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Baird approached Obama about a teaching job at Chicago during his third and final year as a student at Harvard. "You look at his background--Harvard Law Review president, magna cum laude, and he's African American," Baird says. "This is a no-brainer hiring decision at the entry level of any law school in the country." But Obama wasn't interested. Obama did, however, mention that he was writing a book on voting rights, so Baird arranged for him to become a Law and Government Fellow at the school--a position that provided Obama with an office and a modest stipend he could use in the course of his writing. When Obama came to Baird in the middle of his fellowship to report that his book on voting rights had morphed into the memoir that would become Dreams From My Father, Baird told him not to worry. "It was a good deal for us," Baird explains, "because he was a good teaching prospect and we wanted him around." Indeed, after the publication of Dreams, Baird, who was then dean of the law school, took another shot at hiring Obama as a professor. Obama, who was in the midst of successfully running for the state Senate, once again declined. But he did accept the law school's offer to become a senior lecturer--then a title held only by Posner and Easterbrook--and teach a reduced course load of three classes per year.
For the next eight years, Obama taught upper-level constitutional law courses on equal protection and voting rights. He was a huge hit with his students. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, which reviewed students' evaluations of Obama's courses, he was almost always rated one of their favorite instructors during his time at Chicago. Given the subject matter of Obama's courses, one might assume that students in the classes--which were electives--would have been disproportionately liberal. But Chicago's reputation for producing law professors tended to mitigate against that. "Anybody who's thinking they want to go into academia, conservative or liberal, kind of knows they have to take equal protection," says Kenworthey Bilz, who took equal protection from Obama in 1997 and is now a professor at Northwestern Law School. "I can very confidently say he didn't strike me as liberal or conservative."
Because of his political duties in Springfield, Obama scheduled most of his classes on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons--before or after the weekends he'd spend with his family in Chicago--which meant he rarely participated in the law school's famous faculty seminars and workshops. This caused a little grumbling among some of his colleagues. "He was at the law school but not of the law school, like Posner and Easterbrook," says Richard Epstein, the famously libertarian law professor. "He's not someone who came to lunch when the topic wasn't one of his choosing." But other faculty said Obama made contributions outside the classroom in other ways. Obama was particularly good at "bonding with students and being a forceful mentor with students," says Baird. "The hours he kept tended to be different. Frank Easterbrook doesn't get up before ten o'clock, where Barack would be there at eight o'clock. Students could have a cup of coffee with him at eight o'clock, and many did."
Obama's closest colleagues at the law school tended to be the more liberal members of the faculty--such as Cass Sunstein and Geoffrey Stone--but many conservatives were fond of him, even though they often didn't see eye to eye. Saul Levmore, the school's current dean, whose politics are hard to characterize but generally right-leaning, says, "We were intensely interested in him. We were looking for him to say, 'I'm giving up politics, I want to be an academic.' We were always in recruiting mode with him." Epstein, who once almost sold his Hyde Park home to Obama and would buttonhole him to talk about things like state mandates for health insurance, offers one reason why: "He was always a terrific listener. He'd sit there and cock his head, take it all in."
Of course, as Epstein points out, Obama's willingness to listen didn't necessarily mean he was willing to be convinced. "What you don't get, alas and alack, out of all this is a change in point of view," Epstein says. "If you ask me whether I had any influence on his intellectual or moral development, I'd say no, not even a little."
But other Chicago conservatives seem content with the fact that Obama tried to understand their point of view, even if he didn't wind up adopting it. "What I know from my dealings with him at the law school is that he does really attempt to understand the points of view of other people who look at the world or a particular issue differently than he does," says Fischel. "He's much more intellectual, much more thoughtful, much more interested in discussion, debate, and dialogue than the typical politician. And that gives me some confidence about him, even though from my perspective he's much too liberal. I've never voted for a Democrat in my entire life. He's the first one I might vote for."
Jason Zengerle is a senior editor at The New Republic.
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