If Barack Obama didn’t exist, America would have eventually had to invent him. Instead, the task was efficiently, if not inexpensively, subcontracted to Harvard Law School. For those with callings like Obama’s, HLS is a three-year dress rehearsal for a life of leadership, a life lived in the public arena where every decision counts and where one mistake can lead your cause (and, in his case, your people) off a cliff or to irrelevance.

A near perfect microcosm of the countervailing forces engulfing America in its neverending racial and cultural dramas, HLS comes complete with the rich, the poor, revolutionaries, apparatchiks, the left, the right, the befuddled middle, immigrants, shell-shocked refugees from politics, and a mandate to produce an endless supply of national leaders preternaturally gifted to sort through all the meshugas and chart a course to the future. HLS gave Obama the tools to lead the way to a brand-new politics of blackness, one knowledgeable of the past while simultaneously free enough of it to move purposely forward.

But how? Would Obama have become today’s “Obama 2008” phenom had he attended HLS during one of its periods of relative apathy (like my ‘don’t mind me’ years, which began after he graduated in 1991), or did the crushing thrust-and-parry of that tumult forge his racial-intellectual-activist future?

Obama keeps mum about his experience there, but it’s a near certainty that someone of his ruminative, activist bent would have been deeply affected by the climate of war-torn HLS. Paired with his years as a community organizer, what better preparation for a life at the heights of American politics? While Obama just missed the ’80s campus agonies of South African divestment, there was still plenty of bitterness and manned barricades from which to choose. Lucky Barack was just in time for the inheritors of the Reagan Revolution, Desert Storm and, most significantly, the battles royale of traditionalists versus the ‘crits’ and faculty diversity.

His responses to both upheavals were polar opposites; the differences in those responses tell us something about the person, and politician, he would become. Controversial on arrival, Critical Legal Theory stormed HLS in the ’80s; it argued that the law is merely politics by other means and that its claims to impartiality were mere pretense crafted to serve the interests of wealth and power. Soon, the Critical Race Theorists built on that concept to argue that race was the decisive factor of existence for minorities since the law, Crits believe, is partisan.

Given the built-in accusation of class-, sex- and racism, as well as Crits’ reliance on personal narrative to refute dry academic analysis, the stage was set for vitriol and conflict in the Hark, at Hemenway, on the pages of the Law Review, and especially at tenure meetings. Amidst mounting pressure from both left and right, the professoriat, under then-dean Vorenberg, blocked Crit professors Clare Dalton and David Trubek’s tenure hopes. That 1987 battle was still bitterly alive five years later when I arrived. Trubek’s description of HLS as “the Beirut of legal education” seems impervious to critique.

While Obama attended some of Professor Charles Ogletree’s voluntary ‘Saturday Schools’ on the subject, he appears to have largely kept his thoughts to himself. Classmates and professors remember him as somewhat sympathetic but not directly engaged in an academic battle that would have kept him firmly in the limelight of one of the defining dramas of his days at HLS. But he was out front-and-center on faculty diversity. During Obama’s time, there were only three black professors and exactly zero black females. (Professor Lani Guinier was the first such hire in 1998.) Testament to the regard he was held in by both the professoriat and his peers, he was afforded a rare prominence in that battle; he made impassioned calls for faculty diversity, most notably at a rally for controversial black professor Derrick Bell who, in 1990, made good on his promise to resign from HLS unless a black woman was tenured.

Two highly controversial positions (both of which he likely agreed with), both with the potential to come back to haunt him, but only one public commitment. Why? In a word: Caution. Mature, thoughtful, and focused (having just spent time in Kenya learning to meld his African-ness with his American-ness), it’s likely that Obama used HLS, with its instant passport to center stage, to learn to pick his battles, to keep his eyes on the prize. You can fall headfirst into ‘causes’ there—women’s issues, disability rights, the environment—and you can fall headfirst into neverending meetings and manifestoes and unceasing rhetorical warfare against the maddening powers that be, quicksand into which all too many black students fall. Perhaps all the leftist agitation struck him, too, as masturbatory. Demanding that an institution with Harvard’s resources find at least one woman of color has a discrete, quantifiable goal with a tangible result. Dismantling the power structure might just take a while.

There is ample anecdotal evidence from classmates, friends, and professors, that Obama was frequently impatient with the law’s dry remove from the average person’s life, especially after his years after college spent organizing on the South Side of Chicago. He went to Crit lectures and no doubt has many Crit friends but, in a world of limited resources, perhaps he decided that investing in the chic intellectual issue of his day was not the best use of his time and talents.

Or political capital. No one knows better than he, the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, that he could excel as either a scholar or an activist; no doubt the HLS maelstrom helped him make the decision. In addition to goal-setting in a topsy-turvy environment, HLS probably also taught him that nothing succeeds like success; however much he might have frustrated the campus left with his dangerous silence on an intellectual issue, he maintained his place in the leadership with his fervent embrace of an overtly racial one. He disappointed the black/left elite but came through for the black polity, a line Obama will be walking for the rest of his public life. As long as Obama keeps his eye on the bottom line of black uplift, any Ivy Leaguer who attacks him for failing to be esoterically critical enough of the powers-that-be will be scorned and silenced. Obama figured out that abstruse Law Review articles and tenure battles among elites are easily overshadowed by direct action.

As injustice goes, America is a target-rich environment. HLS taught Obama that you can’t take them all on and remain either productive or sane. Say what you will about his chosen fields of engagement while a student (and the pressure on him to take part in every battle), it’s inarguable that HLS helped prepare him to remain calm and decisive under pressure from both allies and opponents. Whether he wins the White House or not, Obama faces many more bitter choices between symbolic victories and concrete ones, loyalty and integrity, race and country. From the perspective of another who had to run the tricky gauntlet of HLS, I think he got his money’s worth from our alma mater.