Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities came out last week, and I was in the room Monday night when Elise Stefanik sat down with Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam to talk about it..
The Hearing That Started Everything
Most people remember the December 2023 congressional hearing. Stefanik, a Harvard alumna herself, asked the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn one question:
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct?
Claudine Gay’s answer, “it depends on the context” went around the world. Multiple Ivy League presidents eventually resigned. It became the most-watched congressional hearing in American history, with over one billion views.
But the hearing, Stefanik told the room, was just the beginning. The book is the full story.
Harvard Was Unrecognizable
When Stefanik returned to Harvard after October 7th, she was stunned. “It was unrecognizable to me,” she said. “We had a very vibrant Jewish community, a very active Hillel community when I was there. And yes, it was a left-leaning school, but it was not this truly den of antisemitism that you saw, not only tolerated but frankly fueled at some of these schools where professors would have classes in these pro-Hamas encampments.”
She drew a sharp contrast between how Harvard treated Larry Summers and how it treated Claudine Gay. Summers was pushed out by the faculty. Gay got unanimous support from the Harvard Corporation board, even after it became clear she was a serial plagiarist. That plagiarism story was first reported by Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo, and Stefanik credited it directly as one of the things that finally broke the dam.
“The faculty circled the wagons for Claudine Gay,” Stefanik said. “She couldn’t answer the question. Just calling for the genocide of Jews, does it violate your university’s code of conduct? She answered, infamously, it depends on the context. And the faculty supported that.”
“The DEI regime is at its core antisemitic.” She described a pre-October 7th incident at Harvard Business School, where Jewish students reported rising antisemitism to the Office of DEI and received no response at all. “It didn’t fit into the DEI regime,” she said. “They were not worthy of a response from the university.”
Stefanik was herself canceled by Harvard, removed from its bipartisan Institute of Politics board after a speech she gave on the House floor about election integrity. She told the dean exactly what would happen: “This is going to have a chilling effect on conservative students or independent-minded students on campus. They’re going to feel very fearful for speaking up if they do not toe the far-left radical line.” Their response? “They said they didn’t care.”
Three years later, she was instrumental in forcing Harvard’s president to resign.
DEI and Antisemitism Are the Same Disease
Salam pressed Stefanik on the connection between DEI ideology and the explosion of campus antisemitism since October 7th. Her answer was unambiguous: “The DEI regime is at its core antisemitic.” She described a pre-October 7th incident at Harvard Business School, where Jewish students reported rising antisemitism to the Office of DEI and received no response at all. “It didn’t fit into the DEI regime,” she said. “They were not worthy of a response from the university.”
She credited Manhattan Institute scholars, specifically Chris Rufo and Jason Riley, whose research she said was foundational to both the hearing and the investigations that followed.
Follow the Foreign Money
Qatar is number one. Communist China is number two. Stefanik put the number at $1 billion annually flowing into elite institutions from these two countries alone. “These schools now view themselves as global institutions, no longer as American institutions,” she said. “These are American institutions that are funded by billions of dollars of US taxpayers, and we need to prioritize American students.”
At Columbia, roughly 40% of students are from overseas, and many of the leaders of the Hamilton Hall takeover were foreign students. “They are not American students,” she said, “and they’re chanting not only death to Israel, but death to America.”
Congress passed the Deterrence Act to close loopholes that had allowed foreign governments to funnel money to specific professors and centers without disclosure. The Department of Education now publishes a public report on all foreign government funding for the first time.
“These are American institutions that are funded by billions of dollars of US taxpayers, and we need to prioritize American students.”
The Schools Getting It Right
This is not only a book about failure. Stefanik highlighted institutions doing things right: Vanderbilt, which just hosted a Passover Seder with over 600 students in its football stadium; the University of Florida under Ben Sasse’s leadership; Dartmouth, which responded to encampments with immediate disciplinary action.
What do they have in common?
“Strong leaders. They’re focused on academic excellence. They’re not focused on political indoctrination. They’re focused on teaching students in the classroom skills that they will use when they graduate, not focused on brainwashing.”
Stefanik also said the ratio of conservative to liberal professors in humanities departments was once roughly one-to-one Today it is 88-to-one at some schools. “That’s not reflective of the American people as a whole,” she said.
What She Revealed About Trump
One of the more surprising moments of the evening was when Stefanik described President Trump’s personal involvement in this fight. “One of the people that I would hear from earlier and almost more consistently than anyone was President Trump, either via text or phone call, after these hearings, after news stories. He’s very in tune and focused on this issue.”
SNL Got It Exactly Backwards
She also brought up the Saturday Night Live cold open that aired the weekend after the hearing. Rather than go after the university presidents whose answers were morally bankrupt, SNL attacked Stefanik and her committee members for asking the questions. “They essentially praised the antisemitic answers of those university presidents,” she said. She called it “the worst cold open ever.”
Get the Book
Read a chapter excerpt at Newsweek and order the book here.
As an Amazon affiliate Restore Childhood earns a small commission from any purchases made through the book links in this article.
Same here. I paid a steep price for standing out from the crowd.
https://x.com/LMucchielli/status/2032426999835148793
https://indepnews.org/en/what-the-laval-case-shows-about-academic-freedom/
https://indepnews.org/en/academic-dissent-at-universite-laval-during-covid/
https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/when-collegiality-becomes-censorship
https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/heresy
https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cgq/1994-v38-n105-cgq2677/022467ar/
Unfortunately, Stefanik just introduced H.R. 8250, which would mandate a digital ID to access operating systems. I was quite disappointed to see her jump on the digital identity/technocracy bandwagon. Sad. But her book is good, at least.