Obama Snubs Hard-Working College Students
Shortly after becoming president, Barack Obama said that he strongly supports continuing education. “If we want to come out of this recession stronger than before, we need to make sure that our workforce is better prepared than ever before,” he said in 2009. “Right now, someone who doesn’t have a college degree is more than twice as likely to be unemployed as someone who does. And so many of the Americans who have lost their jobs can’t find new ones because they simply don’t have the skills and the training they need for the jobs they want.”
Things change.
Now it’s an election year. The president’s reelection team is making a play for the youth vote that was key to winning his first term. He’s visiting colleges and universities, trying to attract support from the 18-to-21 demographic by accusing Republicans of wanting to double the Stafford student loan interest rate from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. (Not really true.)
As Obama brings his rock-the-youth-vote campaign to the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City, he wants to be photographed in a sea of adoring youthful faces. And yet, through incompetence or cynical calculus, he’s throwing some of the most inspiring, hard-working students in America under the bus.
Maybe the president still likes the idea of adults going back to school. But apparently he doesn’t want to speak to students over age 21—or be seen with them.
On May 14th Obama will deliver the commencement address at Barnard College, a women’s-only institution across the street from Columbia University in upper Manhattan. Unfortunately no one noticed—or didn’t care—that the elaborate security checks for the president’s visit would bork the long-scheduled Class Day for Columbia’s School of General Studies.
Columbia has four undergraduate colleges: Columbia College, for young (18-to-21) liberal arts students; the School of Engineering and Applied Science, also for traditional students; Barnard College (ditto on ages); and the School of General Studies, which mostly serves older students who are either beginning or completing their bachelor degrees. There’s a big Columbia commencement ceremony where the entire university gathers to receive their diplomas; in addition, each school has a separate event called Class Day.
If President Obama is looking for an example of continuing education that works, he need look no further than Columbia General Studies. It’s a special place, representing the pinnacle of continuing education in the United States. GS offers adult students from age 19 to 79 the chance to study at and graduate not just from college, but from an Ivy League school. Notable GS alumni include Isaac Asimov, Sandy Koufax, Hunter S. Thompson, Ira Gershwin, and Amelia Earhart.
Most importantly, GS has heart. It takes chances on people whom lesser institutions wouldn’t consider. Six years after I was expelled from Columbia’s engineering program, GS let me in.
Like most GS students, I held several jobs at the same time I attended classes, studied, and wrote papers. Also like most GSers, I paid my own way. GSers don’t get much financial aid. Given my history, however, I was grateful for the second chance.
After I graduated—with honors—I got a job in the GS admissions office. One applicant, originally from China, said that she had no college transcripts. She couldn’t even prove that she had attended high school. The records, she said, had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. “Let’s bring her in,” the dean of admissions said. “Let’s hear her story.” To my astonishment, they admitted her. GS’s bet paid off. She worked hard and graduated near the top of her class.
If she were graduating this year, however, she and her parents might not be able to attend her Class Day.
Dean Peter J. Awn wrote in an e-mail to General Studies students: “We were informed last Friday that, if we were to continue with our original plan to have Class Day at 9 a.m. on Monday, May 14, your families would have to arrive at least three hours before the event (5:30 a.m.) to undergo a lengthy security check to attend a ceremony that is not associated with the President’s visit. In fact, neither you nor your families would be able to remain on campus to hear President Obama speak.”
Despite featuring tough admission and graduation requirements, General Studies students are accustomed to being treated like the ugly stepsister of the Columbia bureaucracy. Even so, the Obama snub was over the top. If the initial insult wasn’t bad enough, the president’s inconsideration would have subjected GS graduates and their families to Guantánamo Lite conditions, detained for hours. “We would also be confined to the Butler lawn with no ability to roam around the campus. Frankly, I find that unacceptable,” wrote Dean Awn.
Unwanted, uninvited and evicted from their own space, GS has been forced to move its Class Day to Sunday, May 13th. Which happens to be Mother’s Day. “I realize that, by this point, your families have made their plans and that, not only will this be an inconvenience, but that it also will force you and your families to incur additional expenses,” said Dean Awn.
Jennifer Wisdom, a GS junior, told the Columbia Daily Spectator, “I can’t help but question…if this was happening to Columbia College or the School of Engineering, would it be allowed to occur?”
“It’s the president of the f—-ing United States,” said Reina deBeer, a senior. “The Obama security would have had to know about the measures. It just seems odd.”
They wouldn’t have had to look far. Patrick Gaspard, Obama’s political director from 2009 to 2011, now executive director of the Democratic National Committee, is a General Studies graduate.
The GS Class of 2012 is learning an important lesson: Courtesy and respect are for the little people. One percenters like Obama do whatever the hell they feel like. And if you get in their way, they’ll squash you like a bug.
(Ted Rall’s next book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” out May 22. His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL
13 Comments.
Ted: Simply amazing. You continue to attack the symptoms instead of the problems, and are focused on Obama – as if he has a magic wand and can make everything better by a wave of his hand. Stop for a moment. Stop. Look at the rest of the government – the Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court. Collectively, these several hundred people have much more power than the President. Plus, the corporations, banks and super-rich have may possibly, any single one of them, more power than the President. Meanwhile, the guys at the airport are stip-searching children, and as usual, the excuse is that they were told to it – just like the german soldiers that murdered the jews were “told to do it”. All this continues here and now today, because people need money and food, and will do almost anything if they can say they were “told to do it”. Understand this. The Law of the Land is “Money talks – bullshit walks” OK, bullshit detector, start walking. You can continue to be part of the problem by ranting and raving on your blog about Obama and other crap – these are symptoms – or you can drag an investment bank CEO out of his car and beat him to death – extreme as that sounds, it would probably be more effective.
You are correct, Ted. I totally agree with you.
Obama is the problem. Correct.
The Democrats are the problem. Correct again.
The Republicans are the problem. Correct again.
I remember your critique of the system very well, so you don’t have to repeat the entire laundry list with every post on my account.
Job well done.
Rikster, rikster, rikster- great post until the last half of the last sentence. Don’t buy in to the violence BS- that’s exactly what the right WANTS.
Good job calling Ted out for attacking the symptoms instead of the problems and his can’t see the forest for the trees view of Obama though.
Oh, and Glenn- please point out ANYWHERE recently where Ted has said ANYTHING negative about the Republicans.
Some of us have been begging him to point his guns at the REAL enemy for quite a long time now. Instead, he seems to prefer shooting the only people that stand a chance at making things better.
Whimsical,
I agree that the Republicans are the real enemy. And, by Republicans, what I mean are the super-right-wing climate-denying hysterics who think every sperm is sacred and that women are there to run the kitchen oven, have babies and keep their goddamned opinions to themselves.
As a progressive, I have a pretty simple agenda. I think everyone — yes, everyone, even a war criminal like Dick Cheney — should have the basic human rights of food, shelter, health care, education, and so forth. I also think no one should have to be degraded or humiliated in order to get those things. To me, it is a very rational series of steps that leads to these conclusions. When someone gets to the point where they have to say, “I have no food,” that isn’t an indication of their failure; it’s an indication that society has dropped the ball. Why? Because the purpose of government is not to protect the rich and powerful; the purpose of government is to protect the weak and poor.
To pay for all the wild extravagance that I envision (fed children who can read and write after going to schools that weren’t funded grudgingly as an afterthought to the war budget and the flotilla of SUVs the police force needs), I have the wild and crazy idea that taxes would be assessed to pay for them. If all those taxes mean a couple hundred people don’t get to buy solid-gold sinks for the servants’ quarters on their yachts, well then, I really don’t have a problem with that.
The reason I mention all this is that, from my perspective, I cannot expect a shrill hysteric Republican — who thinks the biggest threats to the country are gay marriage and Mexicans picking fruit without documentation — to understand a political platform based on the notion that we’re all in this together and that everyone is entitled to not have to die in a gutter. These people are simply not capable of understanding such thinking. So I get that I cannot count on them, and that I cannot reason with them.
What I have the problem with is what Martin Luther King Jr. mentioned when he said that, “in the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
The Democrats — specifically, the DINOs, but also all the compromisers, all the centrists, who cave and negotiate on every damned thing — have culpability in this, too. The fringe-wing of the Republican Party is beyond hope. But the Democratic-leaning members of the process should be able to understand.
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” — Walt Kelly
@Rikster: I focus on Obama because he is the president, the nominal leader of the political class, and because progressives need to stop worshiping him so they can start focusing on the important work they need to do, namely bringing down this rancid system. Of course Obama is a symptom. But until we demystify him, he and the Democrats and the two-party system will continue to distract us.
@Alex: That’s right. I don’t focus on the Republicans right now because we’re never going to convince them. They’re too far gone.
I’m not really convinced that phony liberals like the Democrats can be brought over to the forces of light, either. After all, these Democrats are to the right of George W. Bush in many respects, particularly their assertion of the right to use drones and assassination squads with impunity.
I am trying to appeal to the reasonable leftists out there who still don’t see Obama and the Dems for what they are.
Rikster, did you stop and take a look when Bush was President? or did you just call Bush evil? Funny how we distribute the blame evenly when its someone we like as President, and then drop it on them like an Anvil when we don’t like them. One thing about Ted agree with him or not, he’s had the same stance on all of the presidents, they aren’t far enough to the left.
Thats the point the Republicans aren’t really the enemy anymore than the Dinos, at the end of the day, voting for one idiot is the same as voting for the next. Face it, the difference between Obama and Bush is pretty minimal the only time Obama attempts to pass any legislation of substance is as election time comes around. Right before the mid-terms suddenly Obama cared about Gay rights and gave them a token gesture by making don’t ask don’t tell obsolete… sort of, after being badgered about it. He has been pretty wishy washy on Abortion in his private life, but I guess if you don’t believe private belief matters you can say he’s neutral on it since he hasn’t done anything.
Wow I actually have to agree with Ted on a piece I haven’t discussed a lot. The reality is, most people who claim to be liberal aren’t really all that liberal in their thought processes. They are liberal on causes that affect them. IE- I have a gay son, so it okay to be gay, when I was a college girl I got an abortion so abortion is okay, but typically conservative in areas they don’t have a personal connection to, which explains why its so popular for liberal leaning college students to beat homeless people, and rape passed out college girls.
@alex
Here’s my problem with that: NOBODY, and I do mean NOBODY, expects you to try and reason with Republicans. They are byond reason- but there are folks out there that haven’t grasped that point- yet.
And there’s a sizeable chunk of people out there who aren’t rigidly Republican or Democrat, and they get enough Democratic bashing from the mainstream, highly conservative media. You know what happens to those people when they go online looking for an alternate perspective and find nothing but more Democratic bashing?
They get shoved at best, towards apathy ( The “Why vote? Both parties are the same.” utter BS); or at worst, towards actual, full-throttle support of Republicans (“Well, hell- if both the left and the right say the Democrats are so bad, I might as well support the Republicans”). Neither of these outcomes is a good thing.
Even if you are only talkiing to other leftists, you have to assume that people iin the middle are hearing your dialogue. It is everyone’s responsbility to provide those in the middle with both context and clarification for their criticism of Democrats; i.e. that Democrats may be dissapointing, but Republicans are eldritch horrors that will shatter this nation’s sanity, if not it’s very soul if we are foolish enough to let them back near the levers of power. Heck, it’s not just our responsibility, it’s in our best interest (had we lived by this principle in 2010, the last two years would’ve been VERY different).
This is ESPEICALLY true for someone like Ted, who has a national forum. It’s just a shame that he’s letting his fantasies that revolution will have a positive outcome and a dislike born from extremely unrealistic expectations keep him from living up to his responsiblity to provide the previously mentioned context and clarification.
I agree with you that the Democratic leaning members of the process should be able to understand- but ONLY if we provide them with context and clarification. Just as you would not expect to hand a kindergartner Plato and expect him to understand without the proper context and clarifiction; you should not do the same with the electorate.
Whimsical,
I think we’re arriving at the crux of the problem. We are looking — I think — at the same set of problems, but we cannot agree upon the approach to solving those problems.
I think that the past 30-odd years have shown, mostly, a set of deteriorating conditions in this country that are very closely paralleled by the research conducted by Stanley Milgram. Our “experiment” started with the War on Drugs, and, in incremental stages, just like Milgram’s “guards,” the brutality has escalated, bit by bit. And I think the only hope we have now is to let a bunch of whackjob maniacs have full control because they will not be subtle, they will not take things bit by bit. Let the Tea Party run the show. Everyone will be armed. We’ll go back on the Gold Standard. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the FDIC will all stop. Thirty foot walls will go up along the length of both borders. Every classroom will have a three-foot crucifix installed in it. Spanish will be outlawed. And that’s just the first month.
Back in the 1980s, the War on Drugs militarized the police forces by providing them with federal funds IF they used those funds to fight drugs. Ergo, drugs became the most important thing to fight. This, of course, was all a cover story for helping the police find newer, better ways to harass minorities and poor whites. Then came the Rockefeller drug laws, a great testing case not just because it helped the prison-industrial complex, but because it showed that ordinary people would give up school funding, social services funding, library funding, etc., even while prison after prison was being built, if a few PR dollars were used to convince them it was the only way to keep them safe.
Then came 9/11. A jackpot for the military-industrial complex. The lobbyists and string-pullers have gotten the war industry positioned as being in a fight against an ideology. We are now fighting a War on Terror. It will never end. We have pat downs at airports (to keep us safe). We take our shoes off (to keep us safe). We have Stop and Frisk (Jim Crow in a new suit, to keep us safe, once again, from all those murder-inclined minorities.) We have strip searches after trivial arrests. Yes, the police have always screwed with people. But now, it’s becoming codified as Holy Writ. Meanwhile, at the Batcave, the government is putting together a massive data collection system that will archive every phone call, e-mail, etc.
All of that didn’t come along at the same time. It was one thing, then the next, then the next. Just like Milgram saw with his test subjects. Nice, incremental conditioning. Nice, incremental brutality. (Cue the “When they came for the Trade Unionists, I said nothing” spiel.) You don’t need a degree in psychology to understand what’s going on. A few more years of “moderate” Democrats striving toward “consensus” by “compromising” on every single thing that matters, and we will have concentration camps in this country. “Well, it’s a perfectly reasonable compromise. If these people are unemployed, or broke the law by looking suspicious in front of a police officer — as we know, police officers cannot lie — that lazy and criminal element needs to be kept somewhere (to keep us safe). It’s simply more efficient to put them all in one location. Behind barbed wire. Surrounded by armed guards. With no access to the outside. It isn’t a concentration camp. It’s a long-term detention facility. There’s a big difference. See, we took some of the media around on a carefully orchestrated tour from which they had to agree not to deviate. It has every convenience. Some of these people have never had it so good.”
@alex
I’ve always known we saw the same problems (well, mostly), but you’re right- I will never be able to endorse your solution. You know why? Because this:
“And I think the only hope we have now is to let a bunch of whackjob maniacs have full control because they will not be subtle, they will not take things bit by bit. Let the Tea Party run the show. Everyone will be armed. We’ll go back on the Gold Standard. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the FDIC will all stop. Thirty foot walls will go up along the length of both borders. Every classroom will have a three-foot crucifix installed in it. Spanish will be outlawed.”
Is exactly what will happen. And it will KILL us as a country. There will be no coming back from it, not for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
We are both looking at a patient with very advanced cancer. I believe the patient can be saved, but it is going to take extremely delicate surgery, followed by years of painful treatment. And yes, at any time we could make a mistake and the patient would die, but my prescription is that that’s the best chance we have for the patient to make a recovery in the fullness of time.
Your prescription appears to be a bullet in the brain. Thanks, but no thanks.
I understand you’re angry about your personal situation. But destroying the country is NEVER going to be the answer. You cannot fight the right by letting them win. It just doesn’t work that way.