Taking Professor Obama’s Class
Barack Obama’s teaching experience at the University of Chicago offers a window into how he leads.
By Steven Gray
As the presidential race heats up and Democratic nominee Barack Obama is forced to respond to increasingly tough attacks from the Palin-energized GOP ticket, his campaign style is coming under growing scrutiny. Some feel the candidate has too often been more head than heart, more intellectual than passionate, less a leader than a lecturer. Will his style survive the rough-and-tumble of a modern media-saturated presidential campaign?
Yet balancing the two personae — professor and politician — has been key to Obama's success. Much of his style can be traced back to his dozen years as an academic, at the University of Chicago Law School. A look at those teaching days reveals just how he has managed to be at once popular and intellectually exacting.
By most accounts, Obama's time at the law school was a huge success. He arrived in 1992, fresh out of Harvard Law School, to juggle teaching courses in constitutional law and race theory. Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with hordes of devoted students, written a popular book and launched a political career as an Illinois state senator.
The University of Chicago sits on the city's South Side in a neighborhood called Hyde Park, an enclave of tree-lined streets, upscale condos and cafés. The law school is a space agey, 1960s-era glass-covered building on a campus largely modeled after Oxford University. Classroom No. 5 was Obama's favorite. It's a spare space on the building's first floor, with a stretch of windows overlooking a parking lot. Obama usually sat at a desk front and center in the room, before several semicircled rows of students. "What are the principles we can glean from this case?" he'd often ask as he began each class. Sometimes he'd wait for students to voluntarily make their arguments; other times he'd "cold call" them by name. Obvious answers wouldn't work. Nor would a simple "Yes, I agree." It was like a conversation.
"There was a lot of give-and-take," says Marta Lowe, who took Obama's Current Issues in Racism and the Law class during the spring of 1995. "There was no pontificating from on high about what we should think. It was us organically coming up with kernels of wisdom." Obama in academe proved to be more charismatic than academic. Evaluations by students reviewed by TIME gave him consistently high ratings. For a winter 2003 course called Voting Rights and the Democratic Process, for example, he received a 6.07 out of a possible 7 for "overall evaluation of teaching performance."
“There was a lot of give-and-take. There was no pontificating from on high about what we should think. It was us organically coming up with kernels of wisdom.”
His exams as well were engaging and almost communal. Consider the one he gave for Constitutional Law III in the Fall 1997 semester. Students were told to act as attorneys in the make-believe state of Futura, advising the parents of a 23-year-old woman named Dolly, who had established a living will before sustaining near fatal injuries in a car accident. The will empowered her parents to make "any and all decisions regarding medical treatment," including terminating "life-sustaining treatment." The parents wanted to clone Dolly by taking a healthy cell from her body and inserting it into an embryo whose genetic material had been removed. The case hinged on a single question: Did the state's ban on such cloning violate the constitutional rights of Dolly and her parents? "You do not need to arrive at a definitive conclusion," Obama advised in the five-page exam. "Instead, make the strongest possible argument for each claim. Be sure to consider the possibility that Futura's ban on cloning does in fact encroach on some constitutionally recognized rights, but is nevertheless constitutional."
Beyond the classroom, Obama was an enigmatic figure at the law school, a bastion of conservative legal and economic scholarship that reveled in debate. He continued to teach even after becoming an Illinois state legislator, and perhaps because of the nearly four-hour commute to the capital of Springfield, Obama rarely attended the school's afternoon meetings, during which instructors and students discussed and argued a range of topics. To some degree, Obama's absence from those meetings isolated him from the highly opinionated scholars who were residents on campus, leading some to see it as an aloofness from a person with a too self-assured worldview. Richard Epstein, a Chicago professor and one of the nation's leading libertarians, sees a parallel with Obama's campaign style. When Obama grants audiences to adversaries, Epstein says, "he's got this wonderful manner, cocks his head forward, always asks good questions. You always feel you've been heard out." But in the end, "he doesn't change his mind. He's surprisingly rigid, intellectually."
Yet the school administration appeared to adore him, even when he began basically working part-time, with most of his week spent in the state capital. He had been reluctant to take the University of Chicago job in the first place, planning to do community work and write a book on civil rights law. But Douglas Baird, then chair of the law school's faculty appointments committee, convinced Obama to take a two-year post as a law and government fellow, promising him an office and time to work on his first book. Baird figured that "he'd be around, in case we could persuade him. [Then] we'd have the upper hand on the other schools that'd want to recruit him."
By the mid-1990s, however, Obama had published Dreams from My Father and was contemplating a career in politics. Baird, by then the law school's dean, recalls Obama walking into his office one day to announce that he planned to run for the Illinois state senate. "It's a bad idea," Baird recalls telling Obama. "You have great talents. You should think about joining the faculty." He recalls Obama saying, "That's not who I am. I want to try politics." Their arrangement: Obama was to become a senior lecturer, a title that put him on the same tier with accomplished attorneys like Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner, both of whom had become federal judges. The promotion provided Obama with a larger office and a salary higher than that of most other senior lecturers. It became a platform for him to plot his bigger moves — including eventually leaving academe entirely for politics.
In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes: "I loved the law school classroom: the stripped-down nature of it, the high-wire act of standing in front of a room at the beginning of each class with just blackboard and chalk, the students taking measure of me, some intent or apprehensive, others demonstrative in their boredom, the tension broken by my first question — What's this case about? — and the hands tentatively rising, the initial responses and me pushing back against whatever arguments surfaced." Professor Obama is facing a classroom the size of America now. The question is whether he'll be able to bring his students along.
