Last week, my friends at the Washington Examiner
published a work of deep-dive research. It's called "The
Obama You Don’t Know " and it's absolutely worth your valuable time. It is,
in essence, the due diligence America’s media should have done back in
2007.
My favorite part of the report is
the debunking of Obama's "rock star" status as a University of Chicago law
school lecturer. Here’s the bigger picture:
[D]uring his first two years,
when he ranked first among the law school's 40 instructors, with students giving
him a rating of 9.7 out of a possible 10.
But law student evaluations made
available to The Washington Examiner by the university showed that his
popularity then fell steadily.
In 1999, only 23 percent of the students said
they would repeat Obama's racism class. He was the third-lowest-ranked lecturer
at the law school that year. And in 2003, only a third of the student evaluators
recommended his classes.
His classes were small. A spring 1994 class attracted
14 out of a student body of 600; a spring 1996 class drew 13. In 1997, he had
the largest class of his tenure with 49 students. But by then, his student
rating had fallen to 7.75. Twenty-two of 40 faculty members ranked higher than
Obama.
The story of Obama’s time at the University of Chicago, of course,
begins with the strangeness
of his hiring. Obama was hired at Chicago for no particular purpose but
rather simply because he was Barack Obama. As the school's Douglas Baird would
later explain, "You look at his background—Harvard Law Review
president, magna cum laude, and he's African American. This is a no-brainer
hiring decision at the entry level of any law school in the
country."
Obama was given carte blanche for teaching, but instead he told
the school that he was working on a book about voting rights. So they made him a
lecturer, instead of a professor, and basically subsidized what they thought was
scholarly writing. Instead, he spent the time writing his (first)
memoir.
And all of that squares with the Examiner’s reporting on
Obama’s presence at the school:
The new faculty status put him
on par with Posner, Easterbrook and a third federal judge, Diane Wood. As the
Chicago Law School explained, senior lecturers “have high-demand careers in
politics or public service which prevent full time teaching."
"
Senior
lecturers were, however, still expected to participate in university activities.
University of Chicago Law School Senior Lecturer Richard Epstein told The
Washington Examiner that Obama did not do so.
Obama, Epstein said,
"did the minimal amount of work to get through. No one remembers him. He was not
a participant in luncheons or workshops. He was here and gone." …
Obama
was also a no-show for the faculty workshops, nonclassroom lectures and moot
court cases judged by sitting members of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals…
Current Chicago Law School professor Lisa Bernstein said faculty lecturers are
still encouraged to participate in as many such events as possible.
The
pattern of minimal performance at the Chicago campus was not an exception to the
rule for Obama. In the state Senate during the same years he was lecturing,
Obama voted "present" nearly 130 times, the most of any legislator in the
chamber.
If only he had taken the same approach to his
presidency. |
"Somehow I'd forgotten that summer isn't truffle season, which
made my recent visit to DB Bistro Moderne in midtown Manhattan almost pointless.
After all, why order the DB burger stuffed with foie gras and braised
short ribs marinated in red wine if I can't also get my fresh shavings of black
Péri-gord truffle? (That a preserved truffle is blended into the meat
is beside the point.)
This might sound excessive, but the DB is still a
magnificent creation. The flavor combination of the sirloin and short ribs is
divine—even without the fresh black truffle. Its inventor, the French chef
Daniel Boulud, describes the DB, which weighs nine ounces and is four inches
tall, as a 'burger for grown-ups.' Boulud had the idea for 'a fancy
French-American burger' in late 2000, and to this day, out of 100 lunchtime
customers at DB Bistro Moderne, roughly 80 will order the $32 indulgence. (When
in season, a roughly $150 version is available, with a double portion of black
truffle shavings.)"
MORE |
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