IN HIS DEFENSE OF LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE, I was amused by Peter C. Pfeiffer’s assertion that elite colleges require foreign language study to “allow students to take on an alternative identity and see the world in different ways.”

President Obama went to not one, not two, but four “elite” schools: Punahou, Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law. He can’t speak Austrian, but he does speak Australian.

And he certainly does “see the world in [a] different way.”