“The U.S. government is depriving universities of billions of dollars in federal funding…”
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
In 1907, the American historian Henry Adams began circulating a memoir which achieved resounding success in 1919: The Education of Henry Adams. Given Adams’ illustrious family—his grandfather and great-grandfather were presidents—one might expect this to be a self-righteous story about the wonders of American education.
Instead, he galvanized the public with the bold assertion that everything Adams had learned in 19th-century schools was useless. Immersed in religious studies and the classics, he was ill-equipped for a world of mass electrification and the automobile. If education was supposed to prepare him for the future, he argued, it had failed.
Nearly 120 years later, Adams’ criticism is once again relevant, particularly in the United States. New technologies are disrupting traditional methods of student learning. The problem is not just the rise of AI models. It is also ideological. The U.S. government is stripping universities of billions of dollars in federal funding as it demands more control over curriculum and admissions. The future of education is in chaos, but it is not dying; it changes to adapt to the present moment.
I thought of Adams as I sat down to take my first college class in over two decades. “Race, Media and International Affairs” is taught by journalist and international studies professor Karen Attiah. In 2024, Attiah covered politics at The Washington Post and taught international affairs at Columbia University in New York. But earlier this year, Columbia unceremoniously canceled its classes. A few months later, Attiah says she was fired by the Post for social media posts about racism and right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The newspaper then refused to comment on Attiah’s dismissal.
But, in Attiah’s words: “Now is not the time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be held hostage by institutions that kneel to authoritarianism and fear.” ” So she converted her Columbia course into what she called “the resistance summer school,” which she livestreamed to anyone paying tuition. Five hundred students signed up in 48 hours and the waiting list was enormous. Now she’s teaching two classes this fall, including mine.
In many ways, Attiah’s course feels like a throwback to the courses I took in college over 25 years ago. Sitting at a desk, Attiah lectures on topics such as how colonial newspapers in the 1600s described wars with indigenous nations in the colonies and why the media failed to cover the Japanese proposal for racial equality for the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Weaving together the history of American media and international race relations, Attiah taught me many things I had never known, even though I worked my entire adult life as a journalist and occasional professor of media studies. I feel like I’m back in college, in the best sense of the word.
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I fear for academic institutions, but not for the future of education. The quest for knowledge can never be stopped
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Attiah’s pragmatic approach stands in stark contrast to that of other professors who have put their work online. Philosophy Tube, a long-running lecture series by philosopher Abigail Thorn on YouTube, teaches modern philosophy with effects, costumes, and witty scenarios. But Thorn’s goal is the same as Attiah’s: she wants to make education as accessible to the public as possible and to challenge authority without academic constraints.
Attiah and Thorn follow in the footsteps of academic and activist Stuart Hall. After teaching cultural studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, in the 1960s and 1970s, he wanted to step out of his ivory tower and educate the British public about racism in the media. So he co-wrote and co-hosted a documentary for the BBC in 1979 called It Ain’t Half-Racist, Mum, about racial bias in news reports and television broadcasts about black immigrants.
When the public cannot access higher education, Hall suggested, then higher education should be accessible to the public. And that’s exactly what educators are doing right now. Some teach for free, thanks to crowdfunding; others, like Attiah, use a subscription model. Regardless, they find ways to educate.
But what about students who don’t want to stare at a screen for hours? A new movement is underway to reach these learners as well. Hacker and maker spaces – community centers for science and engineering learning – are springing up around the world. Members can take classes in everything from electronics to 3D printing and welding.
As Adams argued, education must prepare us for what comes next. And what is coming, I believe, is a world where academic freedom will only exist outside of academia. I fear for the future of university institutions, but not for that of education. As long as we support our renegade professors and space hacker tutors, the quest for knowledge will never end.
Annalee’s week
What I read
The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong, a cozy fantasy about archival mages.
What I watch
Frankenhooker, the greatest adaptation of Frankenstein never done.
What I’m working on
I’m doing my homework for Karen Attiah’s class!
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Automatic noodles. They are co-hosts of the Hugo award-winning podcast Our opinions are correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com
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