Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will join the School of International and Public Affairs as a fellow at SIPA’s Institute of Global Politics in March, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Pompeo will teach a course on diplomacy, decision-making, and organizational leadership, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A SIPA spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pompeo is the latest politician with ties to the White House to join SIPA’s faculty. Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jacob Lew returned to SIPA in January and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined in February 2023. Clinton, who is on the leadership team for IGP, directed the creation of the institute, which was formally approved by the University Senate in May 2023.

“The Academy cannot be an ivory tower,” SIPA Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, GS ’03, wrote in a statement to the Wall Street Journal about the hiring. “We should engage with the world because we learn a lot from engaging with practitioners with differing positions and ideologies who also ultimately can learn from us.”

Pompeo served as President Donald Trump’s second secretary of state from 2018 to 2021 during his first administration. He was also director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2017 to 2018. Pompeo began to distance himself from Trump following the president’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump revoked Pompeo’s security protections last month, a move regarded by some as an attack. Pompeo has previously faced threats from Iran due to his work under the first Trump administration.

Yarhi-Milo told the Wall Street Journal that Pompeo’s hiring reflects SIPA’s desire to engage in debates across ideological lines and noted that SIPA had been planning Pompeo’s fellowship for several months. She stated that it was not in response to any increased political pressures by the new Trump administration.

Pompeo has commended Trump’s recent executive actions to curtail diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at universities and colleges, writing in a post on X on Feb. 18 that DEI programs are “racist” and “have done enormous damage to kids and teachers.”

Since Trump’s inauguration, Columbia has altered statements on DEI on several University web pages, including the Athletics web page, which saw the removal of its transgender inclusion policy.

Pompeo told the Wall Street Journal that he looks forward to having “fair, reasoned and fact-based discourse” and suspects that Columbia’s outreach was “intentional in the sense that they were seeking to bring onto campus…someone with a view that is very different than most of the faculty on their staff.”

During the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” last spring, Pompeo criticized the protests in a statement on X on April 22, 2024.

“What’s happening at Columbia isn’t a protest: it’s a violent, pro-Hamas mob threatening and attacking Jewish students,” he wrote. “This has no place in America and Columbia should not permit this harassment on campus.”

Pompeo also told the Wall Street Journal that he is focused on teaching and the students, and is “uninterested in the name of the institution on their diploma, and deeply interested in what it is they know.”

Pompeo noted that “the United States’ greatest risk is that we refuse to teach the next generation about the greatness of our nation.”