What’s interesting about these bits is not so much Obama’s gravitation toward Marxist profs and structural feminists, but the calculation behind the gravitation. Received wisdom holds that college is supposed to be a time of intellectual exploration and discovery, a period when students are supposed to mix with people whose perspectives are sharply different from their own (that’s the whole idea behind diversity, isn’t it?).

Yet Obama embraced the reigning orthodoxy of campus leftism, going so far as to pick his friends on the basis of their politics. Wouldn’t it have been far more audacious to seek out friends regardless of their politics—or at least to look for some among, say, conservative Christians, advocates of gun rights, and proponents of free enterprise? Assuming, of course, there were any to be found?