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In 1981, in search of a community to belong to, he transfers to that prestigious university on the edge of Harlem -- Columbia, where he majors in political science with a specialization in international relations. He also swapped drugs for Marxism.
Obama says he was somewhat involved with the Black Students Organization and participated in anti-apartheid activities. "Mostly, my years at Columbia were an intense period of study," he says. "When I transferred, I decided to buckle down and get serious. I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk."
Obama says it is difficult to separate his college experience at Columbia from the urban experience of living in New York City, and his memoir offers little about his time on campus
When Obama arrived in New York, he already knew Sohale "Hal" Siddiqi, a drug addicted illegal alien from Pakistan, who was a friend of Chandoo's and Hamid's from Karachi, who had visited them at Occidental College.
He had come to New York from London two years earlier and found his caustic wit and unabashed desire to make money perfectly pitched to the city’s mood. He had overstayed his tourist visa and now made a living in New York’s high-turnover, illegal immigrant workforce, waiting on tables.
In 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walk-up on East 94th Street.
In "The Book," Siddiqi is identified only as "Sadik" -- a short, well-built Pakistani" who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party. They were roomies for a while. Siddiqi confirmed Obama's account that he turned serious in New York and "stopped getting high."
Watching Sadik's drugging obviously got Obama's attention.
"I stopped getting high. I ran 3 miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry," he wrote in "Dreams."
He went to the Marxist-Socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs in Brooklyn and started lecturing his relatives until they worried he'd become "one of those freaks you see on the streets around here."
The Obama campaign declined to discuss Obama's time at Columbia and his friendships in general. It won't, for example, release his transcript or name his friends. It did, however, list five locations where Obama lived during his four years here: three on Manhattan's Upper West Side and two in Brooklyn -- one in Park Slope, the other in Brooklyn Heights. His memoir mentions two others on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
