Like several parts of Barack Hussein Obama’s (mm mmm mmmm) 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 a small mention in Mr. Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father”.   Instead, he devoted that chapter to his impressions of race and class struggles in New York.  I’m shocked.

An article in Columbia College Today, a publication of the university, reported that Scooter portrayed Columbia as a period of buckling down following a troubled adolescence.   Obama said that he did not socialize much, instead spending a lot of time in the library, “like a monk.”  Yeah, right.  He has also said that he was involved to some extent with the Black Students Organization.

Federal law limits the information that Columbia can release about Scooter’s time there. A spokesman for the university, Brian Connolly, confirmed that  Obama spent two years at Columbia College and graduated in 1983 with a major in political science.   He did not receive honors and specific information on his grades is sealed.   A program from the 1983 graduation ceremony lists him as a graduate.

The Los Angeles Times has reported that Obama studied, while at Columbia, under the late Edward Said, an Arafat devotee. That alone really does not mean a whole lot.  Said was a popular professor and hundreds of students took his comparative literature courses.   However, Scooter evidently maintained some sort of tie with Said.   A photo that made the Internet rounds before the election shows Obama talking to the professor at a 1998 Arab American community dinner in Chicago, where the Obamas and Saids were seated together.

Said knew a lot of radical operatives.   Among those radicals were Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.  When they emerged from wherever they were hiding in the early 1980s (while Obama was attending Columbia), Ayers enrolled in education courses at Bank Street College, adjacent to Columbia in Morningside Heights.  He then earned his doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1987.  Said liked Ayers so much, he wrote a paragraph for the dust jacket of the bomber’s 2001 book, Fugitive Days, in which Ayers brags about being a part of the Weather Underground.

From 1985 – 1988, Obama was a Community Organizer in Chicago.  What does a Community Organizer do?  I’m glad you asked.

Per Byron York in an article found at nationalreview.com:

Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be “an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions.” Once such hostilities were “whipped up to a fighting pitch,” Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising.

Obama was hired by Jerry Kellman, a New Yorker who had gotten into organizing in the 1960s.  Kellman was trying to help laid-off factory workers on the far South Side of Chicago, in a nearly 100% black community.   He led a group, the Calumet Community Religious Conference, that had been created by several local Catholic churches in the industrial community.   Kellman was advised to hire a black organizer for a new spinoff from CCRC.  They called it the Developing Communities Project, designed to focus solely on the Chicago part of the area.

One of Obama’s projects while he was there, was to try to build an alliance of white and black churches and enlist them in the cause of social justice.  Obama had a problem, though.   He didn’t go to church himself.   And that, brothers and sisters, is how Obama, drawn to the preaching of Rev. Jeremiah Wright (and a political opportunity), joined Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street.

If you ask Obama’s fellow Community Organizers what his most significant accomplishments were, they’ll say two things: the expansion of a city summer-job program for South Side teenagers and the removal of asbestos from one of the area’s oldest housing projects.   Those  were his biggest victories.

So, after 3 years of Community Organizing, Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School at the age of 27.  The question is:  How did he get the money for this?  In my article Why Haven’t I Heard of Khalid Al-Monsour? ,  I attempt to answer that question:

President Obama attended Harvard Law School from 1988 – 1991.  The average tuition during that time was $25,000 per year.  It would have cost $75,000 to attend there for 3 years.  As president of the Harvard Law Review, he received no stipend from the school, according to Harvard spokesman Mike Armini in a interview with Newsmax.

If numbers cited by the Obama Presidential Campaign for Scooter”s student loans are accurate, that means that Obama came up with more than $32,000 over three years from sources other than loans to pay for tuition, room and board.  Hmmmmm.

Along with the funding issue, very little is known about Obama’s time at Harvard Law School,and his sycophants in the Liberal hierarchy, Main Stream Media,  and even Harvard Law School Administrators have done a remarkable job in running interference against anyone trying to find out about it.

From Jodi Kantor’s article at nytimes.com:

He arrived there as an unknown, Afro-wearing community organizer who had spent years searching for his identity; by the time he left, he had his first national news media exposure, a book contract and a shot of confidence from running the most powerful legal journal in the country.

During his time at Harvard, Obama met and started dating Michelle Robinson, the future First Lady.  I don’t know if he was attracted to her arms or not.

He also managed to get himself elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Bruce Spiva, a former review editor who now practices civil rights law in Washington, said that the law review is:

fairly disconnected from the breadth and the rough and tumble of real politics.  It’s an election among a closed group. It’s more like electing a pope.

As the president of the review, Scooter had to walk a delicate line. He served on the board of the Black Law Students Association, often speaking passionately about the hot topic of the week, but in a way that would not make white classmates defensive.   He kept away from fiery rhetoric.  He even did a spot-on impersonation of the Rev. Jesse Jackson when he came to speak on campus, according to Franklin Amanat, now a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn.  Obama’s  brashest public speaking moment came at a rally for faculty diversity, where he compared Professor Derrick Bell, who had resigned after agitating for greater faculty diversity,  to Rosa Parks.

Most of the time, young Scooter stayed away from the fiery rhetoric of campus debate, choosing safer topics for his speeches. At the black law students’ annual conference, he fervently told students to remember the obligations that came with their privileged education.

Barack Hussein Obama graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard Law School.  We don’t know anything about his actual courses or grades.   The records have been sealed.

Now, law degree in hand, Obama was ready to return to the Windy City. 

During this period of Barack Hussein Obama’s (peace be upon him) life, we see the seeds planted during his childhood and teen-age years start to take root and grow into a full-fledged, Alinsky-inspired Socialist ideology.

In tomorrow’s blog, we’ll explore his adventures among the Chicago Liberal and Academic Elite and the path that led him to his first political campaign.

Sources:  nysun.com, nationalreview.com, nytimes.com