Re: The Ghost Of Columbia University:
PBS DOCUMENTARY PRODUCERS FIND NO EVIDENCE OBAMA ATTENDED COLUMBIA
http://thedailypen.blogspot.ca/2012/10/pbs-documentary-producers-find-no.html
“I DIDN’T CONSIDER HIM AMERICAN” – Interviewing several people from Obama’s past, producers of “The Choice” documentary about the coming 2012 election find it inexplicable that there are no Columbia classmates who can attest to Obama’s attendance there.
By Dan Crosby
of The Daily Pen
updated 9:37 a.m. 10/15/12
NEW YORK, NY - A recent documentary about the life of Barack Obama broadcast on PBS’ “Frontline” called “The Choice 2012” presents a variety of testimony from alleged classmates of Obama during their mutual attendance of Occidental College and Harvard University.
However, when the producers attempted to film a segment about Obama’s attendance at Columbia University, they were unable to locate even one of Obama’s classmates from the New York-based University and, instead, recorded an interview with an alleged “roommate” who shared a rundown New York apartment with Obama.
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Tank logic: PBS are 'birthers'! :doh1
I guess they didn't look hard enough, just like everyone else! :LMAO
:LMAOPsttt Joe...it's not PBS IT IS the idiots that tried to produce this idiot shit.WOW this is hard and I am glad I could help you with this EASY task!!:LMAO
New York: Columbia University
OFFICIAL SOURCES:
Brian Connolly, Columbia Spokesman
A spokesman for the university, Brian Connolly, confirmed that Mr. Obama spent two years at Columbia College and graduated in 1983 with a major in political science. He did not receive honors, Mr. Connolly said, though specific information on his grades is sealed. A program from the 1983 graduation ceremony lists him as a graduate.
Robert Hornsby, Columbia Spokesman
School spokesman Robert Hornsby told WND that federal law limits the release of information about a student, but he could confirm that "Barack Obama applied for and was granted admission to Columbia College as a transfer student in 1981. He enrolled for the fall term of that year as a political science major. With the conclusion of the spring semester of 1983, Obama completed the requirements for a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and graduated with his class."
Columbia University Directory
Columbia University Class of 1983 Graduation Program (added 6/19/2012)
"The image [to the left] --never before released--is from public records at Columbia University that prove that Obama did, in fact, graduate in 1983 from the Ivy League school. Contrary to some conspiracy theories, Obama was a student within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences--not the less selective, “nontraditional” Columbia University School of General Studies (which only merged with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1990)." From Breitbart.com
Some birthers have questioned why Obama is listed at the end. It's alphabetical by last name. It also shows that he didn't attend under the name "Barry Soetoro", another claim.
FELLOW STUDENTS
Phil Boerner, Classmate and Roommate
I was Barack Obama ’83’s roommate at Columbia College in fall 1981.... We both transferred from Oxy to Columbia infall
1981. Barack had found an apartment on West 109th Street, between Amsterdam and Columbus [Video of apartment as it looks now], and suggested that I room with him. Our sublet was a third-story walk-up in a so-so neighborhood; the unit next door was burned out and vacant. The doorbell didn’t work; to be let in when I first arrived I had to yell up to Barack from the street. It was a railroad apartment: From the kitchen, you walked into Barack’s room, then my room, and lastly the living room. We didn’t have a television or computers. In that apartment we hosted a number of visitors, mostly friends from Oxy who stayed overnight when they were passing through town. Barack was very generous to these visitors. As a host and roommate, he sometimes did the shopping and cooked the chicken curry.
Barack has said that he spent a lot of time in the library while at Columbia and one reason
for this was that our apartment had irregular heat, and we didn’t enjoy hanging out there once the weather got cold. The radiators in our apartment were either stone cold, or, less often, blasted out such intense heat that we had to open the windows and let in freezing air just to cool things down. When the heat wasn’t on, we sometimes sat with sleeping bags or blankets wrapped around ourselves and read our school books. We also didn’t have regular hot water and sometimes used the Columbia gym for showers.
I remember often eating breakfast with Barack at Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway. Occasionally we went to The West End for beers. We enjoyed exploring museums such as the Guggenheim, the Met and the American Museum of Natural History, and browsing in bookstores such as the Strand and the Barnes & Noble opposite Columbia. We both liked taking long walks down Broadway on a Sunday afternoon, and listening to the silence of Central Park after a big snow. I also remember jogging the loop around Central Park with Barack.
One weekend I invited Barack to meet my grandparents, Elizabeth and William Lytton Payne ’46 GSAS, at their summer place in the Catskills, which we called “the farm.” I took Barack to meet some neighbors on the mountain; everyone seemed to like him pretty well, whether they were die-hard supporters of Ronald Reagan or extreme liberals. While at the farm, Barack joined the routines there, which typically included a few morning hours doing chores, such as clearing brush and sawing firewood.
After that first semester, we had to move. Barack tried to find an apartment for both of us, but was only able to find a studio for himself. I was able to house-sit in Brooklyn Heights. Barack and other friends came and visited me there a few times; we typically watched pro basketball or football on TV, or went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. He was amused by my beginning banjo playing (I’m much better today!). Hanging out, we could get pretty emotional about sports, food and injustice. I remember one time when we were out walking he took the time to ask a homeless guy how he was doing, so even then he was concerned about others.
Through different living arrangements in Astoria, Queens; Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; and all over Manhattan, we stayed in touch and remained friends for the rest of our college years. He got to know my girlfriend from Arkansas, who is now my wife. Since I last saw him in 1985, we have exchanged a few letters and photos. He left for Chicago, and I eventually settled in Sacramento.
Barack wasn’t thinking about becoming President when he was in college; he wanted to be a writer. Barack is a good man — some might even call him a saint for tolerating my beginning banjo playing. Based on my six years of knowing him in college and the years immediately after, I can vouch that Barack is a man of character, and I trust him to do the right things when he is President.
According to Phil Boerner, Obama’s roommate, friend and fellow transfer, Obama transferred from Occidental to CU because: “we [Boerner and Obama] felt like we were in a groove and we wanted life to be more difficult…Obama used to tell his friends that he wanted to go somewhere where the weather was cold and miserable so that he would be forced to spend his days indoors reading.”
Obama took a a course on modern fiction with the late fabled Edward Said. He was underwhelmed. [Author David] Remnick writes, “And yet Said’s theoretical approach left Obama cold. ‘My whole thing, and Barack had a similar view, was that we would rather read Shakespeare’s plays than the criticism,’ Boerner said. ‘Said was more interested in the literary theory, which didn’t appeal to Barack or me.’ Obama referred to Said as a ‘flake.’”
Obama lived at 142 West 109th and Amsterdam with Boerner. Their monthly rent was $360. Remnick writes that, “the apartment’s charms included spotty heat, irregular hot water, and a railroad-flat layout. They adjusted, using the showers at the Columbia gym and camping out for long hours in Butler library.” Um, POTUS…they’re just like us!
Mr. Obama, who ultimately made Chicago, and now Washington, his home, enjoyed his New York years, Mr. Boerner recalls. Museums. Jogging in the park. Breakfasts at Tom’s on Broadway, not yet the celebrated hangout of Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza.
“I miss New York and the people in it,” he would write Mr. Boerner a few years after they graduated. “The subways, the feel of Manhattan streets, the view downtown from the Brooklyn Bridge.”
The apartment they shared, however, took some getting used to, Mr. Boerner recalled: 3E at 142 West 109th Street, a five-story building between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. The apartment had no interior doors, just archways, and Mr. Boerner had to walk through Mr. Obama’s room to reach his own. Hot water was scarce, and the two young men often showered at the Columbia gym. “It had a bathtub but no shower, just one of those plastic shower things that works ineffectively,’’ said Mr. Boerner...
When they lived together, Mr. Boerner said he thought Mr. Obama wanted to be a writer, not a politician.
New York was on the rebound when Mr. Obama arrived in New York. Ronald Reagan was president. Edward I. Koch was mayor and the city’s fiscal crisis had just started to abate. Life for Columbia students could be hard, however. Mr. Boerner recalls Mr. Obama wrapping himself in a green sleeping bag (seen in this photo Mr. Boerner took) to keep warm when they studied at home. They listened to reggae. Bob Marley. Peter Tosh. Talked philosophy. Theories of justice and John Rawls. Mr. Boerner recalled Mr. Obama joking that he would rather be spending his time pondering Lou Rawls, the singer.
Some nights Mr. Obama would whip up some chicken curry, a dish he learned from a Pakistani friend. Other meals were at Tom’s. “We would just go there for the breakfast special, two eggs over easy and toast,’’ said Mr. Boerner. “It was like $1.99, and we lived on a lot of bagels. They were, like, a quarter then, but they expanded in your stomach.’’
Though the two men stayed in touch, the housing arrangement ended that winter. Mr. Boerner thinks the leaseholder took the apartment back. Mr. Obama recalled in his memoir giving up the place “for lack of heat.’’
His letters to Mr. Boerner reflected the wistfulness of all expatriate New Yorkers. “I am still amazed when I think of what we put up with there,” he wrote Mr. Boerner in October 1986. “Still, I think you’ll find you miss it once you’ve been gone awhile.”
Sohale Siddiqi, Classmate and Roommate
The way Sohale Siddiqi remembers it, he and his old roommate were walking his pug Charlie on Broadway when a
large, scary bum approached them, stomping on the ground near the dog's head.
This was in the 1980s, a time when New York was a fearful place beset by drugs and crime, when the street smart knew that the best way to handle the city's derelicts was to avoid them entirely. But Siddiqi was angry and he confronted the bum, who approached him menacingly.
Until his skinny, Ivy League-educated friend — Barack Obama — intervened.
He "stepped right in between. ... He planted his face firmly in the face of the guy. 'Hey, hey, hey.' And the guy backpedaled and we kept walking," Siddiqi recalls.
There was a time before Obama wore tailored suits — when his wardrobe consisted of $5 military-surplus khakis and used leather jackets, and he walked the streets of Manhattan for lack of bus fare. It was a time well before the political arena beckoned, when his friends thought he might become a writer or a lawyer, but certainly not the first black man with a real chance to become president of the United States.
When Obama arrived in New York, he already knew Siddiqi — a friend of [Occidental Classmates] Chandoo's and Hamid's from Karachi who had visited Los Angeles. Looking back, Siddiqi acknowledges that he and Obama were an odd couple. Siddiqi would mock Obama's idealism — he just wanted to make a lot of money and buy things, while Obama wanted to help the poor.
"At that age, I thought he was a saint and a square, and he took himself too seriously," Siddiqi said. "I would ask him why he was so serious. He was genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor. He'd give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me very irritating."
Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man.
"We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay," said Siddiqi, who at the time worked as a waiter and as a salesman at a boutique.
In about 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street. Siddiqi managed to get the apartment thanks to subterfuge.
"We didn't have a chance in hell of getting this apartment unless we fabricated the lease application," Siddiqi said.
Siddiqi fudged his credentials, saying he had a high-paying job at a catering company, but Obama "wanted no part of it. He put down the truth."
While Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine during high school in Hawai'i, he writes in the memoir that he stopped using soon after his arrival in New York. His roommate had no such scruples.
But Siddiqi says that during their time together here, Obama always refused his offers of drugs.
Siddiqi says Obama was a follower of comedian-activist Dick Gregory's vegetarian diet. "I think self-deprivation was his schtick, denying himself pleasure, good food and all of that."
Siddiqi said his female friends thought Obama was "a hunk."
"We were always competing," he said. "You know how it is. You go to a bar and you try hitting on the girls. He had a lot more success. I wouldn't out-compete him in picking up girls, that's for sure."
Finally, their relationship started to fray. "I was partying all the time. I was disrupting his studies," Siddiqi said. Obama moved out.
---
Sohale Siddiqi, his real name, confirmed Mr. Obama’s account that he turned serious in New York and “stopped getting high.” ... What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends.
Michael J. Wolf, Classmate
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.”
Michael Ackerman, Classmate
A young man with a red backpack often lingered outside the International Affairs Building. He was a commuter student, so he typically arrived early, but the door to his Modern Political Movements class was always locked until the last minute. His classmate, Michael Ackerman, CC ’84, always forgot whether his name was Barry or Barack. He knew that “Barak” means “thunder” in Hebrew, but Ackerman didn’t think he looked Jewish. Ackerman said he found his fellow political science major “charming,” but the two remained only casual acquaintances.
Barack Obama, CC ’83, was “almost chameleon-like, spy-like, slipped in and out,” Ackerman recalled. “He tried to keep to himself.”
According to Ackerman, who is now a lawyer in California, Obama sometimes played pick-up games of basketball and went to a few meetings of the Black Students Organization, but “he didn’t really hang out much” and kept his nose in the books. “At that time, a lot of commuters at Columbia weren’t as involved as people who lived on campus,” Ackerman said.
Jim Davidson, Classmate
... I met Barack Obama at Columbia University when we were both students there in Spring 1983... I was a student at Columbia University 1981-1985.
Not only did I meet and talk with Barack Obama at some length, he wrote an essay that was published in The Sundial magazine on campus in 1983. Over the byline “Barack Obama” is a discussion of the anti-war groups on campus, including Students Against Militarism, a group I was a member of. (I was also a member of Young Americans for Freedom.)...
So, in summary, I was a student at Columbia, I met Barack Obama, I knew he was a student, and he and I talked, among other things, about my involvement in Students Against Militarism, my discomfort with its connection to Maoists and Stalinists on campus, and my favourite hat with political buttons all over it.
Cathie M. Currie, Graduate Student
"I knew [Obama] while he was [at Columbia]. He was remarkable then, but not in the way that most people think of as "remarkable." He was not trying to be noticed — he was studious and thoughtful. I said of him: "Whatever Barack decides to do for a career, he will be the best at it." When he left our group he was often on his way to a library."
"We played soccer on the lawn in front of Butler — I was usually the only woman playing and he treated me as equally as the others: if I was open, he sent the ball into the space in front of me, if I wasn’t open — he never made the silly passes that some men did to try to act like they were being egalitarian. The "into the space" passing was consistent — he was a superior strategist — and many of us had been college or semi-pro players. We always wanted him on our team."
"After games we had discussions — and we found that the same thoughtfulness of play was evident in his thinking about policy and social issues. He was a serious guy, but always had a ready laugh or twinkle in his eye."
"I was doing my Ph.D. — I assumed he was a fellow grad student. When I saw him on television at the Democratic Convention I was only surprised that I knew him, but entirely not surprised at his achievement."
"The people who are making these claims, Fox et al, do not understand Columbia. I recently told a father of a current student that he should visit the campus on a warm Friday night to see the school environment that is uniquely CU — it is the same as when I studied there: hundreds of us sitting on the library steps doing school work on laptops."
Currie isn't surprised that he was not widely-remembered by fellow Columbia classmates. "My sense of it was that he was keeping a low profile," Currie said.
He seemed like someone who had made a decision to prioritize his studies, she said. "We'd ask him to go out with us for beers after soccer," she said. "He seemed like he wanted to, but then he'd step back and say, 'Sorry, I'm going to the library.'"
Jonathan Zimmerman '83, Classmate (Added 8/10/2012)
Would he attend his thirtieth next year? Obama’s classmate Jonathan Zimmerman, director of the History of Education Program at New York University, who remembers the president from a sociology class taught by Andrew Walder, hopes so. “I’ve never been to a reunion,” he said. “But if that guy says he’s going, I’m going!”
FACULTY
Lennard Davis, Assistant Professor (Now Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago)
In the spring of 1983, I was Barack Obama's professor at Columbia University. Barack, or Barry as he was known then, was a senior in my class on "The Novel and Ideology." I understand from reliable sources that he liked the class and was intrigued by what I was teaching.
Michael L. Baron, Professor of Political Science
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.
In 1983, as a senior at Columbia in New York, Barack Obama enrolled in an intense, eight-student honors seminar called American Foreign Policy. His former professor, Michael Baron, recalled in an interview with NBC News that Obama easily aced the year-long class. But Baron says he never had any inkling that the gangly senior would scale such heights.
“You wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, he’s going to be secretary of state or president someday’,” Baron said. Obama was whip smart and “clearly one of the top one or two students in the class,” he said, but Obama’s seven classmates also could hold their own. “No real dolts in the class,” Baron remembered.
Twenty-five years later, Baron is president of a digital-media company in Florida and has hung up his professorial tweeds for good. He had saved Obama’s senior paper for years, and even hunted for it again this month in some boxes. But he said his search was fruitless, and he now thinks he tossed it out eight years ago during a move.
Baron described the paper as a “thesis” or “senior thesis” in several interviews, and said that Obama spent a year working on it. Baron recalls that the topic was nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union.
“My recollection is that the paper was an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States,” Baron said in an e-mail. “At that time, a hot topic in foreign policy circles was finding a way in which each country could safely reduce the large arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other … For U.S. policy makers in both political parties, the aim was not disarmament, but achieving deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and keeping a substantial and permanent American advantage. As I remember it, the paper was about those negotiations, their tactics and chances for success. Barack got an A.”
Baron said that, even if he could find a copy of the paper, it would likely disappoint Obama’s critics. “The course was not a polemical course, it was a course in decision making and how decisions got made,” he said. “None of the papers in the class were controversial.”
So would it provide any political ammunition today? “I don’t think it would at all,” Baron said. “It wasn’t a position paper; it was an analysis of decision-making.”
Baron acknowledges that he’s a big Obama supporter. He wrote a letter of recommendation for his former student when Obama applied to Harvard Law School. And, Federal Election Commission records show, the former professor has donated $1,250 to Obama’s presidential campaign.
“People assume he’s a novice,” said Michael L. Baron, who taught Mr. Obama in a Columbia seminar on international politics and American policy around the time he wrote the Sundial article. “He’s been thinking about these issues for a long time. It’s not like one of his advisers said, ‘Why don’t you throw this out?’ ”
In a paper for Dr. Baron, Mr. Obama analyzed how a president might go about negotiating nuclear arms reductions with the Russians — exactly what he is seeking to do this week.
:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO
op: