Obama the Law Professor

The NY Times article on Obama as the law Professor at the University of Chicago has now done the rounds of the numerous legally-informed blogs on the web (Check out Instapundit for some links). I still can't quite believe the trajectory of his career. If it were in a film, you'd laugh at how ludicrously unbelievable the plot was. So let's start at the beginning:

The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship.

Wait a second, an academic who hasn't published one single scholarly article, and this is supposed to be a good thing? That's like ignoring a third of your job responsibilities. Still, I guess he started as he meant to go on:

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The HarvardLaw Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

This kills me. As someone nearing the end of their PhD and looking (possibly) for an academic position, the thought of getting a fellowship and then using it to write my memoirs is almost unfathomable...but perhaps more amazing is that the Law School were happy to go along with this.

Then there's this:

In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

If a white guy imitated 'clueless black people' in a lecture how long would it be before he got fired: three seconds...maybe four?

Seems like nothing has really changed either:

In his voting rights course, Mr. Obama taught Lani Guinier’s proposals for structuring elections differently to increase minority representation. Opponents attacked those suggestions when Ms. Guinier was nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, costing her the post.

“I think he thought they were good and worth trying,” said David Franklin, who now teaches law at DePaul University in Chicago.

But whether out of professorial reserve or budding political caution, Mr. Obama would not say so directly. “He surfaced all the competing points of view on Guinier’s proposals with total neutrality and equanimity,” Mr. Franklin said. “He just let the class debate the merits of them back and forth.”

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.

Typically of Obama, he avoids the difficult questions which could come back to haunt him (think back to all the 'present' votes or the 'I pressed the wrong button' votes in the Illinois legislature). It's almost impossible to know what he actually thinks about these issues, and it's not like he publishes either, remember:

Nor could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her. “He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said.

The Chicago law faculty is full of intellectually fiery friendships that burn across ideological lines. Three times a week, professors do combat over lunch at a special round table in the university’s faculty club, and they share and defend their research in workshop discussions. Mr. Obama rarely attended, even when he was in town.

Of course, God forbid he discuss important social and legal issues with the best legal minds in the country...Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers are much better sounding boards.

You know, I can't make any judgement about how a law school professor should live or write or teach but from reading this article it becomes glaringly obvious that Barack Obama is, and probably always has been, a politician at heart (and, no, not the kind that wants to make things better for their constituents). He's charted his career very carefully (almost cynically), making sure his fingerprints are nowhere to be found. The poor guy's been running for President for about 20 years.