Columbia University has enlisted former secretary of state Mike Pompeo to teach a course on public diplomacy.
Pompeo will join Columbia’s Institute of Global Politics (IGP), housed within the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), as a Carnegie Distinguished Fellow for a one-year appointment, starting on March 1 and lasting through February 2026.
“I am thrilled to join the Institute and to provide a unique voice defending traditional American values and the Founders’ vision for our great nation, alongside the necessity to support our allies across the world,” Pompeo said in a statement. “I appreciate the commitment of the Institute to a broad spectrum of opinions and look forward to engaging with students and faculty around a central mission of the university: learning through investigation and the exchange of ideas.”
“I’m uninterested in the name of the institution on their diploma, and deeply interested in what it is they know,” Pompeo told the Wall Street Journal. “The United States’ greatest risk is that we refuse to teach the next generation about the greatness of our nation.”
The announcement comes as Columbia continues to deal with rampant campus anti-Semitism. Last month, for example, anti-Israel student radicals dumped cement into SIPA’s sewage system. A week earlier, pro-Hamas agitators stormed an Israeli history class and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers.
Columbia, however, has taken increasingly aggressive disciplinary measures, possibly as means of appeasing President Donald Trump, who has promised to target campus anti-Semitism. The university promptly suspended at least one of the student protesters who disrupted the history course and posted a security guard outside at least one of its Jewish studies courses. Two of the other agitators were students at Barnard College, Columbia’s sister school, and were reportedly expelled.
Columbia also hired a Trump transition alumnus last month to lobby for the institution on “issues related to higher education and appropriations” as Republicans threaten to tax the Ivy League institution’s $15 billion endowment. Trump’s Department of Education on Feb. 3, meanwhile, opened an investigation into “widespread antisemitic harassment” at Columbia in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack.
“The Institute of Global Politics at Columbia SIPA is honored to welcome former Secretary of State Pompeo to its current cohort of IGP Carnegie Distinguished Fellows,” a university official told the Washington Free Beacon. “During his tenure as a Distinguished Fellow, Secretary Pompeo will meet with students, engage with faculty and university leadership, and contribute to ongoing policy work within IGP.”
Pompeo will join fellow former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who became IGP chair in 2023 and teaches a fall semester course, “Inside the Situation Room.” In September, dozens of anti-Israel students gathered outside Clinton’s “sham class,” branding her a “war criminal” and urging attending students to walk out.
Clinton “fully endorses IGP’s mission, including its commitment to welcoming experts with a diversity of political perspectives,” a university official told the Free Beacon.
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