Obama Continues to Distance Himself From Columbia

Obama and grandparents at a bench in Riverside Park adjacent to Columbia, a few yards from where I type this.

You gotta wonder what Columbia did (or didn't do) to our next President.

Obama, who transferred to Columbia and graduated in 1983, rarely mentioned Columbia during the campaign. Even during a visit to Columbia in September for a candidates forum with John McCain, Obama played down his connection to Columbia. If anything, he criticized the university during the event: "With all due respect to the President of this fine university, the best education I ever had was on the streets of Chicago."

Obama has also refused speaking invitations ever since the University began inviting him in 2004. By contrast, John McCain, who did not attend Columbia but whose daughter graduated from Columbia in 2006, has.

It may not come as a surprise then that, with the launch of the new White House webpage today, Obama's biographical page does not make any mention of Columbia (let alone the Ivy League or New York City). It does, however, mention that the President attended Harvard Law. It's not stylistic either: both Vice President Biden and First Lady Michelle Obama have plugs for the University of Delaware and Princeton in their bios, respectively.

Now I don't begrudge the President for refusing to chum up the Alma Mater like he does Harvard Law. I can't imagine he has much connection to, or appreciation for, a school that threw him out on the street his first night here and reportedly denied him the opportunity to graduate with honors because he was a transfer student.

Columbia is plagued by the notion that it lacks the sort of community and alumni network that other sesqui-bicentennial universities and its rivals in the Ivy League boast. (The least of it being the fact that Columbia's meager alumni giving rate hurts the school in the ever-important annual US News rankings, which on occasion ranks Ivies like the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth a bit higher, despite being what many consider lesser academic institutions). That the Columbia Club of New York, the school's official alumni organization in its backyard of New York City, has no official clubhouse in that backyard and has actually had to rent access to the Princeton Clubhouse in midtown Manhattan (not far from the Penn, Harvard, or Yale clubhouses, which serve those institutions beyond their statelines) really cements Columbia's impotence in this regard.

Now, the fact that the first Columbian elected President refuses to even acknowledge the school only makes it worse. Despite the fanfare on Low Plaza today, PrezBo has got to be worried about the way Obama avoids Columbia as if it were the plague, not unlike the way John McCain avoided Bush 43 during the campaign.

In Columbia's defense, Obama may just lack attachment to a school where he lived as a self-described "monk." That said, if Columbia denies me Latin Honors because I'm a transfer student, they sure as hell aren't getting so much as a dime from me.