Why Is Senator Obama Silent About His Undergraduate Years at Columbia?

"There may well be a completely different reason for [Senator Obama's Columbia] Transcript not being released. The Transcript will show Obama's name and ADDRESS in New York. While Obama was at Columbia, Bill Ayers was studying at Bank Street College - less than a quarter of a mile down the street. Given the similarity of their politics, it is highly unlikely that they did not know each other."---New York Sun Commenter "Will"

The picture above was taken while Senator Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia. It was probably taken in 1981 or 82, according to Zombietime (10-27-08).

Senator Obama was born on August 4, 1961. He graduated from high school in 1979 and from Columbia in 1983. Senator Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia in 1981. Senator Obama has not provided much information about his years as an undergraduate at Columbia, so many people are speculating that Senator Obama became involved with his "neighbor" the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers during his college years.

I would like the media to ask Senator Obama if he knew the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and/or his wife the terrorist Bernardine Dohrn while he was at Columbia. Just answer "yes" or "no." That doesn't take much time.

Zombietime observes that little is known about Senator Obama's years at Columbia, and he has posted an article titled "Barack Obama's Close Encounter with the Weather Underground: Did the presidential candidate and the revolutionary terror group cross paths at a violent 1981 anti-Apartheid protest?" (10-27-08).

Zombietime (10-27-08) comments:

What I do know is that Obama had the same political interests as the final remnants of the Weather Underground at the exact same time in the exact same place. That as an adult he was living in the same city where and when they conducted their second-to-last terror attack, which was a protest against the Apartheid polices of South Africa -- the very topic to which Obama has said he was devoted at that time. So because of all this, Obama must have known about the Weather Underground and their tactics while he was still in college. So when he met Weather Underground founder William Ayers 13 years later, Obama certainly had to have known exactly who Ayers was and what he had done.

...[D]amn how the coincidences -- if you can call them that -- kept piling up. I may have never found proof that Obama was at Kennedy Airport on September 26, 1981, when Weather Underground terrorists blinded an innocent man, but I did uncover evidence to suggest he could have been there. Indeed, all the facts point in one direction: that he could very likely have gone to the protest, because protesting against Apartheid was by his own admission his field of interest at the time. And he was in New York on that day. But primarily because very little is known about that period in Obama's life, we may never find out the real story [See full text].

The New York Sun has also published an article titled "Obama's Years at Columbia Are a Mystery" (9-2-08).

...[O]ne chapter of the tale remains a blank — his education at Columbia College, a place he rarely speaks about and where few people seem to remember him.

...The Obama campaign has refused to release his college transcript, despite an academic career that led him to Harvard Law School and, later, to a lecturing position at the University of Chicago. The shroud surrounding his experience at Columbia contrasts with that of other major party nominees since 2000, all whom have eventually released information about their college performance or seen it leaked to the public.

..."We like to pretend IQ doesn't matter, but it really does with a lot of jobs, including the presidency," a professor at Smith College who studies the effects of human intelligence on the economy, James Miller, said. "We can't trust the information that candidates give us, so it's important to look for objective data that they can't falsify or distort."

Mr. Miller acknowledged that Mr. Obama displayed academic achievement at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude and led the Harvard Law Review. Still, Mr. Miller said, he would like to see information about how Mr. Obama performed in various subjects at Columbia.

...The Obama campaign declined to comment for this article and did not offer an explanation for why his transcript has not been released.

...In contrast with the rest of Mr. Obama's life story, little is known about his college experience. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia in 1981. The move receives only a mention in Mr. Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father," which instead devotes that chapter to his impressions of race and class struggles in New York.

An article in a Columbia University publication, Columbia College Today, reported that Mr. Obama has portrayed Columbia as a period of buckling down following a troubled adolescence. He did not socialize much, he has said, instead spending a lot of time in the library, "like a monk." He has also stated that he was involved to some extent with the Black Students Organization.

Federal law limits the information that Columbia can release about Mr. Obama's time there. 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. [Full text].

One person who read this article responded with this speculative comment:

Submitted by Will, Sep 22, 2008 16:59

There may well be a completely different reason for the Transcript not being released. The Transcript will show Obama's name and ADDRESS in New York. While Obama was at Columbia, Bill Ayers was studying at Bank Street College - less than a quarter of a mile down the street. Given the similarity of their politics, it is highly unlikely that they did not know each other. I am suggesting, and it is only a suggestion, that Obama may have even have lived with Ayers and his wife, and the transcripts are withheld for fear of revealing that fact. A close relationship at Columbia would also explain why Obama moved to Chicago, and not back to Hawaii, when he graduated Columbia. So it is possible that Obama went from being Mentored by Frank Marshall Davis directly to being mentored by Bill Ayers, who then assisted ingetting him into Harvard via Khalid Al Mansour, and also got him onto the Woods Foundation Board and the Chicago Anneberg Challenge.

THis would make Obama out to be a bare faced liar in his claim of "Hardly knowing Ayers as someone who just happened to live in his neighborhood."

Since Senator Obama chooses to remain silent about his Columbia years, perhaps these speculations are not far from the mark.

We already know from Bill Ayers' stary-eyed admirers that Senator Obama lied when he claimed that Bill Ayers was only his neighbor. A young scholar who admires Bill Ayers and who coauthored a book with Bernardine Dohrn on juvenile justice issues wrote an article in Slate (10-10-08) titled:

The Bill Ayers that Barack Obama and I worked with was no "domestic terrorist."

Note that the title of the article confirms that Senator Obama "worked with" Bill Ayers. They weren't just neighbors. And of course, Bill Ayers was a Weather Underground terrorist.

Young Tanenhaus reveals that Mrs. Michelle Obama even promoted Bill Ayers' book, A Kind and Just Parent, in the law school, giving the terrorist respectibility in the eyes of the legal community:

The publication in 1997 of Ayers' book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court attracted much local and national attention...That year, Chicago named Ayers its "Citizen of the Year." In November, Michelle Obama, who was then director of the university's community service center, convened a panel at the law school to discuss Ayers' book and the issues it raised.

The scariest part of young Tanenhaus' eyewitness account is his nauseating observaton in Slate (10-10-08) that the the Ayers-Dohrn crime family bake gingerbread houses at Christmas. Young Tanenhaus forgets that the witch in Hansel and Gretel lived in a gingerbread house:

I now include the Weather Underground in the history surveys I teach to undergraduates. I do my best to place them in the context of the radicalism of the late 1960s. I sometimes find it hard to believe that the Bill and Bernardine that Barack and I met in Hyde Park in the 1990s are the same people that my students are learning about in class. I know them better as the couple that invited me into their home in 2000 to meet their extended family, make gingerbread-cookie houses, and share Christmas dinner. Our conversation that night, as it almost always did, focused on the future, not the past.

The young professor of juvenile justice Tanenhaus is providing context for murder. I call that rationalizing murder. Lovely. I guess Tanenhaus is not interested in justice for the people murdered, maimed, and terrorized by the rich communist psychopaths who ran the Weather Underground. Is that the America's future?