By Emily Muller

On March 22, Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) announced that Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo will co-teach a class titled “Inside the Situation Room” during the fall 2023 semester.

This will be the first class that Secretary Clinton, who has served as a Professor of Practice at SIPA with a joint appointment at Columbia World Projects since February 1, will teach at the university.

In the announcement video, posted to Columbia SIPA's YouTube channel, Dean Yarhi-Milo said she will "cover the theory of political decision-making and strategy," and Secretary Clinton said she will "cover what it was actually like in the room during the bin Laden raid, the Iran sanctions, the Gaza ceasefire," and other events influential during her lengthy career as an international affairs practitioner.

In an exclusive statement to The Morningside Post, Dean Yarhi-Milo said:

“Inside the Situation Room is an exciting opportunity: to take a trained political scientist and a senior decision-maker who has spent considerable time inside the Situation Room defusing crises and bring our expertise together to educate the next generation of global leaders on crisis management. The video reflects the energy and enthusiasm that Secretary Clinton and I share for teaching this course next fall. The course also reflects the interdisciplinary background and deep expertise of SIPA and its faculty. The world faces no shortages of challenges, from an increasingly aggressive China to a humanitarian tragedy in Ukraine, and our future leaders need to know how to handle fast-moving crises.

The goal of the class is twofold: First, to encourage students to think critically around a set of often-ignored questions: How do the limits of human cognition and rationality impact leadership during international crises? What role do leadership characteristics such as gender, race, prior experience, and even personality play? And do groups make better decisions than individuals alone (or, are democratic leaders more successful than authoritarian ones)? We rarely take the time to think carefully and analytically about how senior decision-makers view the world or arrive at their decisions, much less how various psychological factors such as identity, belief, and emotion shape the policies they devise to promote U.S. interests abroad. Second, the course is meant to enable students to improve their own effectiveness as executive-branch officials in crisis policy making, regardless of what career path they choose.”

Admission to the course will be application-based and open to Columbia SIPA students and undergraduate students from Columbia College, Barnard College and Columbia University School of General Studies. 

Emily Muller (MIA ‘24) is the Editor in Chief of The Morningside Post.