As a young law professor at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, Barack Obama wowed his students and puzzled his colleagues, according to today’s New York Times.
The article describes Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, as a popular professor and something of an anomaly: a junior faculty member who turned down offers of tenured positions and never published a single work of legal scholarship. While Mr. Obama was “well liked” at the law school, he kept his opinions to himself, “leaving colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage,” the article says.
Mr. Obama joined the law school as a fellow in 1991, at the recommendation of a conservative scholar, Michael W. McConnell, who had been impressed by Mr. Obama’s editing suggestions on an article Mr. McConnell wrote for the Harvard Law Review. During his 12 years at the Chicago law school, Mr. Obama ran for office five times and taught three courses, rising from lecturer to senior lecturer, a title generally reserved for federal judges.
Former students interviewed by the Times said that Mr. Obama had a “disarming touch,” drawing out students patiently rather than interrogating them. But he also liked to provoke, challenging students to take unpopular positions on issues involving race. Students — particularly liberal ones — flocked to his classes and gave him “positive to superlative” evaluations, the article says. Some students referred to themselves as his “groupies” and became his early political supporters.
But his colleagues were sometimes frustrated that he wouldn’t take a stand, either in person or in print. One libertarian faculty member suggests that he never published because he didn’t want to put his name on a document that could later haunt him politically.
“He figured out, you lay low,” the professor, Richard Epstein, told the Times. “He was a successful teacher and an absentee tenant on the other issues.”
The online version of the article is accompanied by copies of the syllabi and final exams Mr. Obama used in his classes from 1996 to 2003.
