My Comment on Obama's Teaching Materials
As Jim noted below, the New York Times ran a story today on Barack Obama's teaching experience at the University of Chicago Law School called Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart (registration probably required). The Caucus: The New York Times Political Blog, is making the materials available for readers to examine for themselves, along with comments by Pam Karlan (Stanford), Akhil Amar (Yale), John Eastman (Chapman) and me in a post called Inside Professor Obama's Classroom. There will also be a further round of comments later today. You should cruise on over and post to the comment board there. Here is my initial take on what his teaching materials teach us:
While the course materials themselves do not tell us very much about Senator Obama, the candidate, what they do tell is about Obama, the teacher, is generally favorable. I was particularly intrigued by his 1994 syllabus on “Racism and the Law.” The materials assigned were balanced, including several readings by Frederick Douglass, who many modern race theorists have come to disparage as insufficiently radical (as Obama would know), along with an exchange between Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy on the one hand and Charles Cooper (who is now on Senator McCain’s advisory committee) and Texas law professor Lino Graglia on the other. All three essays appeared in the conservative/libertarian Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy as part of a 1991 symposium on “The Future of Civil Rights Law” and were initially presented at the Federalist Society’s 1990 National Student Symposium held at Stanford. The articles were published during Obama’s third year as a law student so it is not surprising that he would be aware of them. And they would have been fresh at the time they were assigned.You should check out the other posts.
I was struck by Obama’s list of possible discussion topics for his seminar. They comprehensively and concisely identified most of the issues of “race and the law” that were then being widely discussed. What particularly impressed me was how even handed were his presentations of the competing sides the students might take. These summaries were remarkably free of the sort of cant and polemics that all too often afflicts academic discussions of race. Were this not a seminar on “racism and the law” I doubt one could tell which side of each issue the teacher was on. And indeed, even knowing it was written by Senator Obama, one cannot be sure which side of each issue he really took. Whatever position he held, however, Obama could clearly see and dispassionately articulate the other side.
The exam question and answer keys manifest a keen comprehension of then-prevailing Supreme Court Due Process and Equal Protection Clause doctrine. There is no doubt that his students were taught “the law” (such as it was), not merely the teacher’s viewpoints. His exam questions were nicely designed to ferret out the student’s understanding, but also the cracks and fissures in the Supreme Court’s current approach to the Constitution. What they did not show, however, were any insights on the how he thought Supreme Court doctrine could be improved.
Indeed, if one is looking to these material to learn more about Senator Obama’s own views of either “racism and the law” or the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, one will be disappointed. He either was skillful at concealing his own take on these issues both in these materials and in the classroom (as reported by his former students) or he held no deep commitments on what one would think were matters of central concern to him. While this latter possibility would make him a flexible politician, it is bound to disappoint his most vehement supporters and detractors alike. In the end, while they confirm that the former president of the Harvard Law Review is a smart guy, and an exceptionally fair-minded teacher, they tell us little about his core beliefs on the very sensitive issues covered by these courses. Nor perhaps should we have expected them to.
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But not for the grace and selflessness of President Obama, you would feel the wrath of all liberty-loving Americans! Who is this "Volokh," and why does he think he can run a website slandering the Cherished One?
You will pay for your slander.
As it is, the usual suspects will just have to stick with the "Obama is shapeshifter who will say or do anything to impose his stealth collectivist, white-enslaving views on hardworking, God-fearing, blue-collar folk."
Why put that jab in there? Oh, Obama was just an adjunct. Man, ultra-conservatives really do hate the guy. Their bias is astounding. Is this why we need more conservatives in academia?
Given Obama's course materials and exams, referring to him as merely an adjunct (and calling him Mr. rather than Professor Obama), unworthy of fine students like John Eastman, really is the only way to ding the guy. Even a libertarian like me would have enjoyed Obama's class. It appears to have been an especially stimulating class.
Obama might not win the election, but he is completely and totally owning the conservative hacktocracy. He is making them really stretch to find a way to criticize him - which just makes people like Eastman look petty in the process.
Now Obama and others of his type are the exception to the adjunct rule. Some departments do employee experienced people as adjuncts but many are not of the same quality as full-time faculty (IMO).
It will probably cover McCain's watershed paper A Linguistic Study of "Trollop" and "C*nt" in Modern Discourse.
You wrote that "[w]hat [the materials] did not show, however, were any insights on how [Obama] thought Supreme Court doctrine could be improved." Can you generalize for us on how well, if at all, Obama's course materials could have substituted for the kind of research and written scholarship that law school faculty tenure committees usually look for in published articles of tenure candidates?
The reason I ask, of course, is the (to me) startling assertion in the NYT article that after Obama lost his 2002 run for Congress, Chicago Law School offered Obama a very sweet package that included "tenure upon hiring" if he would become a full-time faculty member. I think it's undisputed that Obama had a thin, almost imperceptible career as a practicing lawyer, had never been a judge (or even clerked for a judge), and had never published (even as a student law review member and editor) any scholarly research whatsoever. He did have a strong academic record from an excellent law school -- surely good enough to justify the tenure-track offers that Chicago had previously been reported itself to have made. He also had, by then, several years as a state legislator.
Do you think a plausible argument can be made that his exams, and even his model answers to a few of them, could substitute for the years of research and publication that is the traditional route by which tenure-track legal academics actually earn their tenure? Or do you share my surprise that a school with Chicago's academic standing and traditions would offer tenure to someone who'd never published?
When I paid good money to go to law school, I wanted good teachers. That didn't always correlate with professional standing, unfortunately.
As I understand it, the tradition at UChig is that everyone is called "Mr." except for MD's who are called "Doctor".
My white collar crime class was taught by the head prosecutor of the white collar criminal prosecution division.
My sentencing and corrections course was taught by an adjunct - a criminal court judge.
Ken Starr was an "adjunct" professor, teaching a con law course here-and-there while he worked in private practice or worked for the government.
Paul Clement taught separation of powers as an adjunct at Georgetown.
Did those students miss out because their profs didn't have or didn't want tenure?
Indeed, you are correct, my esteemed colleagues! If only that wiley old curmudgeon had spent less time being hung from the rafters by Vitnamese interrogators--breaking and discloating every bone in his arms--he might have actually picked something up during what was the apex of intellectual achievement in this country!
Truly, McCain is a close-minded, uneducated troll. Certainly not on the same level of ourselves.
Here, you and others have reviewed Hussein's "course material" and have been relatively positive with your comments. You reviewed what you were given. You are the experts in this area. Can I ask that you go back and review them again, looking for things that aught to be there but aren't? Are there time periods, semesters, for example, that are not accounted for? Are there subject areas that should have/might have been covered but weren't? Do we have an actual calendar of his teaching schedule? Are there missing time periods? Who filled in for him when he was gone? Wouldn't you, as law professors, expect that some of his former students would have come forward with anecdotal highlights? I've seen no such comments have you? Is that normal?
I don't trust the guy and, to me, if he is revealing material now, it is only because it has been scrubbed.
This would be the woman with whom he was having an affair? The woman he married who was just more than half his age? That woman?
EIDE_Interface you got the magic words, but forgot the holy water.
The world waits with bated breath.
As you allude to earlier, isn't the topic usually addressed as "race and the law," not "racism and the law"?
I suspect this assessment is correct. We have virtually no information on this Barack Obama character. One thing we do know is that he is a flip-flopper of historical proportions. He couldn't even decide what race he wanted to be when he was born!
At the Law School ('97), we called all of them "Professor". To this day, I can't imagine speaking to Lawrence Lessig or Cass Sunstein without using the title.
This is, of course, like the lodge handshake, designed to separate the insiders from the outsiders. Outsiders could be immediately identified and snickered at (as being among the vast unwashed not intelligent enough to get into the UC) by the fact that they called people "doctor" or "professor". If Adam B. is correct, it appears that standards on enforcing the social norms have gone to pot. Just another reason not to donate to the alumni fund!
Sometimes I wonder if McCain isn't trying to throw the election. He's going to have to do better than try to use Bush's 2004 playbook. It just doesn't fit him and is likely going to end up back firing.
Amen to that
This is awesome.
Seriously, it is becoming very difficult to distinguish between the sincere and the satirical.
I don't call what he did to his first wife dumb. I call it despicable and a sign of exceptionally bad character.
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dyer:
You are not in a position to claim he never published in HLR. You are only in a position to claim that he never published signed material. HLR includes a lot of unsigned material.
Also, you should not imply that it's common for an HLR member (or president) to publish signed material in HLR. Of the 80 members of HLR while Obama was there, this many published signed material in HLR: zero (details here).
I think we discussed all this in the other thread. As I recall, you never addressed these issues.
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OBAMA!!!!!:
That's a bit exaggerated. But since he graduated at the bottom of his class, there is indeed lots of room to wonder about how smart he is. Especially when he may have gotten in via AA (Admiral Action) to begin with.
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joe:
The GOP knows that the next four years are going to be hell because of the mess Dubya made, so they would prefer to let a D take the blame. There's no other way to explain why McCain's campaign is so feeble.
So don't blame Eastman for that "insult."
FWIW, I had the same positive reaction to the materials Obama selected and the objective analysis exhibited in the model answers to some very interesting test questions. I have nowhere near your scholastic credentials (I was not a law review calibre student), but after practising law for over 40 years, most in a big-firm environment, I think I know good work when I see it.
I found his discourse in the answers was scholarly, objective and well-balanced, rather than ideologically slanted to the left. He also was able to articulate without disparagement the views of conservative Justices, particularly, Scalia.
I believe he would make a much better law professor than a President or CIC.
For those professors interested in fostering diversity, it would seem to me that they would be in favor of giving someone as talented as BHO a hand up to tenure, as opposed to a hand out. All in the Spirit of the Affirmative Action they consistently advocate.
In the meantime, I will continue to rely on what the Obama campaign's official spokesman told Politico.com, which I'll (once again) quote verbatim:
I've seen this repeatedly from Obama in settings far beyond the law and may account for a significant proportion of his appeal. Would that this were less rare, for the sake of the nation an even of the left itself.
I have no need to show proof for a claim I have not made. You, on the other hand, have made the claim that Obama "never published … any scholarly research whatsoever." Where's your proof? You either have proof, or you've proven that you like to state as facts things that you do not know for a fact. Which is it?
LaBolt only said Obama didn't write a signed article. He might have submitted unsigned material. Notwithstanding Politico's remark ("one thing Obama did not do while with the review was publish any of his own work") which unaccountably goes beyond Politico's paraphrase of what Labolt said.
I also notice you have not addressed this: of the 80 members of HLR while Obama was there, this many published signed material in HLR: zero. Nevertheless, you like to imply that HLR members typically publish signed material. Do you have grounds for this, or is it another instance of you implying you know a fact that you do not know for a fact?