A Columbia University student criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “decision-making” class for lacking depth and authenticity, saying she came across more as a politician “while reading passages from her book.”
Clinton’s class “Inside the Situation Room,” which she co-teaches alongside Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, exposes students to foreign policy topics and is supposed to instruct students about how to make decisions at a national level. Fox News reported that the student, Laalitya Acharya, found the former secretary of state unrelatable, according to a TikTok video posted in December 2023.
“I would have really, really hoped that she would bring in some more unique insights … rather than her almost basically reciting passages from her book word-for-word during lecture,” Acharya said in the video.
She went on to say the class felt like a one-sided speaking engagement, with Clinton failing to bring fresh perspectives on the class’s topic, which Acharya said wasn’t already expressed in Clinton’s book. Her assessment of Clinton’s teaching performance as uninspiring contradicts the course description.
“[The class] employs insights from diverse academic fields — including political psychology, domestic politics, and international relations — and the direct experience of high-level principals in the room to understand the key factors which underpin a nation’s most crucial decisions,” according to the description.
Though Acharya said she did not regret taking the class, she had hoped Clinton would have been more candid.
“I would have really, really hoped that she would bring in some more unique insights and … more vulnerability and discussion on why she made the decisions that she did, what her insights were, what her thoughts were,” Acharya continued in the video.
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Acharya is not the only student who has criticized Clinton for being a disingenuous professor. Yahoo News reported in December that another student, Cate Twining-Ward, who wrote a letter to HuffPost, was initially eager to take the course but described her experience as feeling like “the audience on a late-night talk show.”
“I am also discouraged that neither Clinton nor the dean attended a single weekly discussion section, let alone read the assignments we poured hours of work into writing,” Twining-Ward wrote. Instead, these duties were handed off to the teachers assigned to lead the discussion groups.