Class consciousness

Today: Mark Yarm, executive editor, features and special projects, at PCMag and the author of Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge.

Issue No. 384

“An Antidote to All the Despair and Misery”
Mark Yarm

“An Antidote to All the Despair and Misery”

by Mark Yarm

Last summer, in the wake of campus protests over the war in Gaza, Columbia University reportedly canceled nearly a dozen courses at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), including a spring 2025 class entitled Race and Journalism that was to be taught by adjunct professor Karen Attiah, a SIPA alum and Washington Post opinion columnist.

“It’s been terrifying to see institution after institution across the country cave on diversity, freedom of speech, and academic integrity, not to protect students and faculty, but to protect donors and reputations,” Attiah wrote on Substack in April. In that same post, the writer and editor announced that she would be teaching the course intended for Columbia on her own, at what she dubbed Resistance Summer School.

The D.C.-based school, which Attiah says has nearly 550 virtual and in-person students (40 of them on scholarships), officially launched last month. “We have students all the way from, I think, 17 to someone who’s nearly 80,” Attiah told me. “We have lawyers, we’ve got an epidemiologist, we’ve got librarians, we’ve got teachers, we’ve got filmmakers. It’s really just this wide spread of people who just love to learn, which is cool.” There are nearly 4,000 people on the waiting list for the fall cohort.

Attiah teaching class (photo credit: Ethan Wong)

Meanwhile, Attiah’s future at the rapidly changing Washington Post appears “uncertain,” according to a report in Oliver Darcy’s Status last week that detailed her “tense” sitdown with Adam O’Neal, the Post’s new opinion editor. “As O’Neal indicated during their meeting, her work seems at odds with its emerging editorial direction, and it’s hard to imagine she’s long for his world,” Darcy writes.

Attiah did not respond to my request for comment on the Status report, but we did discuss her situation at the Post (and more) in the interview below, conducted on July 25. It has been edited for length and clarity. (Full disclosure: I am an adjunct at Columbia Journalism School.)

Where did the idea for Resistance Summer School come from?

After my course was not renewed for funding at Columbia, I sat on what to do for a few months, and then I was like, Why can’t I just teach this on my own? The name Resistance Summer School actually started off as kind of a joke, to be honest. I put on Bluesky that I was interested in offering this independently, and I asked folks, “Okay, if I did this, how many of you would sign up?” And honestly, I would have been happy if like 30 people said yes, but then I think that post got like 3,000 responses.

After that, I put up a post, like, “Get in losers, we’re going to Resistance Summer School.” And the name just kind of stuck. But fundamentally, it’s the course about race and media and international affairs that Columbia didn’t support me teaching.

What did the university communicate to you about why the course was canceled?

Still nebulous. All sorts of reasons. They were saying that they were cutting courses based on low enrollment. My course was over-enrolled. But then they communicated to others that it wasn’t a budget concern. And then a lot of passing the blame as to who made the decision. So to this day, I still don’t know.

What is your suspicion?

My course got unanimously approved in the same month, more or less, as October 7. And then I was very vocal about my criticism of Israel. I have been told that the SIPA administration was not happy with my stance on Gaza, and I was critical of the administration and how it handled the encampments [on campus] later.

I have strong reason to believe that my stance on being against what I believe now is a genocide and calling for adherence to international law is what got my course non-renewed. Now I know what they’ll say. Columbia will say that they offered for me to come back. That was only after public attention, after I went public about the cancellation.

Are you still affiliated with Columbia, or did you part ways?

The way that it stands, it’s sort of like a detente. I’m not at war. I’m an alum of the School of International and Public Affairs, and it was my dream to teach in the international affairs school. I designed this course to be the class I never had on race and international affairs, so I was very keen on teaching it there. Their offer was to just move me somewhere else in the Columbia system. So, as far as I know, I suppose that offer is still on the table. However, I informed them that I’d be pursuing my own independent course. For now, this is where my heart and soul is.

[In a statement to Flaming Hydra, a SIPA spokesperson writes, “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 2025 semester, but she declined. She was also offered the opportunity to teach the same course in 2026 at Columbia, which she has not yet accepted. We are grateful for her willingness during the 2024 semester to teach our students as both a distinguished journalist and valued alumna.”]

Everything seems to have culminated, for now at least, in Columbia agreeing to pay a $200 million fine to the Trump administration over allegations that the school failed to stop the harassment of Jewish students. What is your take on this settlement?

It's not just a [monetary] settlement, it’s what they’ve agreed to, as far as I understand, in terms of limiting international enrollment, in terms of having possible review of admissions, adhering to, basically, being particularly sort of anti-diversity. The money settlement, to me, it’s almost like a bribe. But it’s not just that. It’s what communities and people and values do they throw under the bus for this? What is $200 million even worth? To me, for any institution that has been around for that long that has had that amount of brand reputation and prestige, $200 million seems like almost chump change.

Even if I were to have taught at Columbia, I probably would not have felt safe to teach what I was teaching at Columbia, especially in this climate. We saw that Columbia has moved to discipline students involved in pro-Palestine activism last year. So there seems to be no statute of limitations for punishing people who are exercising their right to speech. This is not an environment conducive to academic freedom at all, particularly if you’re a marginalized professor.

Tell me about Resistance Summer School. How have the first few classes gone?

So far, it’s been amazing. We’re teaching at the Martin Luther King Jr. library here, and it’s been so cool to see in-person students. We usually have around 200 to 300 people who attend the live lectures, and then afterwards we have discussion sections and such. It’s been such an antidote to all the despair and misery just to have this community of people who are realizing that we were—if not outright lied to in our history books, we definitely are suffering from a whole lot of omission when it comes not only to race, but even media history.

I started my class talking about Japan and the Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 at the League of Nations, which was rejected by the U.S., the U.K., and Australia at the time. This is why I created the course. When I learned about this as a working journalist, I was like, How the hell did I not know that it was Japan that tried to champion global racial equality at the birth of what would become the United Nations?

You’ve argued that the media is not prepared for this moment, and I include myself in the media. Where are we failing the worst?

I’m assuming you’re talking about legacy media. I definitely think in general, it’s already weakened by the lack of diversity in newsrooms and the lack of perspective. A lot of these sorts of failures have been baked into the system, right? I mean the propensity for race and racism to generate interest and sales. We call it clickbait now. In the course, I talk about “pamphlet bait.” We learn that pamphlets in early colonial newspapers actually got boosted by, or gained a lot of profit by, talking about three things: war, nonwhite people, and violence.

I’ve always been critical about this perceived notion of objectivity, particularly when it is very obvious when one side is either engaging in explicit racism or platforming mistruth. I do not think we have learned how to deal with that. Our traditional, large media was not designed to serve the interests of people outside of power.

You brought up the lack of racial diversity. Obviously there are big changes afoot at your employer, the Washington Post. A good chunk of the opinion section, where you work, just took buyouts. You recently tweeted, “So… officially, I’m the last Black staff columnist left in the Washington Post’s opinion section.” A., how does that make you feel? And B., why are you staying on?

I don’t know how much I can say about it now, because it's a very fluid situation. All I can say is, well, yes, there are changes afoot at the Post. But I think anyone with solid thinking skills can say, “Well, if it took just this short amount of time for only there to be one Black columnist left, it must mean there weren’t that many to begin with.” It has never been a point of pride that for a long time, I was the only Black female opinion writer on staff. That’s an indictment. Washington, D.C., according to the last Census, is something like a high-30-percent, low-40-percent Black. So that’s damning. 

Post owner Jeff Bezos said that the paper wants to focus on defending “personal liberties and free markets” in the opinion section. But that doesn’t sound like what you’re interested in?

I don’t know if that’s true. My entire career has been about people having freedom to live. It’s been about fair competition in the marketplace of ideas, for sure. So for me, that’s what I’ve been about. If there’s anything that's defined my entire career, from being an international affairs student to being in journalism, it’s that I believe everyone should have freedoms and respect for the dignity of others and that people should be free from being oppressed just because of who they are or where they come from or what their skin looks like.

With all that is going on in the world, all the things we’ve discussed, what if anything is giving you hope about the future of journalism and race relations?

What gives me hope is when I go back in history, and I see how people have not only resisted but managed to overturn the worst of conditions, whether it’s slavery or apartheid. And knowing that it’s been a long game and understanding that we might not see the end of all of this in our lifetimes. 

But I think for me, knowing that even what I’m doing is not new, and that, whether it was during the Reconstruction era or during segregation or in Eastern Europe under oppressive societies, professors have always been like, “We are going to take this knowledge to the people.” This has been one of the most beautiful experiences that I’ve seen.

I just fundamentally question a lot of the premises that we accept as normal in terms of how education should be. And it’s been really cool to kind of jailbreak that system and teach in a better way, in a way that’s more responsive to the needs in the moment than a bureaucratic system could be. It’s a lesson in learning how to flow around the rocks, being like water, especially when these institutions are failing us deeply.

VICTORS OF HYDRANYM NO. 12

Theme: PARTY

E B E L D

Embracing Bacchanalia, Evading Life’s Demands
Gins (18)

Every birthday, envisioning looming death.
Ethan Sapir (10)

Everyone Bring Extra Large Doritos
Corey (8)

Enough beer encourages lewd dancing
Jake (8)

Everyone better effing love dancing!
Stella (8)

Ergot, baby—everybody LOVES delirium!
Stray Demon (8)

🔥 CONGRATULATIONS GINS 🔥

for your wisdom and sound advice, now inscribed in the ANNALS of HYDRANYM.

Hydranym No. 13 will appear on FLAMING HYDRA tomorrow. Come back to play!

BLUE(SKY) MONDAY

Josephine Riesman

Laurie Woolever

jj skolnik

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