King-Slutzky is teaching ‘Contemporary Western Civilization,’ which all undergraduates are required to take in order to receive a diploma.
Johannah King-Slutzky, a doctoral student at Columbia University who was roundly mocked for demanding “humanitarian aid” for the students who broke into and occupied a building on campus in April, is teaching a class in that same building this fall, a course listing obtained by National Review shows.
King-Slutzky is teaching the “Contemporary Western Civilization” course — which all undergraduates are required to take in order to receive a diploma — in Hamilton Hall, the building where 22 students were arrested after forcing their way in and setting up camp, during the 2024 fall semester. Eighteen of those 22 students, an August congressional report found, remain in good standing with the university despite Columbia administrators stating they would expel those involved.
Acting as a spokeswoman for the student activists who organized the anti-Israel encampment on Columbia’s lawn and occupied Hamilton Hall, King-Slutzky took questions from reporters outside the building and explained why she believed the school should provide “aid” for the protesters.
“It’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students,” King-Slutzky said. “Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you? If the answer is ‘no,’ then you should allow basic . . . I mean, it’s crazy to say because we’re on an Ivy League campus, but this is, like, basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?”
King-Slutzky’s dissertation focuses on “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860” and she is “particularly interested in theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose and alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination.” She describes herself in her biography on the Columbia English department’s website as having “worked as a political strategist for leftist and progressive causes” before enrolling at the university.
As NR reported at the time, King-Slutzky formerly served as Refinery29’s Director of Tumblr, a role in which she “developed original video content about social justice issues like Islamophobia” before joining the Council on American-Islamic Relations — an organization that celebrated Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and has a long history of antisemitism and support for terror.
When asked by a reporter about whether a group that stormed a building should expect the university to provide food and water, King-Slutzky said she and her comrades opposed Columbia’s effort to “violently stop us from bringing in basic humanitarian aid” but could not point to an example of such an occurrence.
NR contacted Columbia for comment but did not receive a response by press time.