The University of Chicago has one of the best law schools in the nation. For 12 years, Barack Obama was a part-time lecturer at Chicago, while at the same time also working for a law firm and serving in the Illinois legislature. When he lost his first try for Congress, Chicago offered him a position as a full time, tenured law professor. He turned it down, and two years later successfully ran for the U.S. Senate.
In today's New York Times, Jodi Kantor writes a fascinating account of the impact that Obama had on students while teaching at Chicago. Obama's students remember his even-handedness in discussing complex racial and other issues, his skill at forcing students to discover both sides of each issue, his ability to demonstrate:
that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved, that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next.
His former students lament today that his talk on the campaign trail presents complex issues so simplistically, when they know the level of complexity of which his mind is capable and which comes most naturally to him.
That's politics, of course.
But wouldn't it be nice to have a president with a mind even capable of a complex thought or two? For a change?
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