Following the interview he called me and asked "How do you put up with such oddballs as colleagues? We don't have these weirdos in industry." I replied, "Strange coworkers are the biggest drawback to an academic career."
I tell you this story as a lead-in to a piece by The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan. She has a nice column on how President Obama is a person the American public just doesn't "get." In other words, they cannot figure him out. She says people think he is:
Sleek, cerebral, detached, an academic from Chicago by way of Hawaii and Indonesia. "You know what? I don't know that guy!"Obama spent several years as a part-time law school lecturer, but people including Noonan identify him as "an academic." I suspect what they really mean is that he is odd, as many of my fellow academics were/are odd folk. BTW, lecturer is not a synonym for professor.
