Oxy’s black students remained politically marginalized despite the almost nonstop efforts of Earl Chew, who by April was trying to get support for a Black Theme House dormitory. Only nine African American students turned out for Ujima’s annual photo, and when a five-page Black Student Directory was distributed during winter term, one perplexed undergraduate sent a letter to the student paper that asked, “Why does the Oxy black community need their own directory; don’t they know who they are?” Whoever compiled it did not know Obama well, because it spelled his given name as “Barrack.”
Oxy president Gilman announced there would be no further discussion of divestment, yet the controversy continued to percolate even years later. In May Earl Chew, along with Becky Rivera, ran successfully for top student government positions, but Chew’s close girlfriend from that year later said she had no memory of Barack working with them at all.18
Instead Barack and Hasan channeled their energies into a newly created Oxy chapter of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. CISPES had been founded six months earlier to oppose U.S. aid to El Salvador’s military government, whose violent death squads had assassinated Roman Catholic archbishop Oscar Romero while he was offering mass in March 1980. CISPES supported El Salvador’s left-wing opposition, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), whose ties to the Salvadoran Communist Party had led the FBI to investigate CISPES even before Barack and Hasan helped start Oxy’s chapter in early March 1981.
One of Barack’s favorite professors, Carlos Alan Egan, had prompted the student interest in El Salvador, and on Saturday, April 18, Barack, Hasan, and Paul Anderson drove to MacArthur Park in L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood for a CISPES event led by actors Ed Asner and Mike Farrell. The short march and ensuing rally attracted a crowd of three thousand as well as counterprotesters from Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. “We were walking around and absorbing it all,” Anderson remembers, and particular enjoyed “exchanging barbs” and “verbally going back and forth” with the hostile Moonies. Scores of banners and signs made for a colorful event. “Long Live the Revolutionary Democratic Front,” an FMLN ally, read one; “U.S. Out of El Salvador” demanded another.
With Egan’s assistance, Barack, Paul, and Hasan helped organize a mid-May symposium on El Salvador that drew seven prominent speakers to Oxy, including Sister Patricia Krommer, one of the most prominent U.S. supporters of the Salvadoran left. Several academics, a U.S. State Department officer, and a refugee doctor whom Paul would remember as “actually an El Salvadoran revolutionary” were also on the panel. The event drew a crowd of more than three hundred—a larger number than attended the February divestment rally—and the Oxy paper devoted a front-page photo and a lengthy story to the symposium. Paul recalls several right-wing hecklers showing up, and the student organizers “had to have them extracted.” Multiple off-campus CISPES events took place during late May and early June, with flyers for all of them distributed on the Oxy campus by student CISPES supporters.19
Hasan also organized a Sunday forum featuring former Pakistani Supreme Court justice Ghulam Safdar Shah, who had opposed the military dictatorship’s execution of former president Bhutto and been forced from office in late 1980, plus prominent politician Afzal Bangash, who had founded Pakistan’s most militant Marxist party in 1968 but was living in exile following Zia-ul-Haq’s 1979 military coup. This event too was a success, attracting an audience of more than two hundred, and Barack and Hasan’s friend Chris Welton wrote a front-page account of it for Oxy’s newspaper.
That same week, Oxy students were angered when they learned that the Political Science faculty had refused to reappoint Lawrence Goldyn, the department’s most popular professor. Goldyn denounced the senior faculty’s conduct as “completely unethical and certainly unprofessional,” but he was also aware of the effect he had had on countless Oxy students. Speaking with Susan Keselenko for a long, two-page profile in the year’s final issue of the newspaper, Goldyn said that “frankly I think I’ve probably had as much or more impact on straight people at this school than I have on gay people.”
Goldyn believed he had had “a rather profound effect on a lot of people, but there’s no way of measuring that or knowing that,” at least not for years to come. Many students have “studied with me, gotten close to me, and really been supportive of and loyal to me. I can’t tell you how much respect I have for people like this.” Notwithstanding that realization, Goldyn would abandon political science after this and enter medical school, earning his M.D. from Tufts University in 1988 and becoming an internal medicine/HIV specialist in Northern California. Thirty-three years after his dismissal from Oxy, one former student would thank and laud him in one of Washington’s most august settings.20
Obama’s belief in his potential as a serious writer suffered a painful blow when Tom Grauman told him a short story about driving a car had been voted down for publication in Feast’s second issue on the grounds that it needed more work. Obama was livid. Caroline Boss appreciated how Barack took pride in “his writing and he was trying to hone that as an actual craft,” especially after taking David James’s seminar. But to be told by Grauman that his story had been rejected was more than he could bear. “We had a fairly frank argument about it,” indeed “a shouting match,” Grauman recounted years later. “I just said it wasn’t done,” and “I didn’t want to finish it for him.” Obama “was peeved” and “you could see that his feelings were hurt,” in part because Feast “was a social thing as well as a literary thing,” and “he felt he deserved to be a part of this group.”
But Obama had more important things to consider. Sometime before Oxy’s spring term exams ended on June 9, he and Phil Boerner learned they had each been admitted to Columbia University. Boerner’s Oxy GPA was a less than robust 3.25, or a high B, but Columbia College—the men’s undergraduate portion of the larger university that also included all-female Barnard College—had received only 450 transfer applications that spring, and accepted sixty-seven. Columbia admissions officials were unhappy about the quality of those applicants as well as the quantity. Dean Arnold Collery believed they had not attracted stronger applicants because “we’re not housing them,” instead leaving them to fend for themselves in Manhattan’s rental apartment market. Assistant Dean of Admissions Robert Boatti also cited the limited financial aid as well as Columbia’s policy of requiring all transfers to take core courses that other students had completed as freshmen and sophomores. As a result, a majority of transfer students came from the New York area, many from community colleges. Those who had been accepted had GPAs of about 3.0 and combined SAT scores of 1,100, Boatti said, while entering freshmen averaged well over 1,200.
Boerner and Obama were excited by their acceptances. Eric Moore heard the news and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Barack to stay at Oxy. Sim Heninger, who had seen so much of “Barry” in Haines Annex almost two years earlier, spoke with him in the Cooler one day at the end of spring term and was struck by how “polished and funny” Barack now was. He had changed “very swiftly,” Sim thought, from the emotionally fragile youngster who had almost come apart in front of Heninger in October 1979. “He was a different person by the time he left,” Heninger said. Kent Goss, who had played basketball with Barry during fall 1979, saw the same thing. “He was different. He was more serious … there was a shift somewhere in those two years.”
Alex McNear sensed something similar. “I think he had like a broader vision of something…. He thought there was going to be a different kind of opportunity” at Columbia. Caroline Boss would remember Obama saying “very directly … ‘I don’t know what it is, but I feel I have a destiny, and I feel I have a purpose. I feel I have something that is being asked of me to do; I just don’t know what it is, and I need to … go someplace that challenges me, that forces me to focus and that gives me a sense of direction and personal identity, some kind of avenue to ask myself good questions,’ ” so that “ ‘I will be prepared … I need to be prepared so that if the moment