Does Obama value libraries?

September 5th, 2008 by Matthew_site admin

From the website Obama writes:

Promote College Serve-Study: Obama will ensure that at least 25 percent of College Work-Study funds are used to support public service opportunities instead of jobs in dining halls and libraries.

While I certainly value the dining halls of my various almae matres and have had many an enjoyable meal and conversation in the refectories of my scholastic days, it appears Obama holds them in no such regard. I would think the meals and conversation at the Ivy Leagues would be second to none, but perhaps not having graced those hallowed halls I know not of what I speak.

More curious is the candidate’s disdain for libraries. One can only imagine that as an undergraduate, and graduate student in the honorable study of Law, he would have found libraries most valuable.

Perhaps that is why we see not journal articles, no brilliant legal treatise, not one authored piece during his tenure as Editor of the venerable Harvard Law Review. It is indeed unusual for a professor of Law to not have published one article, written one single chapter, or even given a presentation of note at a learned society during their teaching career.

Indeed Professor Obama, well OK senior lecturer was his official title at University of Chicago School of Law – but he was teaching Constitutional Law an important class in any Law student’s formation, indeed he knows of the fine library facilities at the schools at which he taught and which he attended.. Of course Con Law is a basic building block – akin to the freshman English of undergraduate school – and all law students must churn through it as the begin their studies. To suggest that the learned Obama who in his Senior Lecturer position (a part time non-tenure track position, but much more important than that of a Lecturer who is simply an adjunct instructor) could not publish something of substance is unkind. Perhaps he was working on his fictionalized autobiography.

I wonder if had Obama spent more time in the libraries he so clearly disdains would his scholarly publication record be remarkable. Or would it still have been non-existent?

Posted in Librarian stuff, Politics 1 Comment »

One Response to “Does Obama value libraries?”

  1. jmomls wrote on 10/6/08 at 5:28 17 :

    Hey, now, I landed my first job in a library via work-study funds. It was a gateway job!

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