<p>Way too cynical, xiggi. </p>
<p>Michelle Obama was not exactly plucked out of the kitchen by U of C Hospitals and given a handsomely paid make-work job. She was (and is) a highly competent professional, well connected in Chicago legal, political, and community circles, with degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law. She worked at one of Chicago’s most prestigious law firms, then in the mayor’s office, then in a senior position in the city’s planning department, then as executive director of a major not-for-profit working to connect inner city youth to internship opportunities and leadership training, then as Associate Dean for Student Services at the University of Chicago where her signature accomplishment was to develop a center for community service, then as executive director of community services for U of C Hospitals before being named Vice President for Community and External Affairs there. It’s pretty clear, I think, that her connections were not just to her husband, but to the city’s legal establishment, the mayor’s office, the city’s planning department, and the South Side African-American community, of which she (unlike her husband) was a native, and where she had established strong networks through her various community service endeavors.</p>
<p>This is nothing to be sneezed at. The University of Chicago is a wealthy, multi-billion dollar, predominantly white institution sitting uneasily on an island in the middle of Chicago’s predominantly African-American, and largely poor, South Side. One of the principal ways the university connects with, serves, and makes its peace with its South Side neighbors is through its health and hospitals system, which provides jobs, health care services, charity care, free and paid community health clinics, community health needs assessments, wellness education, and much more to the greater South Side community. Managing all that–and managing the political and PR and community relations aspects of it–is not exactly light work. Whether the particular job title held by Michelle Obama preceded her or survived her is just an absurd trivia question–or, more likely, a political spinner’s debating point, meant to obfuscate rather than to elucidate. What’s clear is that the job that was assigned to her was a critically important and highly sensitive one for the University of Chicago; that she was eminently qualified to perform it; that by all accounts she performed it admirably; and that someone did that job before her arrival on the scene, and someone continues to do that job to this day, under whatever the particular job title, because it involves matters that are really of life-or-death strategic importance to the University of Chicago.</p>