Chronicle of Higher Education Pimps ‘Professor’ Obama for Academic Jobs

Any media outlet that caters primarily to university faculty is naturally going to have an editorial position somewhere between Fidel Castro and Mao Tse Tung. So it’s not surprising to see the Chronicle of Higher Education publish a fluff piece of Obama fan-fiction about his future as a law professor. They updated and circulated his resume for him and allowed various egg heads to take a critical (read: sarcastic) approach to his credentials.

A conservative President with similar part time teaching experience probably wouldn’t be called a “professor” and certainly wouldn’t get a piece like this written about him unless it came from Hillsdale College or the like.

It’s official: The former law professor Barack H. Obama is back on the job market.

It can be tough out there for an academic who’s been out of the game for so long, and Mr. Obama probably hasn’t updated his curriculum vitae in a while. So we did it for him.

Not a cult.

We’ve noticed the former senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School padding his academic résumé in the waning days of his presidency. Mr. Obama went on a bit of a spree in the final weeks, publishing articles in Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and his old grad-school haunt, the Harvard Law Review.

Mr. Obama is no fool. He remembers that publication is the coin of the realm. Since he didn’t put his name to any scholarly articles during his earlier academic career—minding his political ambitions, he played his cards close to the vest back then — he needed to make up for lost time.

Obama’s lack of accomplishment is always presented by the left as some masterful stroke of strategic genius. Not publishing any scholarship is a sign of brilliant foresight. (Never mind that he self describes as “lazy.”) More than likely he’s “publishing” now because he has staffers to write for him, but again, imagine a conservative who was a part time lecturer and never published anything getting this sort of treatment in academic circles.

The Chronicle sent the resume they wrote for Obama around to various law school faculty members telling them to ignore the fact that he was president (and that they all have schoolgirl crushes on him) and  “have fun with it.”

The responses facetiously poke holes in Obama’s potential as if they were part of some boring, G-rated, tweed jacket with elbow patches version of a Friar’s Club Roast.

Daniel C. Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School, said Mr. Obama’s light publication record might cause a hiring committee to balk at welcoming him as a peer.

“Were we to consider him as [a candidate making a lateral move] for a regular academic position, his candidacy would rise or fall on his written work alone,” wrote Mr. Richman. “And some would worry that the work, ranging across diverse fields like clean energy, health care, and criminal justice, lacks a clear scholarly agenda.”

Oh, how droll. Richman, old man, you are indeed a card.

Stephen McCallister, former dean of the University of Kansas law school wonders about Obama’s ambition.

“We have always been wary of candidates who apply for a position either mid- or late-career,” said Mr. McAllister, “because we worry they are simply seeking to ‘retire’ to academia, and are not motivated to be as active in all aspects of a faculty member’s responsibilities, most especially in producing scholarship.”

Ho ho! Well played Mr. McAllister. Don’t let the boys down at the squash club hear you talking like that.

Stanford’s Robert Weisberg sees no future for Obama in teaching or writing about Constitutional law.

“He thinks the Constitution is about things like voting rights and fighting discrimination,” said Mr. Weisberg, tongue firmly in cheek, “whereas everyone knows that these days constitutional-law scholarship is either about theories of judicial review (better yet, meta-theories about theories of judicial review) or about fine linguistic parsing of the purported nuances of Supreme Court opinions.”

He should have added, “But at least he doesn’t think the Constitution is about limiting the power of the federal government like those right wing neanderthals.”

Scott Hershovitz at Michigan’s stab at being humorous unwittingly hits upon a rather accurate assessment of the last eight years.

“People who worked in the Obama administration and want to write about presidential power, health care, or criminal-justice reform are a dime a dozen,” wrote Scott Hershovitz, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “There are at least four of them on our faculty already. What makes this guy stand out?”

Absolutely nothing. He could maybe check off some affirmative action boxes for you.

All these guys are trying to be funny with their inside baseball comedy but you know that they would all give their left shelf of law books to have Obama join their faculty whether he’s qualified or not and they would revile legitimate Constitutional scholars who didn’t conform to progressive orthodoxy.

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