Is Barack Obama the presidential-wannabe darling of academe?

College employees gave him more money than they gave to any other 2008 presidential contender in the first half of the year, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. They contributed a total of $1.46-million to Mr. Obama, a Democratic U.S. senator from Illinois, through June 30.

Mr. Obama is also outshining other candidates on Facebook and MySpace, the online social-networking sites that are popular among college students and recent graduates.

Mr. Obama has logged more than 136,000 supporters on his Facebook page and more than 167,000 friends on his official and unofficial MySpace profiles, according to the TechPresident Web site. On both tallies, he is top among all presidential contenders.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic U.S. senator from New York, comes in second on both counts, and Ron Paul, a Republican U.S. representative from Texas, comes in third.

Meanwhile, it also turns out that the theology professoriate apparently “digs Barack Obama,” according to Jacques Berlinerblau, an associate professor at Georgetown University.

But, as Mr. Berlinerblau reminds us in his blog item, all this praise from the ivory tower may not say much about Mr. Obama’s prospects in the primaries: “Of course, the types of politicians who mesmerize the theology professors,” he writes, “are rarely the ones who sway the American electorate.”