(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) A liberal student at Columbia University penned a Huffington Post op-ed recently complaining that her idealist dreams had been dashed after taking a foreign policy course taught by Hillary Clinton this semester.
Columbia student Cate Twining–Ward wrote that, true to Clinton form, the course was short on substance and amounted to nothing more than political theater, the College Fix reported.
According to Twining–Ward, it “wasn’t really a class—it was a production.”
For that reason, she argued, the course was not adequately “empowering.”
Things went so far that every lecture was filmed by a professional camera crew.
“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,” she wrote, noting that the students had very little leeway to engage organically.
“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.”
Further, Clinton routinely sidelined any serious questions about foreign affairs, particularly the Israel–Hamas conflict that has split the Left in half.
In the context of such discussions, she noted, “the discourse was often neutralized and students were referred to panels and events outside the lecture hall for answers.”
She may have had good reason for dodging that particular subject given the disruptions that pro-Hamas students created during and after the lectures while trying to confront her about it.
That included a walkout in November to protest the fact that Clinton had not spoken out publicly against a so-called doxxing truck that was parked outside the campus outing students for their anti-Semitic statements.
However, Twining–Ward said students were discouraged to raise their hands or ask questions throughout the course. On the final day of class—when Clinton was allegedly going to answer questions—all questions were selected in advance.
According to Twining–Ward, the class made her “question Columbia’s institutional priorities” after it brought in Clinton as a “celebrity professor” who treated students like “audience members.”
In response to the article, Rachel Szala, Columbia’s associate dean for communications and external relations, claimed that there was an “open Q&A for at least 20 minutes at the end of each class,” and added that the questions were not screened in advance.
Clinton was “adamant about the need for difficult conversations that challenge individual assumptions, and this is part of what they modeled in class,” Szala argued.
