A tip of the cap to our own producer of Reality Check Radio, Dr. Ken, for this one. A commenter on Jerome Corsi’s YouTube channel has uploaded what appears to be a copy of the graduation program for Columbia University in 1983 and yes it includes the name of our current President Barack Obama. I believe the reason a Birther posted this was to show that Obama did not graduate with honors at Columbia. However, it is unlikely he was eligible to graduate with honors as a transfer student from Occidental since he may not have accumulated the prerequisite number of credit hours at Columbia. The current standards for Columbia are available on the school web site:
http://www.gs.columbia.edu/academic-honors
To be eligible for school honors, a student must have taken at least 64 credits of coursework at General Studies. For cum laude, a student must have a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.5; for magna cum laude, a minimum of 3.67; for summa cum laude, a minimum of 3.9 is required. The honor is noted on a student’s diploma and transcript.
Also, according to Columbia’s current standards for transfer students only the top 10% of applications are selected and an overall GPA of 3.5 is required. What we know for certain is that Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law School Magna Cum Laude and was the editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Here is the newly located list of Columbia graduates from the Class Day 1983 Program (posted by SCRIBD user brendan_cullinan_1):
This document is not the same list of graduates that was published by Breitbart earlier this year, which also contained the name of Barack Obama.
Some names contained in the new one are not shown in the Breitbart list. The 1983 program also contains the name of Obama critic Wayne Allyn Root and the notation that Root graduated on January 26, 1983 or a semester before Barack Obama. This means that Root who claims “no one knew Obama” was actually only at Columbia for about 18 months while Obama was enrolled there – assuming Root did not stick around for graduate courses. Root claims Obama went by the name “Barry Soetoreo then:
If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia has ever met him, saw him, or heard of him.
So Root knows that he went by the name “Barry Soetoro” even though he never heard of him and never met him. That doesn’t make sense at all. Yet it seems that a Barack Obama graduated just five months after Root graduated. Root didn’t get around much I suppose.
The latest find reinforces my earlier observation that the more real research that Birthers do the more they undermine their own claims. I wrote about that in this article over a year ago and it is still true today.
Nice try. When Obama attended Columbia Universtiy, he went by the name Barry Soetoro and was there as a foreign exchange student from Indonesia.
I suppose we should just take your word for that? Every document produced to date list him as Barack Obama. No document shows he every used the Soetoro name after he became an adult.
Nice try LA Zarus but there is no proof of that. He didn’t go by Barry Soetoro and he wasn’t a foreign exchange student. He left Indonesia when he was 10 years old. He attended elementary school in the US. He attended Junior High and High School in the US in fact he was only in Indonesia for 4 years. The rest of his life was in America. There’s no way he could be considered a Foreign student.
LAZ looks like a one hit wonder.
Was I the only person who started hearing the opening of the music to “Star Wars” when I saw the photo of the graduation program?
Well, birthers are not in this universe, they do live in an alternative non-reality.
That photo is from Breitbart. I think they were trying to be cute or something.
This is brilliant. Truly brilliant!
Has Root commented on this at all?
Thanks! I emailed Mr. Root’s publicist a link and invited him on the show. The two pieces of evidence seem to refute his claim that President Obama attended Columbia under another name. Ironically, the program does show that at least one person attended Columbia under a different name: “Wayne Alan Root”.
[RC: To John Wayne who tried to post a comment please read and follow the blog comment policy: Off topic comments that are nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors are not permitted.]
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