Breaking News – Obama’s Columbia University Transcripts Reconstructed

Jason  Kissner recently questioned President Obama’s whereabouts in spring 1982, and  also discussed in passing some of the courses Obama took while at Columbia. In  response, I would like to try my hand at reconstructing the Columbia part of  Obama’s college transcript based on the published record and my own knowledge of  Columbia’s requirements as an ’84  graduate of the college. This reconstruction may be of interest to those who are  curious about this part of Obama’s undergraduate education, and it may also shed light on where Obama must  have been in spring 1982.

Columbia College is well known for its rigorous  core curriculum. Students must not only study masterpieces of literature,  philosophy, music, and art, but also take courses in science, a foreign language, and even physical education. These  requirements add up to a total of 48 credit hours. Based on a typical student  load of 16 credit hours per semester, a student would need to spend three  semesters taking nothing but core courses in order to complete the requirement.  (In practice, students typically take most of these courses in the first two  years of study, perhaps getting to a few of them over the course of the next two  years.) As will be seen below, as a transfer student with only two years to  complete the core requirements, most of Obama’s coursework must have been  devoted to taking courses in the core.

The Political Science major at Columbia requires 21 credit hours in Political Science plus  two 4-credit hour seminar classes. A maximum of 12 credit hours in Political  Science are accepted from transfer students, and since Obama is on record as  having taken a lot of Political Science at Occidental, it is reasonable to assume that he received the  maximum amount of transfer credit. Obama thus would only have needed to take  three Political Science classes at Columbia, in addition to the two required  seminars, in order to graduate as a Political Science major. Finally, a  student needs 124 credit hours to graduate from Columbia with a B.A. If my guess  is correct that Obama would have taken 70 credit hours in his four semesters at  Columbia, Columbia must have accepted a total of 54 credit hours from Occidental  (including the 12 credit hours in Political Science).

As  one reconstructs Obama’s Columbia transcript, perhaps the most striking thing is  how few Political Science classes Obama must have taken while studying there. In  addition to required classes in the core and in Political Science, the published  record of Obama’s coursework (based on recollections from former classmates and  professors), indicates that he took an English class, a class in Comparative  Literature, and a Sociology class. As will be seen below, this does not leave  room for much more than the minimum requirement of three additional classes in  Political Science plus the two seminars.

I  made several assumptions as I reconstructed the transcript. First, I assume that  Obama must have taken the maximum four semesters of a foreign language, in his  case Spanish. Columbia required me to take all four semesters of the language  requirement, even though I had taken a decent amount of French before I got  there. Obama has admitted that he does not speak any foreign languages, so I am assuming that he did not place out of the  requirement. Second, I assume that Obama took between 16-19 credit hours per  semester. This would be a typical and reasonably heavy load for a motivated  student, and Obama is described as having been serious about his studies. He is  also remembered as playing plenty of pickup basketball and soccer, attending  student group meetings, and spending time at local hangouts, so I do not assume  that he took more courses than that. Classes that Obama must have taken as  requirements, but for which there is no written record, are placed in brackets.  Where there is a written record, I indicate the sources in parentheses or by  hyperlink. Finally, where there is no written record of when Obama took a  certain required course, I placed it where it made most sense to me based on my  own experience at Columbia.

A  few concluding thoughts. I was in one of the classes that Obama took at  Columbia, the course in Modern Fiction with Edward Said. It is worth noting that  my recollection of that class does not square with some of the details recounted  by Obama’s friend and roommate Phil Boerner in Maraniss (449-450) and elsewhere.  It is true that the class was held in a large lecture hall, without much  opportunity for interaction with Said, and that Said never spoke in class about  his political views. But Said’s lectures in this course were not devoted to  discussions about literary theory, as Boerner claims: “We didn’t have a good  reaction to the class. Said seemed to be really into literary theory. And I’m  more into, and Obama, too, into judging works by themselves and not getting  caught up in various feminist-leftist-whatever interpretations. And Said seemed  to be really into that” (Maraniss, 449). Very much to the contrary, Said’s  lectures (as I recall) were devoted to a careful analysis of the texts we were  studying, without any reference to literary theory that I can recall. When Said  lectured about Conrad’s Nostromo, he dwelled on the meaning of the  cracks in a vase. When he lectured on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, he  explained that the word that Kafka uses was the same word used in the gospels to  describe Christ’s transfiguration.

Boerner  also mentions a letter that Obama wrote to him several months after the class  ended, in which Obama complains that Said had not issued grades “until a month  into the new term” (Maraniss, 450). I actually have a vivid memory of receiving  my grade for this class, and my recollection is that grades were issued right  after finals week, as was typical. The reason why I remember this so vividly is  that I had decided midway through the semester to take the class pass/fail, and  I was angry when I checked my grades and discovered that I would have received  an A- if I had not made that decision. While we are on the subject of Obama’s  grades, Maraniss quotes Obama as saying that he graduated from Columbia with a  3.7 grade point average (Maraniss, 465). Based on my own experience, he would  have graduated with honors if that were the case. But since we know that he did not, his GPA was probably lower than  that.

Finally,  in regard to Obama’s whereabouts in spring 1982: all I can say is that there is  no way that he could have graduated from Columbia in spring 1983 if he had not  been taking a full load of classes at Columbia in spring 1982, of the sort I  have indicated above.

2013-02-16 22:45:46

Source: http://theobamahustle.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/breaking-news-obamas-columbia-university-transcripts-reconstructed/