Thursday, July 31, 2008

Vetting Prof Obama's Exams   [Travis Kavulla]

Just now getting around to reading some of the exams Obama assigned in his role as senior lecturer at the University of Chicago law school. Lots of civil rights cases, it seems: His courses were Constitutional Law and a special seminar on “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” Kwame Anthony Appiah and Cornel West appear on the syllabus, but so too does Robert Bork. 

Tantalizingly, the New York Times dug up the “model answers” he provided for two years, 1996 and 1997. But there’s little for someone hoping to exploit an image of Obama as any kind of radical academic: His responses are two-sided, finely balanced, sober. He seems the typical disinterested law prof to me, perhaps worthy of congratulations for keeping his aloofness intact, despite an incendiary subject matter.

There is one somewhat interesting point. One of the 1997 questions (question 2) is a hypothetical about something called the Ujamaa School. (Ujamaa is a Swahili term with political — specifically, agrarian socialist — connotations that means roughly “comradeship.” The word is occasionally used in America by Afrocentric preachers and pedagogues.) This hypothetical school, anyways, has a professedly “Afrocentric” curriculum — Obama describes it as the black answer to a “Eurocentric” school that teaches Latin and Shakespeare — which is designed to bring black students into the folds of public learning.  

After asking his students to vet the legal aspects — whether it complies with Brown v. Board, etc.— he asks “Is Ujamaa a good idea?” Sadly, consulting his own answer sheet, Lecturer Obama seems a lot like Candidate Obama, saying he has no right answer and not volunteering his own opinion. He does posit a “justifiable skepticism in the prospect of truly integrated schools,” however, and points out that a “slim majority” of students “favored the idea of a Ujamaa-type program,” notwithstanding its possible legal troubles.

07/31 10:42 AMShare