing requirements between Occidental and Columbia. This could have meant significant chunks of his class schedule filled with giant lecture courses with very few upperclassmen, and professors who, even at that time, would haved been hard-pressed to tell someone the size of the class to the nearest hundred without looking it up, and certainly couldn’t have named any of the students without reading off the course roster. I was enrolled in two large lecture courses at Columbia in the late 1970s, and as far as I could tell, neither of the “professors” really spoke a word of English (a science course and a math course, both taught by Asians who were obviously VERY new to English). Few students in the class would even have bothered to try to speak to them — after the first couple of lectures, most students only showed up for the exams.