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.
RC Radio Blog 
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.
Except the Columbia ID has been proven to be fake. That style of ID card wasn’t even used until 10 years after he graduated and the photo on it was taken during his first year in congress, if you put it in google images it comes up.
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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I have been a Columbia GS student from 1999 until 2003 and must point out that there are three undergraduate schools within the University, excluding Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia but not part of it. Barnard is an all-girls school and its students can and do take courses across the street at Columbia, Columbia students cannot take Barnard courses.
Columbia College, The School of Engineering (School of Engineering and Applied Science as it was known before the 1997 name change to the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science) and the School of General Studies were, and are, the only three undergraduate degree granting colleges at the University.
I cannot write about the academic requirements for the Honors Program in 1980 until 1983, since I do not possess the necessary information. I can, however, point out that the requirements for admission into the Columbia College, or as it is colloquially known on campus “CC,” are very different than those required by the School of General Studies, or “GS” for short. The fact is CC requirements are much higher than that of GS, and probably are still higher than they were during the early 1980’s.
A potential transfer student can currently, and during the time that I was there, transfer no more than 64 credits, or points, towards their degree. Of course those courses have a certain minimum grade requirement necessary for them to be transferred. I think that a “C” is the very minimum for a course to count towards the transfer. I cannot say what those requirements were in between 1980 and 1983, but would assume that they were not lower.
The link posted in the article above is not very relevant since those requirements are for the School of General Studies and not for Columbia College, and are too recent, as in not going as far back in time as the early 1980’s.
I can personally attest that, with some exceptions, the GS student and the CC student are not intellectual equals and the degree bestowed upon the GS student does not equal that of the CC student. The General Studies Core Curriculum resembles the Columbia College Core Curriculum, but CC courses are more demanding than those of GS.
If in fact Obama or Barry was an exchange student at Columbia, his grades must have been excellent in order for him to get into Columbia College, and not GS. Furthermore, the University is, and did, have race quotas that had to be met by the Admissions Office. The Morningside Campus is by far the most “diverse,” with a disproportionally large non-US non-white student body. I can only assume that Barry or Obama had a much easier time “getting in” with lower quality grades from his other school.
I can confirm that both CC and GS courses are, at least during my time there, quite rigorous, and in order to do exceptionally well, like in the Honors Program, even the most gifted of students must work hard. I have never met anyone who could do drugs and drink all of the time and still get superior grades. Even I had to put in a lot of work even though I am five standard deviations right of the bell curve.
Finally, the student body during the early 1980’s was much smaller by today’s numbers, and I find it hard to believe that not a lot of people remember Barry or Obama. Popularity and likeability is the quintessential attribute of an Elected leader, and I find it hard to believe that Barry did not make at the very least few dozen friends while at the University. One of the reasons that a person goes to college is to make life-long “connections.” Those connections, or a social network of fellow students and graduates, stays with a person their whole life. Unless a person is an extreme recluse, other people will remember them. Lots of people. But it is not possible to just be there, get a degree and have not more than a hundred people remember you. People know other people by sight, even if they don’t know their names, those faces are still familiar, and in my case, I still remember my fellow student’s faces from 10 years ago.
We do not know how many people knew Barack Obama while he attended Columbia but several have said they knew him while he was there. You are making the unwarranted inference that every person who knew the President while he attended Columbia has already come forward. There is ample evidence Barack Obama attended Columbia and none he was anywhere else.
You also said “I have been a Columbia GS student from 1999 until 2003 …” I take it that English was not your area of study? You also said “Even I had to put in a lot of work even though I am five standard deviations right of the bell curve.” From my experience people who feel they have to tell us how smart they are usually reside in the fatter portion of the bell curve.
I think that grammar and sentence structure is not your area of expertise.
P.G.
I figured you were a drive by troll probably lying your ass off about ever attending Columbia. Looks like I was correct.
It is MY area of expertise and your writing is, as RC pointed out, full of technical deficiencies. By the way… Obama’s studying insanely hard explains why he had little social life at Columbia AND why he was named an Editor of the Harvard Law Review in his first year of Law School, and President of the Review in his second year. This is an unprecedented achievement. He then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law.
Tell me…. How did YOU do in college? Or in life, for that matter? “Not as well as Barack Obama did” is my guess. Does that chafe your buns? Tough. Man up. Climb out of the Obama-derangement playpen and join the grownups.
Barnard College was created as the female undergraduate division of Columbia University. It’s gates and signage and letterhead all state that it is part of Columbia University. Moreover, Columbia University grants all Barnard College, Columbia College, School of Engineering, and School of General Studies degrees.
In addition, not only can Barnard students take Columbia courses, but Columbia students can (and do) take Barnard courses. Many departments are merged Barnard/Columbia departments and it is, therefore, impossible for many to not take courses among the undergraduate divisions.
Barnard College was named after educator, mathematician, and tenth president of Columbia College, Frederick A.P. Barnard, who argued unsuccessfully for the admission of women to Columbia University. By establishing Barnard College as an affiliate, women were able to attend Columbia too. Columbia College was all-male and intended to merge with Barnard College (like Harvard did with Radcliffe). When Obama was at Columbia both colleges (Barnard and Columbia) were still single sex.
There is university commencement where all undergraduate and graduate divisions of the university participate. There are also separate class day graduation ceremonies for the individual divisions. The only time that Obama spoke at his alma mater was for the Barnard College graduation day in 2012.
Well this may be the graduation program from Columbia University but I would say that if you really looked past the fact his name is on the list of graduates you might notice the different font and smaller size print
Nonsense. Same font, same size. Even the oddly-shaped letters like the A’s are the same as in all the other names. Man, you guys really are like Monty Python’s “invincible” black knight, shouting “come back you coward!” with his limbs hacked off. You’ve lost, and everybody but crackpots and dead-enders know it. Yikes. Buy yourself a shiny new clue Here’s one for free: the world is passing you by, sucker.
GMan
You are pulling a Paul Irey – that is trying to do analysis on font and type with a second, third or even fourth generation copy. Other names look just like Barack Obama’s. You do not have a clue what you are talking about.
The really stupid thing about GMan’s argument (okay one of the many stupid things) is that like the birth announcements it makes absolutely no sense to forge the program in the first place. There were many students that graduated that day. Many of those students had family and friends who attended. Some of the programs would be thrown out yes, but some would be kept as mementos. There could be tens if not hundreds of programs sitting in photo albums and file folders waiting as the perfect refutation of the forgery.
If there was a conspiracy to put the President into office even though he was ineligible (for some reason that no birther can explain), basic common sense means that they would want to keep to a minimum number of forgeries to minimize the potential of exposure. How would forging the Columbia program aid the conspiracy? It gains them nothing. All that would do would increase the chances that someone would have clear evidence of a forgery. At least with the LFBC forgery allegations, if you assume that “Hawaii is in on it,” then the chances of someone producing a contrary document from Hawaii are minuscule.
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Well since all you liberal democrats are busy blowing each other, stop and think,why would Obama,or what ever the hell his name is,lock up all his school records from the public view? It’s not rocket science dummies, you don’t hide something if you have nothing to hide !!https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AoR.iBVPiNbqXUXTu_OafdmbvZx4?p=Mia+Marie+Pope&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-257 Injoy !!
He did not lock up his records, schools cannot give out school records without written permission. It still amazes me how many of you fell for all of the Fox News lies and fake news stories, it is actually scary to find that so many people can be brainwashed so easily with conspiracy theories.
Correct.
Tony has to be faking. No real person could be that stupid.
P.G.
Knowing that you are a troll, I still want to point out a few ridiculous mistakes you’ve made in your statement.
1. Columbia students(i.e. CC,GS,SEAS) can and do take Barnard courses.
2. GS students are intellectual equal to, if not better than, CC students according to the average GPA.
3. There is not something called a “GS course”. There are GS sections for some courses, but the grading curve is the same and students may enrol in CC sections through petitioning.
I do appreciate your efforts of pretending to be a Columbia graduate, but your level of knowledge is apparently not enough.
Tony “injoy”? Did you eat paint chips as a child? You must be desperate to dig up Mia Marie Pope who had her 15 minutes of fame and then disappeared. I notice Mia never showed any proof she has ever met the President let alone she knew anything. She just seems to have grabbed several birther stories and mixed them together.
Roosie & Reality Check,
I’ve posted a comment here some years back, and forgotten about it until now. I’m not in the habit of posting stuff, arguing about it with strangers and being a “troll.”
Roosie, what school did you attend while at Columbia? What’s your motivation of putting me down on this forum? GS equal to CC or Engineering? You must be joking. Barnard classes, really? No GS courses? So LitHum for GS is the same as Logic & Rhetoric for CC? Really?
Reality Check, I’m definitely not a troll and things I’ve written about are factual and reality-based.
I think your efforts should might be put to better use doing something else, instead of posting here and wasting your time, and life.
P.G., YOUR time would be better spent doing something that matches your intellect.. like serving as a doorstop or speedbump.
Your gullibility would be well-suited to UFO or Bigfoot reasearch. Your fidelity and loyalty to America would qualify you to join Al Qaida.
Add them up, you’d be a conspiracy-obsessed suicide-bomber disquised as a brainless lump of asphalt. Spoiler alert!