Leah Barlow, a liberal studies professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, prepared to teach her Intro to African American Studies class this semester as she always does: She put together a syllabus, mapped out assignments and created a TikTok account to make the material as accessible as possible.
She posted a video on Jan. 20 welcoming her 35 students to the course. By the next morning, it had surfaced in the algorithm of enough TikTok users that 250,000 people had subscribed to her channel.
Within days, Dr. Barlow’s videos had unintentionally inspired a loosely affiliated network of Black educators, experts and content creators to form what has become known as Hillmantok University, a free — and unaccredited and unofficial — online take on the country’s H.B.C.U.s, or historically Black colleges and universities
In lectures delivered in TikTok-length bursts, and in longer sessions over TikTok Live, instructors are teaching classes in gardening, organic chemistry, culinary arts and other subjects. On the receiving end, organizers say, is an audience of about 16,000 registered users.
“I think that this has been in the making,” Dr. Barlow said in an interview last week from her office in Greensboro, N.C. “You have accessibility, not just because of TikTok but you also have people who don’t have to be in the ivory tower to have the ability to speak. That is something that I find both beautiful and necessary.”
The appetite for information also comes at the dawn of a second Trump administration. Dr. Barlow posted her video hours after President Trump was sworn in and swiftly set about dismantling federal programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Many academics fear a trickle-down effect across education.
“I certainly think the political time and the environment is rife with a lot of contention,” Dr. Barlow said, adding that Mr. Trump’s assault on diversity programs had given “fresh urgency” to a project that prioritizes Black voices.
Cierra Hinton, a former math teacher in Augusta, Ga., and a founder of Hillmantok, watched Dr. Barlow’s original post and some of the early videos inspired by it. “Did I wake up in Hillman?” she recalled thinking, referring to Hillman College, the fictional H.B.C.U. featured in “The Cosby Show” and its spinoff, “A Different World.” A name for the movement was born.
Kennddrick Pringley, a publicist and D.J. in Tampa, Fla., also was among the thousands of TikTok users who stumbled onto Dr. Barlow’s original post. Now he’s Hillmantok’s student union president and part of a group of about 40 content creators-turned-volunteers who saw an opportunity to organize.
In the face of the uncertainty over the future of education policy under a second Trump administration, Mr. Pringley said a “social media university” could provide a space to counter the misinformation circulating online.
“Education is becoming limited, covered up, muted and silenced,” he said. “This is a moment and a movement that can teach the masses everything that they really should know.”
Hillmantok’s organizers built a website, complete with a course catalog and registration page, and started delivering regular updates on the Hillmantok TikTok account. There is a board of trustees and student governing board; many members of both bodies spent long nights on Zoom creating a formal structure for Hillmantok.
“We’re marching together to make sure that everyone has a chance at a free and fair education,” Mr. Pringley said.
When Brandi Smith came across Dr. Barlow’s page, she was disappointed to find that the class was not actually open to the public. Still, Ms. Smith, who attended Spelman College before graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design, followed the syllabus Dr. Barlow posted and started holding study sessions on her TikTok page, including on subjects like the documentary “13th” by the filmmaker Ava DuVernay; the songs “This Is America” by Childish Gambino and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott-Heron; an episode of the TV show “Atlanta”; and the essay “Why I Won’t Vote” by W.E.B. Du Bois.
“It was an opportunity to engage with Black women on a level that really spoke to my spirit,” Ms. Smith said.
For André Isaacs, an organic chemistry professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., Hillmantok presented an opportunity he had long dreamed of: using his growing social media following to share his passion for chemistry and teaching.
“We need science literacy in our country,” Dr. Isaacs said. “I want to do my part in having people understand the molecules that are in the skin care products they’re using, and when we say the word acid, what does that mean on a molecular level?”
Dr. Isaacs said that about 1,000 people signed on via Zoom or TikTok Live to hear his first Hillmantok lecture. Since then, about 3,000 people have registered on his website to receive course material, including recorded lectures, lesson plans, homework assignments and even quizzes, along with an open-source textbook and a discussion channel on Discord, the messaging app.
Dr. Isaacs was particularly enthusiastic about helping to demystify a subject that is often viewed as inaccessible.
“College tuition nowadays is prohibitively expensive, so a lot of people can’t have access to that, especially a lot of Black and brown kids,” he said. “If they just had an understanding of what it looks like or maybe a leg up in terms of the materials, that would help build their resilience and their enthusiasm about the subject matter.”
Dominique Kinsler of Orlando, Fla., is using Hillmantok to change perceptions of another topic that many see as having a high barrier to entry: gardening
“Every time I learn something I want to teach it to other people,” she said. “It’s a lot to do while I work,” referring to her career as a pharmacist, “but it’s a passion. It doesn’t feel like a chore.”
Ms. Kinsler taught herself to garden during the pandemic, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers with the instructional videos she posts under her social media handle, Pharmunique. So when Hillmantok sprang up, a Gardening 101 class seemed a natural fit.
Her first Hillmantok video received about 1,000 views within 30 minutes and more than 1 million by the next day. She’s received such an enthusiastic response to her Hillmantok class, she said, that she is working on a textbook. Her approach is simple: To teach people how to garden in the space they have available to them.
Hillmantok came at a “pivotal turning point,” Ms. Kinsler said, especially when it comes to the influence of politics and disinformation.
“People have a bit of fear of what education will look like in the future — will we be able to learn these things?” she said, adding that the recent federal TikTok ban magnified that fear. (The app briefly stopped working this month before flickering back to life after Mr. Trump said he would sign an executive order delaying enforcement of the ban.) “It felt like somebody took a piece of power away from us,” she said.
Now, with Hillmantok, people are taking a different approach, Ms. Kinsler said: “Let me get a notebook. I want to learn.”
Or in Ms. Kinsler’s case, fresh plants instead of a pen and paper.
For their final project, followers of Ms. Kinsler’s Hillmantok course will be asked to show the fruits of their labor: a video of their finished garden.
