December 15th, 2008 no you can't

So apparently, Barack Obama was rejected from Swarthmore (when he applied as a high school student to hopefully attend Swarthmore). According to this month-old Swarthmore Daily Gazette story (which I completely missed when it first came out!):

Senior Joel Mittleman ’09 actually had the chance to personally confirm the rumor when Obama held an open town hall at Strath Haven High School during the Pennsylvania primaries. “I did ask Obama [whether it was true],” he says, “not during the actual question and answer, but as he was walking the line shaking hands afterwards.” Mittleman recalls the Senator laughing in response, asking him where he heard the information, and then saying “Yes, it’s true. It really broke my heart, actually.”

From: http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2008/11/8/obama-denied/

But the plot thickens. Apparently, MSNBC picked up on this story, but almost copied the above Daily Gazette story word-for-word. Although the MSNBC story attributes the story to the “college newspaper”, the wording of the story is lifted almost exactly, including even the “mismatched quotation marks” according to @mskorpe1 on Twitter.

The link to the MSNBC story is here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28197566/
And in case it changes, the screenshot is shown below:

This story fascinates me on multiple levels. First, there is the obvious point: Swarthmore rejected a future world leader. But, what would have happened if Obama was indeed admitted to Swarthmore and decided to attend? Could he still have eventually become the president of the United States? Would he still have formed the crucial social connections that probably led him to success, like the ones he probably made at Columbia? And what does this say about a Swarthmore education? Swarthmore is often criticized for having a “bubble” – almost like an intellectual monastery cut off from the rest of the world. I can see how this is an apt description on many levels. And this insularity is sometimes even looked upon as a positive trait. But the more I think about it, the more I suspect that Obama would have never become who he is today had he attended Swarthmore. He probably would have become a professor, or something just as obscured from the real world.