Duluth, MN (OpEdNews) April 30, 2011: I have often thought that Yale University and Harvard Business School deserved a certain amount of blame for giving degrees to George W. Bush. However, during our long ordeal of W's presidency, Yale and Harvard somehow escaped blame for giving degrees to him.
I mention this puzzling fact because Donald Trump has pivoted from the birther issue about President Barack Obama to the issue of his formal education, especially at Columbia University and at Harvard Law School. Liberals were quick to label Trump a racist for questioning how Obama had gotten into Columbia and Harvard Law. Trump's liberal critics were quick to point out that he was intimating that perhaps Obama had benefited from affirming action. According to his critics, intimating this is a way for Trump to tap into white resentments of affirmative action. Perhaps it is.
But it strikes me as plausible that Obama may have benefited from affirmative action, just as George W. Bush had benefited from the fact that his father, George H. W. Bush, had graduated from Yale. But it does not necessarily follow that Obama was not qualified enough to succeed at Columbia and Harvard Law on his own efforts. It is well known that W. did not set the academic world on fire at Yale. Neither did John Kerry, by the way. But Obama did rise to distinction at Harvard Law.
Enter Andrew Breitbart, the young bomb-throwing conservative author of the book RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION: EXCUSE ME WHILE I SAVE THE WORLD (Grand Central Publishing, April 15, 2011). On April 29th, Breitbart appeared as one of the guests on Bill Maher's television show "On Real Time." Maher accused Trump of being a racist for questioning how Obama got into Harvard Law, but Maher qualified his accusation by allowing that "Trump does not even know that he is a racist."
But Breitbart defended Trump's position. According to Steven Loeb's report at the BUSINESS INSIDER online, "While noting that Obama is "incredibly smart' and "I guarantee you that he excelled, that he earned his right to be in the Harvard Law Review' Breitbart then went on to demand to see what classes Obama took while in college."
Maher questioned how useful such information might be. But according to Loeb, Breitbart persisted: "I'd like to know who [Obama's] professors were, what they espoused and how it relates to his current policy."
Unbeknownst to Breitbart and Maher and Loeb, James T. Kloppenberg of Harvard University has investigated Obama's education and reported his findings in his book READING OBAMA: DREAMS, HOPE, AND THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION (Princeton University Press, October 11, 2011), which I reviewed at OpEdNews on November 22, 2010.
Let's review. Obama started his undergraduate education on a scholarship at Occidental College in Los Angeles and then transferred to Columbia in his junior year. According to Kloppenberg, Obama "studied history and political theory, first in America and then of Europe, in two year-long courses with the political scientist Roger Boesche. [At the time] Boesche was immersed in writing a fine book about Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the widely quoted and too seldom read DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, and he [Boesche] was beginning to think about the subject of his later scholarship, tyranny from the ancient world to the present. Almost three decades later, Obama's experience in those courses remains significant enough that he invited Boesche to the White House, where they joked about the "B' Obama remembered (correctly) having received from Boesche" (page 16).
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