It's Hot Lecture Summer!

It took decades, but I'm officially hip now.

Photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will be going on a hard-earned extended family vacation for the next two weeks. There will still be newsletters during this period, but they will be coming at a slower clip.

Should I be worried about losing some subscribers due to my slacking off? In any other year, the answer would be yes. And as previously noted, this year is super-scary for academics. The Trump administration has declared war on higher education and is doing its damnedest to destroy the research university’s business model.¹ Artificial intelligence is threatening academic jobs. Beyond the economic threats, the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer is correct when he posits, “[The Trump administration] intends to crush the power and authority of whole professions, to severely weaken, if not purge, a social class.” Culturally and politically, the push to denigrate and discredit expertise has been egged on by elites and threatens to reaching Cultural Revolution-levels of hysteria. And a society that no longer possesses the attention span to read might be cool with such a cultural jihad.

Clearly, there are lots of reasons for despair! And yet, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World remains serene that Everything Could Work Out.

Why? Let me just excerpt The Cut’s Hope Corrigan reporting that the hottest trend in the Summer of 2025 is — wait for it — university lectures:

On a rainy Friday night in May, about 70 New Yorkers gathered around a projector screen at NeueHouse, a sleek co-working space in the Flatiron District. The crowd buzzed; couples on dates and groups of friends chatted and sipped cocktails while waiting for the event to start. But they weren’t there to watch a comedian perform a stand-up routine or for a private screening of an upcoming film — they were there to learn.

The guests were attending a presentation titled “The Age of Rage: Understanding Modern Movements” given by CUNY professor Carlo Accetti. It was a production from Lectures on Tap, an event series co-founded by Ty and Felecia Freely, which books 45-minute lectures given by experts and academics at bars around Manhattan and Brooklyn on topics ranging from “Why People Cheat?” (one of the most popular lectures to date) to “Summer Solstice and the Science of the Sun.” The organization will soon expand to Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Tickets to lectures sell out anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours after the schedule is released.

Later, a group of women sitting around an espresso-martini littered table eagerly shot their hands up when the evening’s host opened up the floor for questions; during the mingling portion of the evening, attendees flocked to Accetti, greeting him like a minor celebrity. “After the lectures, people often come up to us and say, ‘I graduated five years ago or ten years ago and I didn’t like school when I was in there, but now that I’m gone I realize that I miss having access to these experts. I miss having this kind of communal learning environment,’” Felecia Freely told me. A couple seated next to me said they had been trying to get tickets for months and didn’t care what the topic was about; they just wanted to participate.

While the Trump administration slashes federal funding for universities around the country, attention spans are broken, literacy rates are down, and AI is zapping critical-thinking skills. “Brain rot” was Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 Word of the Year. But amid this steady drumbeat of bad news about our collective intellect, pockets of resistance are emerging outside traditional academic settings via groups of intellectual hobbyists. People many years out of college or graduate school — who might have nine-to-five jobs, be caregivers, or generally have robust, busy lives — are seeking out structured learning communities both online and in person….

Gathering for seminars and lectures outside the classroom is not a new concept, but it remains hopeful: “There’s a long history of lecturers and independent educators getting together and saying our systems are failing on these issues so we’re going to teach them ourselves,” said Karen Attiah, a colleague of mine at the Washington Post and a former Columbia University professor….

Education doesn’t have to be only about career success. It can be purely for pleasure, to meet new people, or to satisfy a curiosity. “I think this brings out the best in us in a way that I’ve found really moving, and that’s rare sometimes in a hyperachievement-focused, hypercapitalistic society,” Fan said. Her students agree: Amit Shah, a retired publishing executive and writer based in Boston who has taken multiple Fan classes, said that there’s a feeling of freedom that comes with being an adult in a learning environment. “People feel more emboldened. They have more agency in saying, ‘I don’t get what this writer is trying to do,’” he said.

College classes may often be wasted on the young, but learning is a lifelong project. It gets more rewarding as we age: “In college, it used to just stress me out to feel like I had to come up with some great idea and it wasn’t organic,” said Lit Girl’s Vaske, adding that some of the same classes she took in undergrad might feel more enriching now, if she could revisit them. Choosing exactly what you want to learn about is another perk; the Brooklyn Institute of Research, a community-based educational center, offers classes on scholarly topics including portraiture and the “self in the ancient world,” while the movie-focused Cinejourneys leads Zoom classes on film theory.

As anti-intellectualism and disdain for the humanities has become more prevalent among digital communities and in the White House, in our fraught political and cultural moment these alternative learning spaces are building both on- and offline communities powered by accessibility and curiosity. Your own fulfillment is the reward.

This summer, Attiah will partner with the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., to host hybrid classes for her summer course that will include a syllabus, guest speakers, and live Q&A discussions. She wants her students to “walk away changed” with tools and knowledge to take back to their own communities. There’s a general feeling of powerlessness lately, she said, but this is where community learning fills the gaps: “You really don’t have to have permission to come together and share knowledge.”

You’ll have to read the whole thing to appreciate Corrigan’s entire argument — but I have every confidence that my subscribers have the patience and intellectual curiosity to do that very thing.

Just as predictions about superintelligent generalized AI tend to be overblown, the appetite for stimulating in-person intellectual salons remains underappreciated.

I might not be the best college administrator. I might not be the most tech-savvy professor. But I am pretty sure that I give good lecture.

If higher education for its own sake is now the hip thing to do, my moment has finally arrived. And it only took thirty years!

1. As numerous business executives have recently affirmed, the administration’s actions threaten the dynamism of the U.S. economy writ large.