One of the early tests of Barack Obama's political skills came when he was a law student at Harvard University in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Gaining the support of both progressive and conservative editors, Mr. Obama was selected as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He had decided to seek the post believing that he might help ease ideological tensions at the journal even as the campus was embroiled in divisive doctrinal and political debates over issues like faculty diversity.

The uproar included the protests of Derrick A. Bell Jr., the first black professor to win tenure at the law school, who took an unpaid leave of absence and eventually resigned over the lack of a tenured black woman on its faculty.

In the midst of those battles, Mr. Obama presided over difficult debates among intellectuals with wildly different and intensely held views. Yet he was able to set an amicable tone at the journal, according to Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law professor who taught Mr. Obama and served as his mentor.

Mr. Ogletree and others who have known Mr. Obama, now a U.S. senator from Illinois, say his record at Harvard provides an indication of how he might govern as president.

The editors of the law journal "saw him as a coalescing force around which they could come together and do high-quality work," Mr. Ogletree says. "He was able to gently steer them without anyone feeling compromised or undermined in their views."...
Chronicle of Higher Education