In Preparation for the Breitbart Tapes

Judging from the "preview" at BuzzFeed, the tapes being released are not of Barack Obama in college; they are from his law school years. In them (the BuzzFeed version), he is standing in front of Harkness Commons at Harvard Law School, discussing the dispute that raged in the spring of 1990 (right after he had been elected President of the Harvard Law Review). It concerned what protesters deemed to be insufficient hiring of black faculty members, in the wake of Professor Regina Austin (an African American who was a visiting professor at the time) being denied tenure.

I was a first-year student at the law school, working pretty hard and ignoring the newest iteration of the protests that liberal students seemed to launch each spring (at least judging from my college experience). The whole dispute over faculty hiring was an ugly one; I'll be interested to hear if President Obama uttered any bombshells because, judging from my recollections, most of the utterances from the protesters seemed like your pretty standard issue lefty pablum (but there is a pretty big chunk in the Buzz Feed tape that's been cut out of the President's remarks).

Here is a contemporaneous article about the law school hiring controversy that ran in The New York Times magazine.

Update: Hannity says the tapes were from spring of 1991, not 1990. In that case, I was working hard as the newly-elected managing editor of The Harvard Law Review -- and the president had time on his hands, as his tenure as President of the Review had just ended.