Domenico Montenaro, one of three white, male hacks over at MSNBC's political blog, is fussing that no one can produce Barack Obama's senior thesis from his undergrad days at Columbia. Not only that, but in his headline he puts the word thesis in single quotation marks, implying that such a thesis never existed. Obama can't find it. The university can't find it. None of his professors can find it, even the prof he wrote it for. Therefore, splutters Montenaro, Obama must be making it up!
Couple of questions come to mind.
First, who keeps a copy of their undergrad senior thesis, especially if you go on to graduate work? How many of my readers even had to write one? If you did, how long did you keep it? Have you kept anything you wrote 25 years ago (Obama finished his undergrad work in 1983)? If you graduated more recently than 25 years ago, have you kept anything at all from your undergrad work?
I got my bachelor's degree in the early 1990s. I've compulsively kept my calendars and datebooks since my mid-college days -- it's like diaries from the pre-blogging era -- but I'd be hard-pressed to find anything else I've stored in my files, cabinets, and bookshelves from back then. I got rid of my textbooks long ago; they were usually obsolete within months of finishing each class, anyway.
Unlike Obama's, my degree program did not require that I write a senior thesis, though I know some people in my program completed special research projects. I spent my last semester doing an on-the-job practicum where I had to produce only daily task lists, not a cumulative record of my work. And in any event, the lists went into "file 13" years ago. I guess I'd feel differently about a master's thesis, and I couldn't imagine throwing out a Ph.D. dissertation. On the other hand, to get my liberal arts degree, I had to write a heck of a lot of papers: I'd hazard it was 1,500 pages' worth by the time I was done. But I didn't keep a single one, once I'd landed my first post-university job.
Second, now, I didn't go to an Ivy League school like Columbia, so I don't know how usual it is for top-tier schools to require a senior thesis for graduation. Or maybe it wasn't required by the university, but it was required by Obama's particular program of study. Or maybe not. Montenaro doesn't ask that question -- that is, whether a thesis was a requirement for Obama's degree -- and you know why? Because he probably already knows whether Columbia University requires a thesis from its undergrads. Montenaro is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, himself. And if he doesn't already know the answer, the answer was only one phone call away.
Montenaro's undergrad degree is from the University of Delaware, my own alma mater. Thanks, jackass, for diluting my academic credentials.
What's glaringly absent from Montenaro's blog post is what question should naturally follow: where are John McCain's complete military records? Why did the AP have to file a FOIA request to get any of them? Did McCain truly run for Congress out of the goodness of his heart, or was it actually because he'd plateaued in the Navy? Was he or was he not offered an admiralship? Why not clear up that question by simply releasing his military records?
McCain is founding his campaign on his military skill and experience. Obama is not founding his campaign on his undergraduate work. Montenaro should be focusing on the missing documentation of McCain's career military record, not a single, forgotten research paper that Obama wrote in 1982-83.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
And people forget that, back in those days, there was no such thing as a "digital copy" of anything, except for computer science types who worked on main frames.
My girlfriend knows someone who failed to complete her doctorate because, just before it was time to submit it, she lost her dissertation--the only paper copy of her dissertation.
Recreating it was so intimidating that she just gave up.
Post a Comment