The MSNBC host wrote that she wondered if the man was armed with a knife or a gun beneath his coat. Harris-Perry, who is a rape survivor, wrote that she froze during the situation in Iowa, as she had when she was raped as a girl.

What saved her, she explained, was seeing her students in her peripheral vision and remembering why she, and they, had traveled to Iowa. Thinking of her students gave her the strength to create distance between the man and herself, and to report his behavior to the hotel's security. The man apparently got in a car and drove away.

"I did not think, 'No! Get away from me,'" Harris-Perry wrote. "I thought, 'Not in front of my students!'" Harris-Perry explained in the essay that while she didn't know what the man's intentions were, her students helped her escape the situation before it escalated further.

Harris-Perry won't let the man's threats stop her from teaching political journalism, though. She ended her essay by sharing that she'd recently been named Wake Forest University's first Maya Angelou Presidential Chair and that she plans to continue her political work.