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| -Great Cultural Revolution |
| What a Bust! |
| 2023-12-11 |
| [MSN - HuffPost] 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. Clinton’s course, titled "Inside the Situation Room" and co-taught with SIPA’s Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, promised students an opportunity to understand the key factors that underpin a nation’s most crucial decisions. "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. Perhaps the enormous class size was to be expected. It was, arguably, an equitable decision made to meet the high demand from students across a diversity of programs, all of whom hoped to learn from the same distinguished political figure. Unfortunately, our shared enthusiasm was leveraged to what felt like the detriment of our own learning experience. 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.") Much more at the link. I am not surprised. It was all about Hillary. |
| Posted by:Deacon Blues |
| #7 I would have paid to be allowed not to be in that class. |
| Posted by: lord garth 2023-12-11 15:42 |
| #6 ^ Who is a potato |
| Posted by: Frank G 2023-12-11 09:01 |
| #5 Can’t imagine putting up with that baloney for anyone. Can you imagine going through a scaled down version to be imparted with all the wisdom that is Brian Stelter. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2023-12-11 08:43 |
| #4 |
| Posted by: Cholutle Thrans9751 2023-12-11 06:49 |
| #3 Student's admitting they behaved like they were trying to get a rock star's autograph says it all about what a phoney thing the ivys are these days. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-12-11 05:49 |
| #2 At least you can put on your résumé that you helped polish Hilary’s résumé. |
| Posted by: Ululating Platypus 2023-12-11 05:06 |
#1  |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2023-12-11 04:22 |