{"id":34042,"date":"2021-05-11T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-11T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=34042"},"modified":"2021-05-20T23:58:25","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T03:58:25","slug":"barack-obama-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/barack-obama-college\/","title":{"rendered":"Barack Obama: College in Los Angeles Shaped Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Where did Barack Obama go to college? How did his time at Occidental College shape his worldview?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Barack Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles beginning in 1979. At Occidental, Obama became more interested in literature and politics, and began forming his political beliefs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Read more about Barack Obama, Occidental College, and his experiences there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">For Barack Obama, College Offers <strong>an Intellectual Awakening<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Although Barack was always described as intelligent by those who knew him during this time (or at least \u201csmart-mouthed,\u201d according to Gramps), he was unmotivated as a teenager. Hardly a star student and certainly no one\u2019s idea of an overachiever, Barack\u2019s favorite pastimes at this age were hanging out with friends, drinking beer, and smoking marijuana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although these were fairly typical experiences for a teenager growing up in the 1970s, they spoke to what Barack would later describe as a certain aimlessness during this period of his life. But during high school, literature began to stir an intellectual awakening within him. Prodded by his mother, who\u2019d instilled in him a reading habit as a child, Barack began to dip his toes into the world of ideas and great thinkers.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In his later high school years in Honolulu, he could frequently be seen devouring works by authors ranging from Langston Hughes to Ralph Waldo Ellison. It was still self-directed learning at this age. There was no system to how or what he read, nor did he fully understand the texts he was burning through. <strong>But he <\/strong><strong><em>had <\/em><\/strong><strong>discovered something far more valuable\u2014a lifelong thirst for knowledge.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Occidental College, 1979: Forming a Political Consciousness<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Barack matriculated at Occidental College in Los Angeles in the fall of 1979. Although he brought with him a certain intellectual fervor, he was still the typical college freshman in many ways, interested in parties and coeds (often hoping to impress attractive female classmates with his eclectic reading choices).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>But Barack did begin to develop some of his core political beliefs during his time at Occidental College. <\/strong>While he was still cynical about political parties and the efficacy of electoral politics (an attitude he had inherited from his mother, who viewed <em>all <\/em>politicians as corrupt, self-serving, and phony), his conversations with professors and his experiences with a diverse student body taught him that broad social movements had enormous power to catalyze <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/political-development\/\">political change<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For Barack, figures like Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), and young civil rights leader John Lewis (1940-2020) were the <em>real <\/em>agents of change\u2014people who mobilized grassroots coalitions to help the oppressed find their voice and achieve agency over their own lives and futures.<strong>For the first time, Barack Obama began to see the awesome potential of mass democracy and a politics based fundamentally on <\/strong><strong><em>empowerment <\/em><\/strong><strong>instead of <\/strong><strong><em>power<\/em><\/strong>. He realized that he wanted to make his mark on the world by pursuing these ideals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Where did Barack Obama go to college? How did his time at Occidental College shape his worldview? Barack Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles beginning in 1979. At Occidental, Obama became more interested in literature and politics, and began forming his political beliefs. Read more about Barack Obama, Occidental College, and his experiences there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":34049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,33],"tags":[274],"class_list":["post-34042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-people","tag-a-promised-land","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Barack Obama: College in Los Angeles Shaped Identity - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Where did Barack Obama go to college? Obama started out at Occidental College in 1979 and transferred after two years. 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