In 1987, the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World made its US TV debut and followed the elder child, Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet), as she studied at her parents’ alma mater. The fictional historically Black college (or HBCU), Hillman, would go on to become a byword for Black excellence. “The influence of kids wanting to go to school, period, I think is very powerful,” one of the stars of the series, Jasmine Guy, said while touring HBCU campuses with her former castmates in 2024, 35 years after the sitcom ended. “Because they could see themselves there.”Hillman College is credited with driving record levels of enrollment at actual HBCUs in the 1980s and 90s, and remains a source of inspiration for Black creatives to this day. The actor-screenwriter Lena Waithe had the fabled campus in mind when she launched her production company, Hillman Grad. “I want to call it something that is close to my heart, and that is the world of A Different World and what that show represented for me and so many other people,” she said.View image in fullscreenFour decades later, that fantasy world lives on and finds itself reckoning with the reality of a second Donald Trump administration hellbent on rolling back diversity programs and gutting the Department of Education. On TikTok, the hashtag HillmanTok has become a free online space where Black scholars share their expertise in subjects that the administration is trying to excise from libraries and school curricula. Anyone who scrolls to their content on TikTok and sticks around for the lesson is part of the class. “I’m mindful of the weight of this particular teaching and this particular time,” says Leah Barlow, a liberal studies professor at North Carolina A&T, the country’s largest HBCU. “Honestly, it feels a little ancestral.”Last fall, Barlow posted an introductory two-minute TikTok video for her African studies class; 250,000 users subscribed to the class channel overnight and within a week it hit 4m views. “I thought it was going to be a trend for a short time, and then we’d move on to the next thing,” says Barlow, who posted the video on the same day Trump retook office and rescinded a federal TikTok ban.But then a sixth-grade math teacher named Cierra Hinton seized on the enthusiasm and started the hashtag HillmanTok. She encouraged Black educators to post instructional videos under the banner, and was inundated with hashtagged submissions. Like Black Twitter and Black Lives Matter, another digital social justice movement was born – the world’s first crowd-sourced HBCU. In an emotional response video, Hinton took a measure of satisfaction in helping “people come together and build something that is bigger than we ever imagined, something that means so much”.HillmanTok class subjects run the gamut from US history to mathematics to culinary arts. There are even electives on African American food studies and Stem careers. “I am finally about to post the syllabus,” Carlotta Berry says in the greeting for her Engineering 101 HillmanTok course. “You can learn asynchronously by watching any of my videos.”The HillmanTok educators aren’t limited to real-world academics like Berry, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana. Shannan E Johnson, a former creative executive at the Syfy channel, has a course on screenwriting. The music journalist Touré has a course on the prehistory of hip-hop. “This is actually a reprise of the class I did 20 years ago at NYU,” he joked. “We’re overenrolled, as usual.”Just as A Different World regularly dealt with weighty subjects such as war, homelessness and the Aids epidemic at the risk of losing advertiser support, HillmanTok also offers culturally urgent lessons on resistance and restorative justice. “People have always been trying to limit and marginalize the impact and effect of Black education,” says Jelani Favors, the director of North Carolina A&T’s Center of Excellence for Social Justice. “But it was those teachers opening up their classroom doors, pouring into young idealists and finding ways to unlock their potential to engage in the deconstructing of Jim Crow and white supremacy.”This is all happening against the backdrop of a Black college enrollment gap in which Black men account for 26% of the student body. All the while Maga donors add insult to injury by trashing the value of HBCU education overall. “Howard was not Harvard,” the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel said in a dig at the former vice-president Kamala Harris’s scholarship at Howard University, the most prestigious HBCU. “You couldn’t even point this out [when she was running]. This is probably a racist thing to say.”That’s just the start of the slights against HBCUs, which were founded to provide educational opportunities for Black students at a time when it was illegal or impossible to attend college in the US. A 2023 investigation by the Biden administration found that HBCUs had missed out on more than $13bn in federal funding for more than three decades because state governors blocked the funds. North Carolina A&T, which has a 14,000-student enrollment, was owed more than $2bn alone. HBCUs could well end up suffering more under Trump, who has made a U-turn from allocating $250m in funding to freezing educational grants and loans – which is how most HBCU students cover tuition. Last month, he signed an executive order to close the Department of Education – a critical lifeline for HBCUs, which have a much harder time fundraising than predominantly white institutions.View image in fullscreenThat HillmanTok is poised to become a resource for a Black student population that could find itself locked out of the traditional college experience makes it more relevant than just another Khan Academy, YouTube University or MasterClass. Inevitably, that momentum faces new headwinds from the rush to capitalize on the Hillman name – not unlike the Black Lives Matter movement did at the end. Some HillmanTok supporters have taken exception to attempts to sell merchandise and live events under the name. What’s more, as a number of trademark claims have been filed for the name, Black TikTok users have raised concerns about a white business interest winning control.“Anytime something looks like it’s going to make some money or turn into a movement, you see this,” says the Howard University law professor Nicole Gaither, who adds that the case for each filing also holds potential ramifications. It just really depends on how the US Patent and Trademark Office is going to view this. “Lena Waithe has Hillman registrations that are related to entertainment services, but she also has education services related to manners and etiquette. And she sells apparel,” Gaither aded.While that plays out in the background, Barlow remains strictly committed to the work. Last month TikTok and the United Negro College Fund hosted an event in Washington to connect HillmanTok instructors with Capitol Hill lawmakers and bring awareness to inclusive education and Black history preservation. While there, Barlow conducted TikTok interviews with the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock and the representative Jasmine Crockett for her class. Crockett implored her students to “take advantage of this moment and realize we don’t have a million Leahs running around. Please value her and value your education.”HillmanTok continues a tradition of Black self-determination through education that dates back to the flouting of anti-literacy laws during slavery. “We always find a way, regardless of what is happening – we, meaning Black people,” says Barlow. “We have always been resilient, autonomous and used agency to get information where it needs to go.”View image in fullscreenThe Hillman brand wasn’t always such an easy sell. Where The Cosby Show was largely written and produced by white people for white audiences as a showcase for Black respectability, A Different World boldly entrusted young Black creatives with the task of relating the cultural experiences that young Black students were having in real time. A Different World faced bitter critical reception when it debuted. One newspaper reviewer called it “a greed-motivated sitcom” in a slam of the show’s creator, Bill Cosby – who patterned the college after the women’s HBCU Spelman College, where he was once a major benefactor.After that rough first season, control over the sitcom was passed to the Fame alumna Debbie Allen (sister of The Cosby Show matriarch Phylicia Rashad) – who not only brought her own college experience at Howard into the production process, but also an army of Black writers and consultants. She empowered actors to give feedback and introduced clauses into their contract that freed them up to write and direct episodes, adding to the show’s diverse perspectives. For a kicker, Allen enlisted Aretha Franklin to record the theme song.Also in the middle of that first season, Bonet became pregnant with her first child, Zoë, with her then husband Lenny Kravitz. Cosby, scoffing at the cultural optics of Denise being portrayed as an unwed mother in college, had Bonet written off the series and reabsorbed into The Cosby Show. “I thought that show just wasn’t going to come back because she was and is the star,” Guy said. But after reconfiguring around the romance between Whitley (Guy) and Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison), A Different World became a ratings colossus alongside The Cosby Show and a mainstay in Black households for generations.Among others, the sitcom introduced the world to Jada Pinkett Smith and the Oscar winners Halle Berry and Marisa Tomei – who took the role playing Bonet’s white roommate after Meg Ryan passed. (It certainly worked out for the both of them.) And unlike with The Cosby Show, the disgraced Cosby’s involvement has not dinted A Different World’s popularity over the years. (He only appears briefly in the pilot.) Last fall, the cast reunited for a national HBCU tour to spark enrollment and scholarship fundraising and found that many of the students who remain inspired by the show had been born long after its initial 144-episode run.In February, A Different World finally made its debut on Netflix – six months after the streamer announced the development of an Allen-produced sequel that would focus on the Hillman experience of Whitley and Dwayne’s daughter, with the pilot to begin shooting over the summer. It remains to be seen whether this new version of the series will address Magaworld’s assault on Black education. It wouldn’t be the same show if it didn’t. “The issues we were dealing with then,” said the series co-star Dawnn Lewis, “we’re still dealing with in some shape or form today.”HillmanTok roll call: five to follow
@amfamstudies Clip highlights from North Carolina A&T’s Leah Barlow from her actual African American studies course.
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