That video of congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, grilling college presidents about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their university policies—and the college presidents responding that it depended on the context—has been viewed more than a billion times, making it what the jacket copy of her new book calls “the most-watched congressional hearing in history.”
The performance propelled Stefanik to new prominence but not yet into a different job. She was reportedly considered—how seriously is unclear—to be President Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate. Trump eventually did nominate her to be the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, a cabinet position, but then in March 2025 Trump pulled the nomination. Stefanik entered the 2026 race for governor of New York—and then announced she was suspending that campaign and also not running for reelection to Congress.
Making a success as a nonfiction writer may be even longer odds than winning election as governor of New York as a Trump Republican. Yet on the basis of her debut performance, Stefanik just might have a promising future ahead of her as an author. Poisoned Ivies is the best book yet on how the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel reverberated on American campuses.
The right-wing jeremiad against decadent universities is a genre with a long history. The conventional list starts with William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1951 God and Man at Yale and continues through Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, and Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. You could take it back even further, to Irving Babbitt’s 1908 Literature and the American College: “The function of the college … should be to insist on the idea of quality.”
Unlike Buckley and D’Souza, who came at it as students, or Bloom and Babbitt, who were professors, Stefanik brings the perspective of a politician. With that hearing questioning Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill, who both subsequently resigned, she “reset the course of American higher education” and changed the perception of Ivy League institutions. “Instead of bastions of knowledge and vibrant institutional life, they are considered hotbeds of radical ideology, groundless elitism, intellectual laziness, and anti-American hatred,” she writes.
“The leaders of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning flunked the most basic moral test imaginable,” says Stefanik. “They acted like a brainwashed herd, all trotting out the same lawyerly verbiage and bureaucratic talking points.”
Stefanik is particularly good on Harvard, where she went to college. This book includes details that I didn’t know about, and I follow this stuff very closely. For example, the senior fellow of Harvard’s governing Corporation, Penny Pritzker, “had hired her own legal team separate from Harvard’s.” And, “at Pritzker’s deposition, there was a heated disagreement when her lawyers would not allow the Harvard lawyers into the room.” Stefanik also reports a meeting she had in 2024 with Alan Garber, then the interim president of Harvard. “Garber seemed surprised and dismissive when I told him that Trump would win, and he insinuated that was not what he was hearing from Harvard’s pollsters and professors about the presidential election.”
She’s also good with details from some of the other campuses, drawing on student reports: “Yale students dropped a heap of fake ‘bloodstained’ hundred-dollar bills on the heads of American Jewish undergraduates as they passed underneath the balcony of one of Yale’s dining halls. According to Sahar Tartak, a dean told her that Yale considered the blatantly antisemitic act ‘political speech.’ The dean’s only stated objection was to the littering.”
She’s good on the causes of the campus problems—tenure; overwhelmingly left-wing faculty hiring for conformity; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; social media, especially TikTok; and the influence of foreign students and foreign money.
She’s good on some possible solutions, including requiring “syllabus transparency” to allow parents and students to understand what they are getting into, and donors to see what they are funding. Also “using our free choice to send a message” by moving away from the Ivy League toward friendlier destinations such as Washington University in St. Louis, Vanderbilt, Emory, Clemson, even Bari Weiss’s University of Austin, in Texas.
And she’s spectacularly good in explaining how this is an issue that matters not only to the Jewish community but “to every American.” She says it “determines whether we strive for academic excellence or political indoctrination at our most esteemed colleges.”
There are a few points where I wished she’d been a little more precise about facts. The hearing transcript at the end of the book has her grilling Gay about what Stefanik four times calls Harvard’s “Middle Eastern Studies Department.” Harvard has no “Middle Eastern Studies Department.” She also writes that, “In fact, the Biden administration went so far as not to open up a single Department of Education investigation into any college regarding antisemitism, using ongoing litigation as the lame excuse for cowardly leadership.” The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights notified Harvard by letter on November 28, 2023, that it was opening an investigation into a complaint about discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students.
She’s also too easy on some institutions and too tough on others. Stefanik’s depiction of Dartmouth as an exemplary model is too sanguine. A program to bring Israeli scholars there has been subject to a flood of opposition in the student newspaper, including from the opinion editor. Even the University of Florida, another success story in Stefanik’s book, recently had to deal with what a university statement described as an “antisemitic gesture” among its College Republicans chapter. I thought she was too harsh on Brown, faulting the university for negotiating with protesters but omitting that Brown arrested 20 protesters in November 2023 or that Brown, unlike other Ivy League institutions, talks about recruiting at religious day schools and has seen meaningful growth in its observant Jewish population in recent years. She’s too harsh on Larry Summers.
But those are minor quibbles. On the big picture, Stefanik—and her House Education and Workforce Committee colleagues like Virginia Foxx and Burgess Owens—are so much more sensible than Claudine Gay or Liz Magill or Michael Schill of Northwestern or Baroness Minouche Shafik of Columbia. As Stefanik puts it, “the American people, much smarter than these university presidents, said enough is enough.”
Perhaps the most stirring example of this were the “patriotic frat boys” at the University of North Carolina who, Battle of Iwo Jima-statue style, raised the American flag on a campus where demonstrators had replaced it with a Palestinian one. Stefanik—daughter of an Italian-American mom and a Polish-American dad, neither of whom has a college degree—has played her own role. If Harvard isn’t proud of her, it should be—Stefanik has done more to improve that university and American higher education than any of its current faculty and staff. In a just world, Harvard would give her an honorary degree and make her the commencement speaker. Or put her on the faculty at the inflated salary the school is reportedly paying Claudine Gay. Perhaps if the government wins its lawsuit against Harvard, Stefanik will wind up as the court-appointed “independent outside monitor.” It would make another good book.
Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities
by Elise Stefanik
Threshold Editions, 256 pp., $29
Ira Stoll is a senior writer at the Washington Free Beacon.
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