Each session would center on a theme, whether a concept like reputation and credibility of governments or a set of challenges like digital threats to democracy. Keren—and her incredible team of teaching assistants and aides—started to put together the academic writings that we would include in the syllabus. My memoir of serving as secretary of state, Hard Choices, became a teaching tool because it provided case studies to illustrate the theories. We’re now working on an edited academic book that combines the work of scholars and practitioners who have studied or lived and led through crises in the United States and other countries.
Keren and I met regularly the summer before our class began. In person and over Zoom calls, we talked through class outlines and lecture drafts. I carried around an enormous binder full of materials we would assign to students, my lecture notes, and documents from Keren.
As summer turned to fall, I got excited thinking about all that we’d teach our students and all I was learning from Keren along the way. I eagerly read the academic articles that she added to the syllabus. One that I found fascinating was from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s 1979 paper “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk” that posited that people feel the pain of losses more intensely than the pleasure of gains. When applied to leaders and decision-makers, that insight reshaped how foreign policy analysts interpret international threats and leaders’ behavior (and it earned Kahneman a Nobel Prize in Economics).
I thought of Vladimir Putin, my old adversary. One could see him as motivated primarily by what he seeks to gain: power, territory, riches, respect. But I believe Putin is motivated more by loss. He’s obsessed with Russia’s lost empire and its perceived humiliations. He’s also terrified of losing what he has—not just his power but his head. The “color revolutions” of the 2000s—the popular uprisings that toppled authoritarian regimes in several former Soviet bloc countries—made him intensely paranoid. He reportedly frequently rewatched a gory video of the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi being pulled from a drainage pipe and beaten to death in 2011. Reading Kahneman and Tversky confirmed my view that Putin did not invade Ukraine and crack down on dissent at home because he felt strong; he did it because he felt scared. This is one of many examples where the class’s syllabus of scholarly analysis enhanced my understanding of a leader’s actions.
Keren is a world-class expert in explaining the sometimes erratic behavior of leaders. As an academic, she’s written extensively about the irrational decisions of everyone from Neville Chamberlain to Saddam Hussein. As a teaching partner, she was a wonderful counterpoint. We bounced ideas off each other in preparation for lectures, came at problems from different angles, and felt comfortable enough to disagree with each other respectfully. My experience going “back to school” would not have been the same without her.
In many ways, this was a very different experience from the last time I taught at the University of Arkansas School of Law in the ’70s. For one, every class session Keren and I taught was filmed so that the students we couldn’t fit in the auditorium could watch the lectures online, and soon the online class will be open to nonstudents as well. The teaching technology was certainly different, too. Fifty years ago, we pretty much just had a chalkboard and a slide projector. Now, Keren and I used a big screen for presentations, we had microphones so we could be heard clearly in the room and on tape, and students could scan a QR code to respond to questions on their phones in real time. Each time we stood at our lecterns on the stage, we looked out at a sea of laptops and phones being used to take notes.
But in other ways, teaching was refreshingly familiar. When Keren and I planned our lessons and delivered our lectures, I enjoyed the camaraderie of a true partnership, and it reminded me of the wonderful friends I found teaching in Fayetteville all those years ago. In class, I felt the old thrill of helping young minds expand and make connections. You could almost see the synapses firing. And, to my delight, I was learning every day, too—from Keren, from the readings, and from the students who asked probing questions and challenged me to see the world through their very different eyes.
My favorite part of every class was when Keren and I would leave our lecterns, sit in the two chairs in the center of the stage, and take questions. Each week, students who had arrived early to get a seat along the aisles would rush to the microphone for their turn to speak. I’ve been in public service longer than they’ve been alive, and I was often surprised and delighted (and occasionally confounded) by topics that interested them. They asked about wars they’re too young to remember, about gender disparities in foreign policy and the double standard women face. They asked about the potential role of artificial intelligence in diplomacy, about regulating social media. Often they’d share a bit about their backgrounds and how their lives were shaped by global policy decisions—sometimes decisions I had been involved in or ones made by leaders I’d known well.
There was the student who shared that as a child she dreamed of becoming a journalist in Mexico, but now she was reconsidering because of how many reporters there had been killed and harassed with impunity. (Thirteen journalists were killed in Mexico in 2022 alone, and Latin America was consistently one of the deadliest regions in the world for journalists.) How could she find the courage to persevere in her dream when there was so much danger and so little accountability from her government or the international community?
It was a timely question because that day we were fortunate to have as a guest lecturer the brilliant Filipino journalist, scholar, and crusader for press freedom Maria Ressa. Maria smiles easily, with bright eyes and an open face that looks much younger than her sixty years. She can just as quickly crack a joke as deliver a thoughtful treatise on disinformation campaigns around the globe. Her youthful energy and sense of humor belie the fact that over her thirty-seven-year career as a journalist, she has been repeatedly targeted by intimidation campaigns and viciously attacked online. For her courage and determination to fight for free expression, Maria received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021.
Who better to answer this difficult but important question? Maria’s response was characteristically pragmatic and wise: This is a real problem, and unfortunately many governments around the world do not respect freedom of the press. Too many target journalists or turn a blind eye to harassment and violence. But the work of journalists, especially journalism that holds the powerful to account, is too important to give up. Journalists need to stand together, she said, to share the dangers they face, protect one another, and hold bad actors accountable. That’s why press freedom organizations like the International Center for Journalists, Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders are so important. There is safety in numbers, and these organizations often provide legal funds and support. That’s no substitute for responsible governments and the rule of law, but it helps. It was an answer that only she could give with such authority and credibility, because she has lived the challenges and dangers that the student was asking about.
This discussion brought me back to my time as secretary of state. Mexico’s secretary of foreign affairs at the time was Patricia Espinosa, a career diplomat who became one of my favorite colleagues. We certainly talked about human rights and the challenges facing journalists, but the overriding priority was how to work together to stem the drug-related violence plaguing border cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez and threatening to spill into El Paso and other nearby American communities. We also focused on important economic issues and challenges around immigration. Because of our shared border, a good relationship with Mexico is vital for America’s security and prosperity, but it’s difficult for our two countries to strike the right balance of cooperation without crossing into interfering. I could see how to this student and others, it looked like the American government should be able to do more to protect journalists and stop Mexican drug gangs from getting away with murder. Those jobs belong to the Mexican government, and what we can do is offer help; they decide whether to accept it. The trade-offs in diplomacy are never easy. That’s why I called my book Hard Choices.
Another student’s question forced me to consider an even harder choice. During our class on women and decision-making, she came to the microphone with a high ponytail and big glasses. She told us that she was from China and had been born a second child in violation of China’s one-child policy, which imposed strict limits on family size. Her father had bribed the local authorities to “buy her life” when her mother was pregnant because he was hoping for a son. “And sorry for him, but lucky for me, he didn’t throw me away.”
On visits to China over the years, I have heard terrible stories from women about abuses perpetrated under the one-child policy, which sought to limit the country’s population growth. Starting in the early 1980s, local Chinese Communist Party authorities closely monitored women’s menstrual cycles and use of contraceptives. They needed to get permission to have a child. Once they had their allotted one baby, they could be sterilized against their will. Women who got pregnant a second time could be forced to have an abortion and faced steep fines, imprisonment, and other punishments. Draconian limits on family size and a cultural preference for boys led to widespread “gendercide.” Baby girls were killed or abandoned because their parents wanted a boy.
This is why, in my speech about women’s rights in Beijing in 1995, I made a point of saying, “It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.”
I had heard these stories and worked on these issues for decades, but now in this Columbia classroom, I was face-to-face with a young woman whose very existence was an act of defiance against this brutal policy. Her parents had risked everything to conceive and keep her. She grew up knowing that as a second child and a girl, she was alive by the narrowest chance. Yet here she was, not just alive but thriving, receiving a world-class education at Columbia University.
Her question for us that day was about the double standard women in politics face. But as Keren and I took turns answering, all I could think about was the courage and determination it took to make it so far. And I appreciated that after all these years, I was still learning about the resilience of women and the persistence of the human spirit.
Midway through the semester, a new crisis exploded—one as complex and challenging as any in our syllabus. On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the extreme Islamist terror group that ruled the Gaza Strip, attacked Israel and murdered 1,200 people. Hamas fighters slaughtered babies, raped women, and kidnapped more than two hundred hostages. Israel retaliated by bombing and invading Gaza to destroy Hamas. The conflict devastated the densely populated Palestinian enclave, killed thousands of civilians, and created a humanitarian disaster.
In the days after October 7, Columbia’s campus was tense with shock and grief. Keren’s and my first priority was to engage our students with empathy, respect, and information that would help them make sense of the complex situation in the Middle East. I was focused on being a good partner to Keren, for whom the situation was particularly fraught. She balanced two difficult emotional realities: her responsibility as dean to nearly 1,400 American and international students, and her concerns for her family in her native Israel, where she had fulfilled her mandatory service in an Israel Defense Forces intelligence unit.
I understood the intense emotional reactions so many felt to this conflict. I have grieved with Israeli families whose loved ones were abducted or killed in terrorist attacks. I have held the hands of the wounded in their hospital beds. In Jerusalem, I visited a bombed-out pizzeria and will never forget it. I have also been to Gaza and the West Bank and talked with Palestinians who have suffered greatly for many years. They dream of peace, a state of their own, and an end to the humiliations of occupation. I met women using microloans from the United States to start new businesses and become breadwinners for their families, including a dressmaker who—because she was finally able to buy a sewing machine—could send her two daughters to school. My decades of experience in the region taught me that many Palestinian and Israeli parents may say different prayers at worship, but they share the same hopes for their kids—just like Americans, just like parents everywhere.
Keren and I understood that the events of October 7 and the war that was about to start would change a lot of things for the rest of the semester. The material and topics of the class would become more relevant, and we knew the students would engage with both through the lens of what was unfolding in the Middle East. Even more important, we recognized that this class was a huge responsibility and opportunity to expose them to relevant history and analysis.
When our class met on October 11, Keren and I decided to allot twice our usual time at the end of class for student questions. We anticipated emotions would be high. We had several Palestinian and Israeli students and knew that many others were outraged, upset, and searching for answers. Keren spoke first, telling the class that she hoped our community would exercise compassion and empathy toward each other. If anyone disagreed with someone else, and we expected some might, we hoped they would do so in a respectful, civil way.
Students wondered what the path forward might look like, whether peace was possible, and how the United States could help. They asked about empathy in leadership. One student who came to the microphone was a young Israeli journalist who had taken a leave of absence from her job at a left-wing publication to study at Columbia. She had advocated for Palestinian rights in her career, but she also told us about students from her school who had been kidnapped by Hamas and relatives of loved ones who had been murdered. She asked about the possibilities for diplomacy to avoid ground warfare in Gaza but also asked what the U.S. response would be if we were similarly attacked by terrorist forces from a neighboring area, like Canada. I was moved and impressed by her respect for all the parties involved and her understanding of the complicated history of the region.
But other questions from students troubled me, like why was Hamas considered a terrorist organization but not the IDF? I was also surprised by some of the blank stares I received when I told the students that if Yasser Arafat had accepted the deal offered by my husband in 2000 for a state that the Israeli government was prepared to accept, the Palestinian people would be celebrating their twenty-third year of statehood.
In the weeks and months that followed, I was struck by how little history of the region most of our students had been exposed to. In a survey taken shortly after October 7, less than 25 percent knew who Arafat even was. (He was the longtime leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization who agreed to put away his guns, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and negotiate toward a two-state solution, although he could never bring himself to say yes to a final deal.)
In the early days of the conflict, pro-Palestinian protests popped up on campus. Students and outside allies pitched tents at the center of campus and refused to leave. They occupied and vandalized Hamilton Hall, the main administration building, and refused to leave. The protesters were an eclectic group; some knew a lot about the Middle East and others knew very little. For some it was about the suffering in Gaza, and for others it was an excuse to chant anti-Semitic slogans. Most seemed earnestly heartbroken by the violence. We don’t have to agree on every policy point to respect the anguish they feel.
Students began chanting and raising signs in classrooms, at convocations, and across college lawns. They organized sit-ins and walkouts—including from our class, although only a small percentage of the 375 students actually left. Some of the protests were respectful and focused on concrete goals, such as convincing the U.S. government to stop providing unconditional military assistance to Israel. Others were not. They were disruptive, disrespectful, uninformed, unfocused, and often plainly anti-Semitic.
One student declared on video, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” All this fueled fierce debates on campus and across the country about free speech, anti-Semitism, and universities’ loss of control. Columbia’s brand-new president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, faced intense pressure and eventually was forced to cancel the university’s main graduation ceremony. The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were forced to resign. (It wasn’t lost on me that the first college presidents being scrutinized most by politicians, the press, and the public were women.)
I was troubled that “From the river to the sea” became a popular phrase for protest signs I saw on campus, which suggested Palestinian sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean and an end to the Jewish state, but most students, according to surveys done at various campuses, couldn’t even name the river or the sea they were referring to. They also chanted “We don’t want two states; we want all of that.” Did they realize that their slogan is seen by many as calling for the destruction of Israel?
How many of the young people demanding Israel immediately halt its response understood that Hamas had repeatedly broken previous ceasefires in recent years, including the one in place on October 7, and that leaving it in power in Gaza would allow the bloody cycle of violence to continue? Were they aware that Hamas deliberately placed military installations in and below hospitals, schools, and refugee camps because it was trying to maximize, not minimize, the impact on Palestinian civilians for its own propaganda purposes? And did they understand the fragility of international support for Israel given a mounting humanitarian crisis? Did the vocal supporters of Israel’s military campaign know the history of failed attempts to defeat radical ideology through force alone, from the French in Algeria to the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other examples around the world? It’s hard to win a war when you don’t have a plan to build peace.
History matters. Context matters. Especially in such a difficult and complex crisis, where nothing is black and white and enmities go back decades if not millennia. If we don’t educate ourselves—and not just through propaganda or snippets of video served up by an algorithm controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on TikTok—we can’t form good judgments or advocate effectively for smart policies. That’s not just true for young people; it’s true for all of us, including policymakers in Washington and other capitals. Nobody in any of our classes ever said anything as uneducated and insensitive as the Republican congressman from Michigan who said Gaza should be handled “like Nagasaki and Hiroshima.” While students in our classes and across campus were confused about the dynamics at play in the Middle East, many showed a deep compassion and a willingness to hear each other. They shared their own experiences and approached painful subjects with open minds. Keren and I hosted webinars, private events, and public gatherings with Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians to discuss how to move humanitarian aid in greater amounts more quickly into Gaza to relieve the suffering of civilians and what could be done the day after the conflict stopped.
On campus and off, I did what I could to share my long experience working for peace in the Middle East, including negotiating a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in November 2012. In an interview on The View on ABC, I tried to explain some of the historical context that had been missing from recent debates. In an essay in The Atlantic, I examined how and when ceasefires can be effective and argued that Israel needed a new strategy and new leadership. In an interview on MSNBC, I was more explicit and said that Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu was untrustworthy and needed to go.
As the conflict continued, I met with families of hostages and prayed and advocated for their swift return. I agonized over the mounting Palestinian death toll, particularly the deaths of thousands of women and children. I was heartbroken when seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, the humanitarian organization run by my friend José Andrés, the celebrated chef, were killed in an Israeli airstrike. War is always terrible, but this conflict was causing unimaginable pain.
If my class had been in session the spring semester as the crisis escalated, it would have been a real-time opportunity to apply lessons from our syllabus. After all, we were teaching how to make good decisions in a crisis—something that seemed in short supply all around.
For example, I’ve seen leaders falter because they failed to set firm boundaries and enforce them or because they made threats that they couldn’t or wouldn’t back up. So I wished that campus administrators at top American universities had set out clearer rules around protesting earlier and enforced them more consistently. I don’t think free speech gives anyone the right to harass or threaten others or vandalize property. Universities and students everywhere deserve better than that. Stronger statements and policies against anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of October 7 would also have helped. Instead, too many universities sent mixed messages and had to scramble later on to control events.
I also found myself thinking back to my experience during and after the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Massive protests, led as they so often are by young people, brought down the longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. But the protesters had no plans beyond toppling Mubarak. When I met with a group of students in Cairo who had helped organize the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, I asked about their plans to move from protests to politics: How were they preparing to influence the writing of a new constitution and contest the upcoming elections? They had no plans and didn’t seem interested in making any. “Have you considered forming a coalition and joining together on behalf of candidates and programs?” I asked. They stared at me blankly. Not surprisingly, they achieved virtually none of their goals other than deposing Mubarak, and Egypt ended up with a Muslim Brotherhood president who was later removed by the army and replaced with another military dictator just as before.
A lesson for students at Columbia and other universities is that the most effective protest movements do their homework, have clear goals, and build coalitions rather than alienate potential allies. Just look at the mass marches in Israel in 2023 that helped block Netanyahu’s ultra-right-wing government from gutting judicial independence.
Another lesson is that peaceful protests can drive progress, but violence and vandalism can set it back. I saw this when I was a student myself in the turbulent Vietnam War era. I was in Chicago’s Grant Park when an anti-war protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention turned into a riot. I narrowly missed being hit by a rock thrown by someone in the crowd. I was against the war, but I worried about causing a backlash that would help elect Richard Nixon and prolong the war. Subsequent academic research has found that the looting and riots in cities after Dr. King’s assassination and those in Chicago did help swing enough votes to hand the race to Nixon.
Even back then, I understood that protesting is only effective if it’s part of a broader strategy to drive real change. At Wellesley, I ran for student government president because I thought I could convince college administrators to make reforms through negotiation rather than disruption. I never lost my belief that political dissent is an important part of democracy, but I learned from seasoned activists like Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, that to make real and lasting change requires more than protests and political stunts. You have to do the work, step-by-step, year by year, sometimes even door by door. Yes, you need to stir up public opinion and put pressure on political leaders. But to shift policies and resources you also need to win elections. You need to change hearts and change laws.
So, I must admit, I don’t have much respect for disruptive hecklers who shout down teachers or speakers, especially when all they’re doing is screaming about imperialism or colonialism. I have zero tolerance for those who may not even be able to locate Gaza on a map and yet insist that Israel has no right to exist.
