The Occidental President: Obama and Teachable Moments May 11, 2010—Huffington Post In his new biography The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, author David Remnick describes how a young Barry Obama discovered the value of a liberal arts education.
education which small colleges provide. During the campaign, the Oxy campus store had fun with the Obama brand, producing a line of “BarOxyWear” clothing (the best selling, “Change We Need” diaper pants, the Barack Rocks t-shirt), and Obama mugs and hats. KCET, the local public TV station, produced a special report on Obama at Oxy, and national and world wide press coverage was largely favorable.
During his two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s leading liberals arts colleges, Obama learned to read and to think critically. He took courses in American and European political philosophy from the school’s renowned professor Roger Boesche. He read works of magical fiction by Latin American authors. He met American black students and engaged in nights of debate and discussion on the politics of the day—and he got to know foreign students from countries such as Pakistan and India. He lear ned about his strengths and his weaknesses. He was not good enough to become a professional basketball player, but he could give a political speech in public— against apartheid—and move a crowd. He could express himself with the written word, even publish his poems in the school literary magazine.
When the new Oxy President, Harvard trained scholar Jonathan Veitch, arrived on campus last fall he challenged faculty and administrators to go beyond t-shirts and to utilize the Obama connection to Oxy for ongoing educational purposes. To illustrate the liberal arts education that Obama received at Oxy, an exhibition of the books Obama read in Professor Boesche’s political philosophy courses was mounted in the book store, and a self-guided tour of “Obama at Oxy” which showed where he had delivered his first political speech and where he took classes was prepared. Along with a colleague in the Politics department, Professor Caroline Heldman, I was asked to teach a course called “Obama and the Issues—the Challenge of Change." The idea was to use Obama’s first year and half in office as a series of teachable moments (one of his favorite phrases) to examine his political leadership and the terrain on which he exercises it.
Above all, he became comfortable in his own skin. As Newsweek put it in a cover article during the campaign, it was “When Barry Became Barack.” He moved on to Columbia where Oxy had an exchange program, and then to Harvard Law with a new found sense of identity and purpose.
Because it was a course in history as it happens, there were no ideal texts. We found one collection of essays—Obama: Year One —written by leading political scientists including my cousin David Magleby, Dean of Brigham Young University, who contributed an essay on how Obama’s use of the Internet has changed Presidential campaigns. We also
Because the truth about Obama at Oxy is a good story (he did not, as conservatives would have it, become indoctrinated by Marxists or Feminists, nor was he recruited by the CIA or Jihadists as some conspiracy bloggers now claim), Occidental is proud to claim him as an exemplar of the liberal arts !88