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Barack Obama during his Columbia years. He says little about his college days in his memoir, and declined requests to release his transcript, but some who knew him praised his record.
He writes that “it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well,” where the graffiti was both racist and anti-Semitic.
In a long profile of Mr. Obama in a Columbia alumni magazine in 2005, in which his Columbia years occupied just two paragraphs, he called that time “an intense period of study.”
“I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk,” he was quoted as saying.
He said he was somewhat involved with the Black Student Organization and anti-apartheid activities, though, in recent interviews, several prominent student leaders said they did not remember his playing a role.
One person who did remember Mr. Obama was Michael L. Baron, who taught a senior seminar on international politics and American policy. Mr. Baron, now president of an electronics company in Florida, said he was Mr. Obama’s adviser on the senior thesis for that course. Mr. Baron, who later wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School, gave him an A in the course.
Columbia was a hotbed for discussion of foreign policy, Mr. Baron said. The faculty included Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, and Zalmay Khalilzad, now the American ambassador to the United Nations. Half of the eight students in the seminar were outstanding, and Mr. Obama was among them, Mr. Baron said.
Michael J. Wolf, who took the seminar with him and went on to become president of MTV Networks, said: “He was very smart. He had a broad sense of international politics and international relations. It was a class with a lot of debate. He was a very, very active participant. I think he was truly distinctive from the other people in that class. He stood out.”
Mr. Obama graduated in 1983. In his memoir, he says he had decided to become a community organizer but could not persuade anyone to hire him. So he found “more conventional work for a year” to pay off his student loans.
“Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors — see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand — and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve,” Mr. Obama wrote.
Cathy Lazere, his supervisor at Business International, described him as self-assured and bright. “He was very mature and more worldly than other people — on the surface kind of laid back, but kind of in control,” she said. “He had a good sense of himself, which I think a lot of kids at that age don’t.”
After about a year, he was hired by the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes consumer, environmental and government reform. He became a full-time organizer at City College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.
Mr. Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the importance of recycling” — a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that more “bread-and-butter issues” like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were more likely the emphasis at City College.
“You needed somebody — and here was where Barack was a star — who could make the case to students across the political spectrum,” said Eileen Hershenov, who oversaw Mr. Obama’s work for Nypirg. The job required winning over students on the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.
Nearly 20 years later, Mr. Obama seemed to remember the experience differently. Gene Karpinski, then executive director of U.S. PIRG, a federation of state watchdog groups, met Mr. Obama in Boston. It was at the time of the 2004 Democratic convention, when Mr. Obama delivered the speech that made him a party luminary. Mr. Karpinski introduced himself. And, he recalled, Mr. Obama told him: “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/politics/30obama.html