Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will teach a course at Columbia University this spring on diplomacy, decision-making and organizational leadership at the school’s Institute of Global Politics, a prominent conservative hire for the embattled Ivy League school.

“The Academy cannot be an ivory tower,” Keren Yarhi-Milo, the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, told The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the appointment. “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.”

The announcement comes as Columbia faces ongoing scrutiny from the administration and Congress over antisemitic activity on campus since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing war between Israel and Hamas, and amid long-running accusations from some conservatives that elite institutions are silencing and sidelining conservative voices.

“I suspect 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,” Pompeo told the Journal.

Pompeo said that he seeks to “teach the next generation about the greatness of our nation” and that he wants to hold “fair, reasoned and fact-based discourse.”

Prior to serving as President Donald Trump’s second secretary of state, Pompeo led the Central Intelligence Agency and served as a member of Congress. He took a hard-nosed approach to the Iranian regime as secretary of state and was a vocal supporter of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Pompeo fell out of favor with Trump after he didn’t endorse the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged and condemned the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Last month, Trump revoked Pompeo’s security detail that had been put in place to protect him from assassination attempts by the Iranian government.