Posted on 12/12/2023 6:31:05 PM PST by simpson96
From my aisle seat, I was well positioned to access the lecture microphone. Just beyond it stood Hillary Clinton. It’s too bad I was only able to ask her one question the entire semester I spent in her course.
Last fall I learned that Clinton would be teaching a class at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. I did not hesitate to apply — and neither did 1,200 other students.
My application essays were impassioned. I was certain Clinton’s five decades of public service would enrich my own leadership ambitions. I had imagined that spending two hours each week with a former senator, secretary of state, first lady and presidential nominee would embolden me in new ways. Unfortunately, my idealistic hopes got the best of me.(snip)
“But what is her class really like?” my peers often asked me.
Well, the thing is, it wasn’t really a class — it was a production.
On my first day, I expected to enter a classroom with 30 other students, which would be typical of classes in my program. Instead, I approached a swarm of several hundred. Next to them was a sea of cameras belonging to journalists from various major outlets. Just to their right, I spotted Secret Service personnel whispering into their radios. It was only 11:30 a.m. — our lecture didn’t begin until 2:10 p.m.(snip)
Every Wednesday for 12 consecutive weeks, I sacrificed my lunch break to queue alongside 350 equally eager students for the chance at scoring a front-row seat. The third week of class, I overheard one classmate say he felt as if he was “waiting for a celebrity concert ticket.” He mused: “I wonder if I can sleep here tonight so I can get up front and ask my question tomorrow.”
On our first day of class, after making it past the Secret Service agents, we settled in for a much-anticipated two hours with the onetime presidential nominee. But the class abruptly ended half an hour early — and continued to do so every week. Only a handful of students were given time to ask their prepared questions.
Why did we lose a quarter of our scheduled class time? The crew filming each session needed time to disassemble their equipment. I’m not surprised; it’s an elaborate setup. Rumor has it that next year the same class will be offered, but instead of in-person lectures with Clinton each week, students will be offered the videos of our class via a platform called Columbia+, which sounds to me more like a streaming service than a scholarly site.
Together in class and on tape, we acted much like an audience at a late-night talk show, distracted by the cameras and yet immersed in the vanity of the production. We followed an unspoken script where we were both active and passive at once — expected to laugh at certain anecdotes, but not encouraged to raise our hands.
It’s no secret that celebrity professors are thought to be great for universities. A recognizable name and an impressive pedigree like Clinton’s attract valuable attention, bringing in students, donors, funding and opportunities for new institutions, like Clinton’s recently launched Institute of Global Politics at SIPA.
But these benefits come with a cost.
Week after week, hour-long lines wrapped around the lobby of the lecture hall, as students employed aggressive strategies to secure near-microphone seats for what became known as “the Hunger Games Q&A.” Subjecting ourselves to this wait was unavoidable if we had any hope of asking even one question during the semester. (Rachel Szala, associate dean for communications and external relations at SIPA, told HuffPost in an email: “Secretary Clinton and Dean Yarhi-Milo held open Q&A for at least 20 minutes at the end of each class. Student questions were not pre-screened and students were allowed to ask more than one question over the course of the semester, even if they had previously asked a question ... During the first class after Oct. 7, they offered twice as long as normal (40 minutes) for questions on the conflict or any other topic students wanted to discuss. And in the last class, Q&A was over an hour.” Despite what Szala says, I will note we were told at almost every lecture that “if you have already asked a question, you are not allowed to ask another one.”)
Twice, Clinton didn’t appear in class. “The secretary couldn’t make it this week,” Yarhi-Milo told us, as if we should expect to pay for a Broadway show only to watch the understudy.
When Clinton was present on stage, students were eager to delve into current events and voice their opinions. However, when sensitive topics arose, the discourse was often neutralized and students were referred to panels and events outside the lecture hall for answers.
Bitterness inside the classroom grew as the war in the Middle East evolved. Clinton faced walkouts, sit-ins and, on several occasions, fierce vocal backlash in response to her often bland answers to conflict-related questions.
When several dozen students planned a mid-lecture walkout in protest of Columbia’s response to doxxing incidents on campus, Yarhi-Milo responded by expressing her shared frustrations. One student yelled back: “Then do better!”
There are no doubt considerable challenges that come with attempting to educate hundreds of students about global conflicts unfolding in real time — especially in a classroom where every word is being recorded. The efforts to ease tensions made by the university and those overseeing the class should be commended. But relying on future roundtables to address students’ grievances, while reducing class time so the course can be digitally documented, comes as a disappointment.
In Clinton's defense, previous generations would have been eager to hear the professor's opinion, not just have a famous person looking at them while they voiced their own young, unformed thoughts. But this is Gen Z, and what they wanted was to be heard, not to listen.
“I would not pay one cent to hear her speak.”
That would be my first thought. THEN I’d consider how much fun it would be to recruit others with me to fill the classroom, and heckle the heck throughout every session.
It’s like spam callers who initially are an annoyance. But it’s really fun to mess with them and string then along .
Only an idiot would pay for a class with that bxtch.
So what exactly was the class she was “teaching”? Seems from the article’s author the only reason for going to the “class” was the hope of getting to ask a question.
Exactly. The pathological need for this generation to go viral in some manner which in this case was apparently being seen asking a question of Her Heinous.
Meanwhile, we have the lament of unfulfilled hero worship from the moron who wrote this and seems only to be upset at the process failure around the class not the actual failure who gave the class and consented, no insisted, actually, knowing her, on it being the shallow weekly event it was.
*
IOW, they were Democrats................
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