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August 27, 2008
Hibernating Occidental Obama
By Bob Connor, The Teagle Foundation
The Boston Globe on Monday, August 25th, 2008 ran a fascinating article by Scott Helman. In the article, the “aimless student” Helman refers to was Barack Obama, and, as the front page headline in the Globe has it a "small college awakened a future senator to service”. The small college was Occidental, in Los Angeles, where Obama studied for two years before transferring to Columbia.
Helman’s article fills in a period only sketchily treated in Obama’s biographies, especially Dreams from My Father. Perhaps the future presidential candidate wasn’t eager to focus on a time (initially) of pot smoking, basketball dribbling and aimless drifting. Columbia was a different story -- one the motivated, determined, focused Obama likes to tell.
But something happened during his time at Occidental that made what followed possible. What was it? Helman’s article evokes various theories – the Zeitgeist of the late 70s and early 80s, the supportive teacher, the atmosphere at Occidental. Obama himself, apparently, saw it as the end of a period of “hibernation”:
He told a Wesleyan University commencement audience earlier this year that the values he learned from his mother – hard work, honesty, and empathy – resurfaced at Occidental “after a long hibernation.”
Well, I don’t know about the “all that I am and all that I ever hope to be I owe to my mother” bit, but there is some plausibility in Helman’s thought that this small college helped wake him up.
His appetite for knowledge of the wider world, expanded by Occidental’s vibrant intellectual and political environment, grew so big the college could no longer sate it.
It must be a wonderful thing to see a bear come out of hibernation. (Don’t get in its way!) I know it is a wonderful thing to see a student wake up to a wider world of knowledge, ideas and responsibilities. As a college friend of Obama told Helman:
He wasn’t talking about becoming the leader of the free world. He was talking about, I feel, being a responsible citizen. A lot of us were like that at Oxy. You were kind of turned on to doing something with your life.
My hunch is that we still don’t understand the physiology of this kind of hibernation very well, still less the awakening process. But we know some things that work and we have some ideas worth testing about some things that might work. When you see a hibernating bear come out of its cave, you know it’s worth the effort.
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