A New Era in Higher Education? Why One Professor Is Taking Her Course Online

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: This week, the Trump administration escalated its war with Harvard cutting another $450 million in grants to the prestigious university, that’s on top of the $2.2 billion already frozen. It’s part of a growing political pressure on higher education. Journalist Karen Attiah discusses what she alleges was Columbia University’s decision to cancel her popular course on race, media, and international affairs. Columbia denies her characterization. Attiah tells Michel Martin why she’s taken the course online now, creating The Resistance Summer school. Their conversation covers how some educators are taking it upon themselves to reimagine the future of higher education.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Karen Attiah, thank you so much for joining us.

KAREN ATTIAH, JOURNALIST AND PROFESSOR: Thanks, Michelle, for having me.

MARTIN: So, you’re an award-winning columnist, a former Washington Post Global opinions editor, the founder of Resistance Summer School. That’s an online course that you created after Columbia University declined, and we’ll talk about that in a minute, declined to repeat a course that you had taught in the spring of 2024. You said that you’d never had a course like that yourself when you were in grad school. So, tell me about the course.

ATTIAH: Yes. So, I decided to create a course called Race Journalism, Journalism or Media and International Affairs. So, looking at the intersection of. Race and how we’ve — how race is constructed throughout the centuries, how identity is constructed throughout the centuries, basically. And how that intersects with basically how we see the world, how we see other countries, how we see other people, how we see ourselves. And what I argue basically in the course is saying that this is a process that is mediated. It’s — if you’re in journalism, if you’re in Hollywood, it’s the stories that we tell about other people that helps to drive and reinforce policy. So, whether that’s, you know, public health policy or refugees or even, you know, going to war, I think, for me, as someone who works in media and has an experience in living and working and reporting from all around the world, it was really an opportunity to bring all of that together. And, you know, sadly, there’s not a whole lot of black people, non-white people that get to be — allowed to be experts on the world.

MARTIN: So, the course was fully subscribed, you know, all the — you know, people in the seats. You got good reviews for the students. You expected that it would be renewed for the spring of 2025. So, when you found out that it wouldn’t be renewed, what did they say to you?

ATTIAH: I was told that the dean would not be renewing my funding.

MARTIN: And were you given a reason?

ATTIAH: Not much, no. To this day, I would still like to know exactly what that decision was about. I still don’t have clarity on that. Of course, it was heartbreaking, frustrating. I was crushed. Yes. You know, it was not only the dream to teach, not only the chance to sort of give back, but I was really — there were already students who had approached me from the previous year saying that they were looking forward to the course. So, my heart, to an extent, was breaking for students who, again, said that they felt that they really needed this course, something like this to be a part of their education, and I wouldn’t be able to give it to them.

MARTIN: So, you wrote about this in announcing the Resistance Summer School. You sat on it for a bit and you thought to yourself, actually, what I’m going to do is make this kind of, I don’t know what’s the right word, an open source or open to the public, open to anybody who wanted to participate. It wasn’t — it’s not free. But it is available for people. And apparently, you had this interesting funding model where people who you offered basically a sliding scale as like what people could afford. The course sold out in, what, 48 hours?

ATTIAH: Yes.

MARTIN: As I understand it from the site, you had 500 slots for the course, and you’ve got a waiting list of 1,600 people.

ATTIAH: It’s 2,000 now.

MARTIN: 2,000 now. So, what gave you the idea?

ATTIAH: Watching what’s been happening politically, and watching what’s been happening at Columbia’s campus in terms of the capitulation to Trump’s demands over DEI and over, you know, particularly I think for me seeing Columbia’s willingness to put the departments of Middle East studies, African studies and South Asian studies under a special receivership just made me think, OK, I have this course, this work, this labor that I’d done for Columbia. And why should it be held hostage, frankly, by an institution that is caving basically on its own values on education. I just felt like I needed to liberate my work and not just that. I think as a person seeing what’s been happening with, you know, what I would argue is a segregationist purge of teaching about race and teaching about history. I knew from (INAUDIBLE) that what I was teaching about was going to be possibly targeted. I just wanted to free, at least myself, in that subject matter, and to an extent, the students from, you know, institutional cowardice, right. And I think, for me, I just, also as a person, in this moment, feeling powerless sometimes watching the news, feeling angry that institutions were caving. I was like, OK, what skills do I have? What could I do? OK. I’ve got this course. I’ve got this syllabus. Let me dust it off, bring it out of the closet and see if anybody wants to have it.

MARTIN: So, you mentioned that receivership. I mean, Columbia isn’t acknowledging that they are ceding to that. But it is a fact that more than 50 universities are being investigated by the Trump administration as part of their explicit campaign against DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies. Their argument is that universities in general, and Columbia in particular, did not do enough in their view to protect students from what they consider to be the antisemitic overtone of the pro-Palestine protests in that spring. In March of 2025, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia University place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under administrative receivership for a minimum of five years as a condition for restoring federal funding, which they say that they have now strip them of something like $400 million or something like that. Now, Columbia responded on March 21st that they didn’t refer to the receivership, but they did appoint a new senior administrator to review leadership and to ensure programs are balanced at that, you know, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department, the Middle East Institute, the Center for Palestine Studies, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and other departments with Middle East programs. And I say all that to say that, do you see what happened to your class per se, as part of that? Do you think that it was related to that?

ATTIAH: What I see, right, is to an extent what the Trump administration is doing with colleges and particularly with Columbia University, personally I would argue would not have happened if these colleges and universities, and frankly, corporations were serious about their commitments to diversity. Since the George Floyd, you know, murder and the Black Lives Matters, protests and all that, we saw so much energy and opportunity and cash and programs, you know, promises about diversity and about rectifying the wrongs of the past, right? And so, fast forward to five years later, we started seeing how, OK, these institutions were like, their similar — their racial justice summer was over. Their internships were over going back to the status quo, right? And so, I think to an extent, Trump targeting the — you know, these so-called you know, woke programs, there’s already a bit of a fertile ground because there — the commitments were already waning. The funding, whether it’s Hollywood, whether it’s academia, whether it was journalism, we saw a lot of that — those promises kind of, you know, be rolled back, be pulled back. You know, my course was canceled last year before Trump took office. But I definitely see this as part of there is already, in a sense, a non-commitment, right, in the true sense of the word. I think that it feels very painfully evident that those commitments to diversity were not much more than branding and marketing to capture, you know, a moment in the post-George Floyd era.

MARTIN: As you would imagine, we — because we are journalists, called Columbia to get their take on your perspective on what happened to your class. And they sent us a statement that said, Karen Attiah taught at SIPA as an adjunct professor during the spring 2024 semester. Her class was funded and commissioned for that term. She was subsequently invited to return to teach the same course in the spring of 2025 semester, but she declined. She’s also been offered the same opportunity to teach the same course in 2026 at Columbia, which she has not yet accepted. And they go on to say, it was a privilege to have her teach our students as both a distinguished journalist and valued alumna. Basically, they’re saying they invited you back. Did that — did they in fact invite you back after initially telling you that the course would not be renewed?

ATTIAH: I’ll start by working backwards. Their second part of the statement says, Columbia invited me back to teach. It doesn’t specifically say SIPA. There are talks about, would I go to the journalism school? Would I be placed somewhere, right? And you’d sort of work it out. I just find that interesting that workaround wasn’t offered last year, only after this course went viral in terms of me doing that.

MARTIN: So, let me just clarify. So, after — so you’re saying that the invitation to teach in this spring of 2026 was only offered after you had made it clear that you were teaching this course to the public, that you were offering it publicly. So, that’s the first thing.

ATTIAH: Yes. Correct.

MARTIN: What about saying that you had been invited back for 2025? What’s the — what’s your response to that?

ATTIAH: Yes. So, again, the offer that came through was not — let’s just say it was not through SIPA’s funding. And again, I mean, I don’t — this has little to do with me having a vendetta against Columbia. I — Columbia shaped me. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t, if it wasn’t for Columbia. But for me as a person, as a — as someone who cares about the subject matter, I just want to be able to be as free as possible to teach in the way that I would like to teach, and not with the fear that at any moment the axe could come again, as the political climates changed.

MARTIN: Well, let me ask you this way though. I have to — I’m going to sort of push forward there. A lot of people saw what happened at Columbia in particular and some other universities, even if people who were sympathetic to and in agreement with some of the messages around Palestine and Israel’s war in Gaza found the behavior of at least some people on these campuses, objectionable, they found some of their messaging to be antisemitic. Do you think that’s fair?

ATTIAH: I think, you know, I was — and I was teaching during the protest, during the —

MARTIN: Oh, you absolutely were. Yes. You sure were.

ATTIAH: Yes, during the encampment.

MARTIN: Yes, you were there.

ATTIAH: And so, it was a learning environment or learning lesson in real- time, even for my students, because part of the course that I teach on is mass media reporting on protest movements for equality, right? And so, I some time not only in the encampments, but even, you know, on the outside. Now only did I see the — and my students as well, all of us talked about this and we were Jewish, Muslim, Christian. We were all talking about, no matter how you feel, the image that was on the outside of what was happening at Columbia was wildly manipulated, misstated, and all that. But one thing that touched me about the encampment specifically was I saw these students that were highly sophisticated in terms of how they organized these encampments. These are little towns almost. They had libraries, they had first aid care, they had food that was coming in. And I think, for me, amidst the controversies, I saw — Columbia gave me a living example of even what I’m doing right now, right? And that despite, you know, clashes over politics or — and disruptions that it is possible for people to organize and for learning to still go on and for professors to be donating their time freely to the community, right. And so, to me it’s like that was also the lesson from the protest, you know, and we saw, you know, despite what one might think about the chance and the behavior, the larger question was, is bringing in a militarized NYPD force to occupy your campus and create it into this war zone, right, is that OK? And so, even though, you know, I’m not going to be on the quad at Columbia, I might be on Zoom or online as we’re seeing broadly, again, outside of Columbia, but broadly this war, this ideological war that we’re having over teaching history over black people even having positions of influence and power, I see myself and, you know, I just feel like I’m trying to do what I saw there, which is just gathering people, whoever wants to listen and that we will still learn anyway.

MARTIN: Karen Attiah, thank you so much for speaking with us. I’ll be interested to hear after your summer school how it all turned out. So, thank you for talking with us.

ATTIAH: Thank you for having me.