Tablet – Elise Stefanik’s sharp questioning revealed that America’s most prestigious universities were rotten to the core. Did it make a difference?
It depends on the context,” was former Harvard University president Claudine Gay’s catastrophically tone-deaf response when New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked her in a televised congressional hearing if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate her troubled institution’s student code of conduct. Gay’s fellow university presidents M. Elizabeth Magill, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth, of MIT, gave nearly identical answers. All three were reportedly coached by WilmerHale, a prestigious law firm that was at least then strongly committed to DEI. That divisive ideology, now banned from our government and all of its grantees and contractors, led the hapless administrators to say with no apparent embarrassment that calls for genocide might, in some circumstances, be acceptable.
As Stefanik recounts in her unsubtly titled first book Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, her fatal question was improvised late in the hearing while she was suffering from flu symptoms. She expected the answer to be a resolute “yes,” which she planned to press with questions about what disciplinary actions had been imposed. The surprise “context” responses launched a national firestorm. The presidents’ dismal performance turned out to be the most watched congressional testimony in history. Within a week, viral videos of the “context” exchange racked up over a billion views. The scene inspired a disastrously unfunny Saturday Night Live cold opening skit in which Stefanik, rather than the morally reprehensible university presidents, was the intended target of satire. The universities drew scathing bipartisan criticism. Outraged donors withheld hundreds of millions of dollars and, in a few cases, began to reenvision higher education governance. Magill was out of her job four days later. Gay lasted less than month, dogged by the scandal and allegations of systematic plagiarism. MIT’s trustees closed ranks around Kornbluth, who kept her job, but the reputational damage was done.
Stefanik, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time of her first election in 2014, is stepping down after her current term and recently abandoned plans to run for governor of New York. Given the passion and erudition in her book, one can only hope that she will remain engaged in our nation’s education reform movement, which has found impressive traction in the second Trump administration.
“Today we have radicalized institutions that trammel civil rights while charging tuition fees so exorbitant that a $100,000 per year price tag is barely over the horizon.”
In confessing that Poisoned Ivies is “mainly a catalog of horrors” documenting instances of antisemitic violence on our campuses, Stefanik understates its greatest insights. Beyond campus violence, which continued to unfold over the course of 2024 while most university administrations did little or nothing to stop it, she relates many heretofore unknown details of what was being said behind the scenes at the universities, in their board rooms, and in government. Congressional subpoenas gathered reams of material that administrators would almost certainly have preferred to conceal. The revelations included Gay telling her bosses at the Harvard Corporation that Stefanik was a “purveyor of hate” for having dared to ask her question. Harvard’s then-provost and current president Alan Garber, who succeeded Gay, privately wrote her that he could “live with” official statements about Oct. 7 that did not describe Hamas’s attack as “violent.” Further hearings showed scarcely more self-awareness. Representing Columbia University, arguably the worst affected campus, president Nemat Shafik, who skipped the original hearings, crumbled in humiliation and speedily left office.
Most other university presidents temporized or did nothing until the Trump administration came into office, banned DEI by executive order, and empowered the Department of Education and other agencies to investigate and penalize academic institutions for failing to protect civil rights. Dozens of them fell under investigation, with many suffering billions of dollars in federal funding freezes. After a fair amount of whining and subterfuge, most eventually cut deals, agreeing to pay eight or nine-figure fines, though Harvard, under the same Garber who settled for not calling Hamas’s attack “violent,” tried to claim the moral high ground by asserting free speech and expression rights in what looked alarmingly like an attempt to justify and continue discriminatory policies. Justice Department lawsuits may help rectify such resistance. The administration’s current ask to resolve Harvard’s woes has reportedly risen to a billion dollars.
Stefanik offers a comprehensive summary of these events, which will stand out as a reliable one-volume corrective to any attempt by legacy media or a future Democratic administration to sweep them under the rug or into a memory hole. She also gives a superb account of where the recent violence came from—an academic culture that had long rotted from within as critical theory, leftwing activism, Marxist thought, and the DEI structures they produced wormed their way into university life. Stefanik experienced hints of this firsthand as an undergraduate at Harvard, where earlier in the century she witnessed unchecked disruptions of recruitment for government jobs, the forced resignation of the university’s now doubly disgraced former president Lawrence Summers over private musings about women and science, and a minority grievance complex that ignored antisemitism in accordance with a ranked hierarchy of supposed oppressed and oppressors. Later, when she as a congresswoman defended President Trump on the floor of the House, she was unceremoniously kicked off the board of Harvard’s ostensibly bipartisan Institute of Politics, amid internal calls to revoke her degree.
Many other universities showed equally worrisome signs of trouble over the two decades or so prior to Oct. 7, but few people outside academia noticed or cared as long as graduates got good jobs and trustees had no incentive to exercise what on paper are considerable oversight and fiduciary powers. Radical leftist faculties self-replicated with the tacit cooperation of a merely leftist older generation, while a bewildered and nonconfrontational conservative movement fussed its bowties in the vain and gravely misplaced hope that what happened on campus would stay on campus.
Today we have radicalized institutions that trammel civil rights while charging tuition fees so exorbitant that a $100,000 per year price tag is barely over the horizon. In some surveys Democrat-registered faculty members outnumber Republicans by a ratio of 78 to one, compared to two to one half a century ago. Entire academic disciplines now do little more than indulge in political activism rather than conventional scholarship. Once popular bedrock majors like History and English have imploded because few students care for their DEI-inflected priorities. According to an Oct. 2025 Pew poll, 70% of Americans think higher education is “going in the wrong direction,” while a July 2025 Gallup poll found that 55% express little or no confidence in it.
Herein, Stefanik argues, lies part of the solution. Dismayed Americans are already in the process of shifting their cash and enrollments to institutions—she singles out for praise Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, the University of Florida, and the new, albeit troubled, University of Austin—that uphold civil rights and academic vigor as tarnished Ivy League prestige wanes. Even bolder innovators are dismantling higher education’s stranglehold on credentialing altogether. Entire fields—tech, logistics, business management, health care support, and communications, to name only a few—are doing away with traditional degree requirements in a world where two of the most successful tech entrepreneurs—Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg—are Harvard dropouts. Peter Thiel offers $200,000 grants to promising young people who skip college. Some are now billionaires in their own right and probably have little time for traditional four-year degree models. A looming “enrollment cliff” caused by a perfect storm of campus radicalism, high costs, and a demographically smaller generation of students poses a major challenge for which no university leader appears to have any plan.
Stefanik recommends continuing Trump policies to use available government powers to enforce accountability on higher education. The process is arduous and faces fierce ideological opposition, practical noncompliance, and many cases of outright dishonesty on the part of recalcitrant universities. But withholding government funds on civil rights grounds has indisputably captured institutional attention. Stefanik has also pioneered worthy legislation to limit foreign enrollment—which at Columbia reaches 40% alongside impressive spikes elsewhere—and to exclude billions in foreign cash from adversarial nations like China and Islamist countries like Qatar. Immigration authorities have ramped up visa revocations to expel foreign students who engage in criminal activity or express support for terrorism.
The pressure could be working. One day after Poisoned Ivies’s release, Yale University, which was quieter around Oct. 7 but has had its share of woke embarrassments, issued an internal report on the nature of public trust in higher education that endorsed most of Stefanik’s findings and recommendations. Perhaps Yale and other institutions will follow them.