Michelle Obama (6 page)

The people running Princeton in Michelle's time were determined to make up for the school's ugly past. But schools like Princeton don't change direction easily. So although Michelle should have been able to just think about her courses and having fun with friends, she was also stuck in the middle of a nationwide debate about race. After coming from Whitney M. Young High School, where those questions seemed to be in the past, it was a rude shock. It was also insulting.

The debate really came to a simple question: Were African American students really good enough to be at elite schools, or had standards been lowered to let them in?

At Princeton, the critics of minority students were notoriously harsh. A group of alumni was formed to attack the school's policy of encouraging minority enrollment. It came out of a similar group that had fought the admission of women, who first enrolled in 1969. In fact, Princeton was still considered difficult for women of any race when Michelle attended. They faced many of the same attitudes minorities did: Some of the professors and other university staff believed they were not intelligent enough to understand the work. So Michelle had it doubly hard.

There was something strange about this debate at the Ivy League schools. Some of the alumni who said they were concerned about lower academic standards expected the university to give their own children an advantage for admission. That had been the practice in these schools for generations. A lot of the complaints about Princeton's new policies came from alumni who were worried that there would be fewer places for these "legacies."

Unfortunately, mistaken ideas about lower standards worked against minority students like Michelle. Hilary Beard, who was a year ahead of Michelle at Princeton, told the school's newspaper in 2008 that she still remembered a professor who accused an African American student of copying a paper because the work was very good. "He told her it was not possible that she had this high quality of thinking. [Her work] happened to be brilliant like any other student's on campus, but her skin was brown."

Having Craig on campus was a help, most of the time. He was already a star player, being tracked by professional teams.

Craig had already gone through the tough transition that many students face when they reach college after going to a high school where teachers push the students and give them attention. In college, a lot of professors are only interested in their own research. They think of teaching as the part of the job they have to endure. They don't give students a lot of direction, but they still expect good work. When Craig first arrived, he remembered, he was "overwhelmed." He was used to breezing his way to the top. But by the time Michelle entered, he was able to give her good advice. One thing was something their father had told him: "You're not going to be number one at Princeton, but not the last either."

Michelle found her balance quickly. As friends remembered, she did more than handle all the course work. She finished it early. She wasn't intimidated by professors, either. One day Craig called his mother to complain. "Mom, Michelle's here telling people they're not teaching French right." Michelle thought the teacher should focus on conversational French rather than literary French. She wanted to be able to communicate with people, not just do academic research. By then, Michelle's mother knew better than to get between Michelle and a teacher. She told Craig, "Just pretend you don't know her."

Michelle also found a way around one of the biggest social perils for African American students at the time, Princeton's "eating clubs." These clubs, unique to Princeton, are a lot like fraternities or sororities. They tend to define the boundaries of a student's social life. The difference is that at Princeton, the official reason for joining is to have a place to take meals, rather than to have a place to live.

Although there are now clubs that choose members at random, joining one of the traditional clubs is like joining a fraternity or sorority. A student might have to endure a lot of interviews, or games, or contests. Then the members decide whether the student is right for the club. In Michelle's time, Princeton's social life was still dominated by the traditional clubs.

Like any club, they weren't just about letting people in; they were also about keeping people out. Jews were excluded until the 1960s—and later at some clubs. A few clubs excluded women until 1990. The last ones only gave in because of a lawsuit.

Few African American students joined. They "did not feel comfortable in the eating clubs," Hilary Beard remembered. Part of it was the "culture of drunkenness" at some clubs. "In that environment, a lot of things got said to people that might not be said when people were sober, and some of these things were disparaging racial comments."

Michelle didn't try to join a club. The idea behind them didn't fit her personality. She had chosen Princeton because it represented the wider world: new people, new experiences, new opportunities. She was not there to create a narrow, country club life surrounded by people just like her. At Whitney M. Young High School, she had been in a community of students who, like her, wanted to break down barriers. At Princeton, the social life was based on creating walls. Some students had selected the school because of those traditions.

But her rejection of them also showed a less obvious part of her personality. She knew something about Princeton's culture from Craig. She knew it wasn't exactly right for her. But she chose it because of the opportunities it offered, and maybe also because it was something that people would have liked to deny her. She'd later make other choices that people who knew her didn't think were right for her. Although her parents had raised her to do what would make her happy, she was still following traditional ideas about what that was. It would be several years before she would do exactly what she pleased.

Instead of joining an eating club, Michelle joined Stevenson Hall, an alternative student center that had been formed in the late 1960s as part of a student-led movement to open the university to new social and academic ideas. Her roommate, Angela Acree, worked there. It also helped define Michelle's social life, but in ways that would never have happened at a traditional club. Stevenson Hall had a kosher kitchen, because one of its roles was to provide a place to eat for Orthodox Jews, who would never have been admitted to a traditional club in the 1960s. Those students became their friends, Acree recalled to the university newspaper. "[We] did everything the Orthodox students did, which included going on a ski trip to Vermont with them one break."

Michelle also spent a lot of time at the Third World Center, which had been established for minority students. (That name is controversial now. It's thought to imply that the students were poor and poorly educated. Some schools with similar student centers still use that name, but Princeton's is now called the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Understanding. )

Michelle had a job at the center. She was the coordinator of an after-school child care program for children of Princeton's lunchroom and maintenance staff. Czerny Brasuell, the center's director, was amazed at her ability to bond with the children. Brasuell's son Jonathan, a preschooler, was one. Michelle and Craig became like big sister and big brother to him. The friendships continue to this day. Now in his thirties, Jonathan told the
Boston Globe
he still remembers Michelle thrilling him by playing "Linus and Lucy," the famous jazz piano piece from the "Peanuts" television specials. "I could not go a week without hearing that."

For Michelle, as for many African American students at Princeton, and maybe for most of them, the Third World Center became what the eating clubs were to white students. "The Third World Center was our life," Acree said. "We hung out there, we partied there, we studied there."

Decades later, during the 2008 presidential campaign, opponents of Michelle's and Barack's would feel threatened by how much time Michelle spent at the Third World Center. They would use a paper Michelle wrote in her senior year, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community," to fuel fears that Michelle hates white people. That paper, a "senior thesis" of the kind all Princeton undergraduates must complete, would be published on the Internet. Every sentence would be put under a microscope.

What scared the critics was the paper's discussion of the isolation and rejection Michelle experienced at Princeton. "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," she wrote. "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second." Michelle wasn't describing how she saw herself; she was describing how she was seen. That was a common experience. It's true Michelle might have overstated the general rule—not every encounter of every African American student put race first. But that may have been Michelle's experience at Princeton. Or it may just be that, as with most senior theses written on a deadline by twenty-one-year-olds, not every word was perfect. Those small questions don't matter. What Michelle wrote about was not something she imagined, which is what Barack's opponents would say decades later.

The more important question, which is at the heart of her thesis, is an old one: Integration or isolation? Every ethnic group faces that question, constantly. Sometimes one side of the debate seems to be in favor, sometimes the other. While Michelle was at Princeton, it was almost impossible for African American students to ignore the question completely. Robin Givhan, a Princeton student at about the same time as Michelle and now a
Washington Post
columnist, told author Liza Mundy she felt pressure to socialize only among African Americans. She felt a little better when her Chinese American roommate told her, "I get that all time from the Chinese kids."

Sometimes the things universities did to help the problem only made the problem worse. Princeton, like Brown and some other schools, invited minority students to campus for Third World Orientation Week to take place before the regular orientation week. Michelle's friend Angela Acree remembered that she and Michelle couldn't understand the point. "We weren't sure whether they thought we needed an extra start or they just said, 'Let's bring all the black kids together.'" The answer was, the university thought the students needed an extra start. The result was, by the time other students arrived, the students who had been there for Third World Orientation Week already had a circle of friends made up only of minorities.

As Michelle pointed out in her thesis, Princeton fell short of offering more meaningful solutions. It had only five tenured African American professors. The Afro-American Studies department offered only four courses in the spring semester of her senior year.

However, unlike the image of her presented by Barack's opponents, Michelle's reaction to the difficult environment of Princeton, which some of her classmates still describe with resentment, was noticeably calm. She didn't imagine insults, but she didn't ignore them when they happened.

Howard Taylor, former chair of the Center for African-American Studies and one of Michelle's thesis advisers, recalled Michelle's moderate position on the question of isolation and integration. "She was not an assimilationist, but she wasn't a wide-eyed militant either," Taylor said. "She was able to straddle that issue with great insight."

The lasting memory of her friends and professors is of a person who sounds much the same as she'd be described today: balanced, funny, energetic, devoted to her parents, and focused on things that matter. She was still academically ambitious, too. She didn't just plan to be a lawyer; she planned to go to one of the best law schools in the country, and the most prestigious, Harvard.

One of the traditions at Harvard Law School is that parents buy space in the back of the yearbook to leave a message for their graduating children. In the 1988 edition, next to serious, almost formal messages of congratulations to Michelle's classmates, is a message from Michelle's parents to her: "We knew you would do this fifteen years ago when we could never make you shut up."

Just twenty-four years old, Michelle now had two of the most respected academic degrees in the country. Doors would open for her. She'd be offered jobs starting at larger salaries than those her parents earned. If she did nothing more than avoid big mistakes, her career would continue to advance, thanks to the prestige of the Princeton and Harvard names. But as she had already found out, there was a price to pay for this kind of success. Not long after starting Harvard, she had called her former boss at the Third World Center, Czerny Brasuell, and admitted, "If I could do this over, I'm not sure I would."

She realized that she probably should have worked for a year after Princeton before deciding whether to go to law school. Instead, she had given in to common pressures. "The thing about these wonderful schools is they can be surprisingly narrowing to your perspective," she told reporter Rebecca Johnson. "You can be a lawyer or you can work on Wall Street; those are the conventional options. They're easy, socially acceptable, and financially rewarding. Why wouldn't you do it?" Earning money was important to Michelle. It was also urgent, because she had Princeton tuition loans to repay.

It's not that she hated law school. She just wasn't thrilled by it. Unlike some of the students, she was happy to remain in the background of discussions. Professors who taught Barack a few years later remember him as much more involved in class debates. When Michelle did speak up, she was more likely to disagree with a teacher than with a fellow student. She wasn't interested in the competition that takes place between students at Harvard. But, true to her pattern, she challenged people in authority.