M2RB: Jethro Tull (Beat Club, 1970)
Hey man, what's the plan, what was that you said?
Sun-tanned, drink in hand, lying there in bed.
I try to socialize but I can't seem to find
what I was looking for, got something on my mind.
Then the teacher told me
it had been a lot of fun.
Thanked me for his ticket
and all that I had done.
Sun-tanned, drink in hand, lying there in bed.
I try to socialize but I can't seem to find
what I was looking for, got something on my mind.
Then the teacher told me
it had been a lot of fun.
Thanked me for his ticket
and all that I had done.
By Charles C. Johnson. The Daily Caller
A longtime professor and one-time dean of the University of Chicago Law School told The Daily Caller that Barack Obama was never offered tenure, despite the assertions of a New York Times reporter who covers the president and the first family.
“Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; [Obama] turned
them down,” wrote Times White House Correspondent Jodi Kantor, author of
“The Obamas,” in a July 30, 2008 profile of the president’s twelve years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
And yet, according to longtime University of Chicago law professor
Richard Epstein, Obama was never actually offered a tenured faculty
position. Nor, for that matter, was he ever a “constitutional law
professor.”
“I have no idea where Jodi got her story” about the tenure offer,
said Epstein, adding that he immediately wrote Kantor to tell her she
was wrong.
“Tenure offers require votes from faculties approved by the provost,
and need a scholarly output. He was approached with the possibility of
an entry level position without tenure, but it never got to the faculty
for want of interest on his side,” Epstein confirmed via email.
Epstein was the law school’s interim dean during 2001. His account
contradicts a claim Kantor has repeatedly made, that a tenure offer came
from Dean Daniel Fischel.
“Mr. Obama turned the offer down,” Kantor wrote in 2008. She expanded
on that claim later that day, writing for a Times blog. “When the law
school tried to hire Mr. Obama after his failed 2000 congressional race,
it was for a tenured job.” Kantor wrote. “In our interview, I asked
[Fischel] if he meant ‘tenure-track,’ and he said no.”
Fischel could not be reached for comment, but Kantor softened her
position when asked via Twitter about Obama’s alleged tenure offer.
“[T]he general idea was that tenure would go through,” Kantor replied. “That said, I don’t know the fine print on the offer.”
That paints a very different picture from the one Kantor presented in 2008.
Soon after Obama lost his 2000 congressional race, Kantor wrote, “the
faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon
hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the
State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for
Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.”
Epstein told TheDC that no such opportunity was ever extended to
Barack Obama. Fischel, he added, would never have been authorized to
make an offer so generous.
“I wish I still had my email to Jodi,” he lamented, “because I wrote
Jodi Kantor in no uncertain terms that the matter had never come to the
faculty, and that under no circumstances would an offer to Obama be
tenured. Indeed I was completely taken aback by the story.”
Epstein drew a clear line of distinction between full tenure and
“tenure track” positions — which offered no guarantees but could result
in tenure at some future date.
“There was support for a tenure track offer,” he explained, “but the
issue did not remain live for long as Obama decided against it. The
thought that the law school could have made a tenure offer to a person
with no academic writing was out of the question, as far as I was
concerned, and I took a lot of heat from people who kept saying that
Chicago had abandoned its scholarly standards by contemplating that
offer.”
“I have no idea what Fischel said to Obama, but what little
discussion [there was] on the faculty side did not deal with tenure.”
When asked about whether Obama had ever taught “constitutional law”
as Obama has claimed as president and on the 2008 campaign trail,
Epstein said “no.”
Obama was interested in “public interest law” and courses on race, he
said, and was trying to “keep his head down” after a national
controversy erupted over another member of the law school’s faculty
because of her interest in racial issues.
President Bill Clinton nominated fellow professor Lani Guinier in
1993 for the post of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. He
later withdrew her name from consideration after critics charged her
scholarship was replete with endorsements of strict racial quotas in
college admissions and local elections.
Epstein, Kantor wrote, said Obama was “unwilling to put his name to
anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had
hurt her. ‘He figured out, you lay low,’ Mr. Epstein said.”
But Obama was not deterred, she wrote, and “taught Guinier’s
proposals for structuring elections differently to increase minority
representation.”
Obama was a lecturer and then a senior lecturer at the University of
Chicago Law School beginning in 1992, and ending in 2004 when he ran for
the U.S. Senate.
“When we hired Obama, we didn’t think we’d be hiring a future
president of the United States,” Epstein recalled during a separate
phone interview. Obama was given a “senior lecturer” position, Epstein
said, but “[we] were trying to do right by Mr. Obama.”
Obama taught one two-hour seminar each semester and had no scholarly
publications, Epstein said, noting what he called a lack of interest on
the future president’s part. He saw Obama as having one eye fixed on
academia and the other on politics.
Professor John Yoo of the University of California, Berkeley, School
of Law, who was a visiting professor on the University of Chicago campus
in the fall of 2003 while Obama was employed there, never recalls
seeing Obama, though his office was across the hall.
Teacher - Jethro Tull
Well the dawn was coming,
heard him ringing on my bell.
He said, ``My name's the teacher,
that is what I call myself.
And I have a lesson
that I must impart to you.
It's an old expression
but I must insist it's true.
Jump up, look around,
find yourself some fun,
no sense in sitting there hating everyone.
No man's an island and his castle isn't home,
the nest is full of nothing when the bird has flown.''
So I took a journey,
threw my world into the sea.
With me went the teacher
who found fun instead of me.
Hey man, what's the plan, what was that you said?
Sun-tanned, drink in hand, lying there in bed.
I try to socialize but I can't seem to find
what I was looking for, got something on my mind.
Then the teacher told me
it had been a lot of fun.
Thanked me for his ticket
and all that I had done.
Hey man, what's the plan, what was that you said?
Sun-tanned, drink in hand, lying there in bed.
I try to socialize but I can't seem to find
what I was looking for, got something on my mind.
heard him ringing on my bell.
He said, ``My name's the teacher,
that is what I call myself.
And I have a lesson
that I must impart to you.
It's an old expression
but I must insist it's true.
Jump up, look around,
find yourself some fun,
no sense in sitting there hating everyone.
No man's an island and his castle isn't home,
the nest is full of nothing when the bird has flown.''
So I took a journey,
threw my world into the sea.
With me went the teacher
who found fun instead of me.
Hey man, what's the plan, what was that you said?
Sun-tanned, drink in hand, lying there in bed.
I try to socialize but I can't seem to find
what I was looking for, got something on my mind.
Then the teacher told me
it had been a lot of fun.
Thanked me for his ticket
and all that I had done.
Hey man, what's the plan, what was that you said?
Sun-tanned, drink in hand, lying there in bed.
I try to socialize but I can't seem to find
what I was looking for, got something on my mind.
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