Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, Elise Stefanik, Threshold Editions. 2026, pp. 256, $29 hardcover; $14.99 eBook.
Beat that f**ing Jew!
For their tolerance of antisemitic outrages and blatant double standards, Harvard, Penn, Columbia, inter alia, and their leaders deserve every ounce of opprobrium and punishment that the public and its representatives have meted out through the media and all three branches of government. First among these champions of moral clarity is Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Harvard ’06, whose Poisoned Ivies elaborates on the infamous congressional hearing where Ivy League presidents misunderstood their audience, smirked derisively, and embarrassed themselves and their institutions.
While journalism provides a first approximation of history—often more false than true—and journalistic nonfiction does somewhat better, this book relies on thousands of pages of documents and irrefutable transcripts. The book’s campus-by-campus structure has room for only the most egregious lowlights, leaving future historians an opportunity to say much more. American campus antisemitism following the terroristic, brutal, immoral attacks by Hamas on Israel in October 2023 represents just one chapter in a much longer, broader, sadder story of anti-Jewish persecution, and historians should tell the whole story together.
Rep. Stefanik tells the immediate story the way a politician should. She has no doubt, nor should she, where morality lies. University by university, we read vivid accounts of violence, vandalism, and encampments that violated campus policies and civil rights guarantees while most presidents and trustees cast blind eyes.
She also correctly diagnoses many of academia’s core problems and correctly explains how college insiders and outsiders should address them. One of the things you buy with Ivy League tuition, students know, is policing and prosecutorial deference to university discipline. This deference saves you from jail and, it turns out, can save your student visa.
But when colleges won’t even follow their own policies and the trustees won’t act, the public ought to step in with accountability for the hundreds of billions of dollars per year that subsidize higher education. The legacy elite universities have squandered the deference they once deserved. No reasonable reader of this book should conclude otherwise.
Among academe’s problems, which are well-known to higher education reformers: Ivy curricula usually fail to teach the great ideas and achievements of Western and American civilization. Instead, courses often indoctrinate students with anti-Western, anti-American themes. This is both because of their far-left ideology (the faculty’s giving patterns show them to be only slightly less radical than Bernie Sanders) and because of their increasingly international, heavily Chinese, student body and their huge donations from the Arab world.
Indeed, our legacy elite American universities generally think of themselves as serving the world, not America and Americans. Their attention to America centers the near-religious tenets of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), CRT (critical race theory), and cultural Marxism with the goal of destroying traditional American culture and institutions in order to set up a socialist future. Their “critical thinking” shibboleth lies almost entirely with being critical of the West while failing to teach accurate history, especially about Israel. Meanwhile, trustees like the honors and emoluments, like football tickets, associated with leadership much more than fulfilling their leadership responsibility.
Rep. Stefanik also describes many of the right reforms. Many go beyond antisemitism but are related to addressing it, because resetting colleges on the path of truth and virtue rather than activism would solve multiple problems at once.
The list of reforms is long because the demons are legion. Here the list alone must suffice. First, some edifying choices: Curriculum reform such as through the new schools of civic thought; modeling high-quality dialogue across differences, as Princeton professor Robert George and Cornel West demonstrate; morally committing to a culture of civility, as at Vanderbilt; actually enforcing a meaningful disciplinary code to protect students, like Vanderbilt and the University of Florida do; syllabus transparency; board transparency; merit-based hiring and admissions, including standardized tests and excluding students with a demonstrated history of disruption; and promoting alternatives to traditional college degrees.
Then, more on the punitive side: Capping admission of foreign students; disclosing and limiting or eliminating foreign donations (at least from countries hostile to American values); revoking visas as warranted; reforming Middle East studies centers; vigorously enforcing civil rights laws by state and federal governments, including better articulation of how violations can lead to loss of tax-exempt status; distinguishing antisemitic crimes under the Clery Act; lawsuits; shaming from student and alumni organizations; tenure reform as in Tennessee and Florida; union reform as in Florida; taxing endowment income; catching foreign espionage; and accreditation reform.
The federal government’s proposed higher education “compact” captures several of these reforms. Stefanik writes, “America’s institutions of higher learning do not exist outside our national social compact; they are part of our democracy, so they have democratic responsibilities.” Amen. If they want the people’s money, they must serve the people.
Notice, though, that I have left institutional neutrality, viewpoint diversity, and free speech for last, because they require a moral and political argument while assessing Rep. Stefanik’s otherwise excellent book.
In short, this book would not satisfy Socrates. The Socratic elenchus famously helps serious thinkers see where two assertions contradict each other and cannot simultaneously be true. That’s an unfortunate problem for this politician’s book.
The problem for a politician—and for democracy—is that common sense is often false, partly false, or far from salutary. Colleges and universities, at their best, interrogate common sense in pursuit of wisdom and truth. Sometimes they find that common sense—in all its purported moral clarity—involves contradictions or does not fit the evidence.
Or, as Rep. Stefanik quotes Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield in a Wall Street Journal op-ed precisely on point, a great university “seeks to find truth out of what society takes for granted.” That role is at the origin of academic freedom and why universities, at base, must be maximally free, as Yale put it in 1975, to preserve “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”
But a Socrates in any era is perceived as corrupting society’s youth. Socrates is always suggesting to the youth that saying what a good citizen would say is not necessarily identical with what one would say after thinking for oneself. A good college also does that.
So, to be blunt and politically incorrect: A college that cleaves to institutional neutrality, viewpoint diversity, and free speech, as this book nobly advises, is a college whose disciplinary code does not punish mere expression like a call to genocide, absent more.
Or, as Rep. Stefanik pithily cites Ben Sasse, “Speech, he observed, is protected, but violence is not.” Secular, private universities worth their salt should offer the same level of free speech protection that the First Amendment provides for a public community college.
Indeed, Americans are allowed to express support on either side of an armed conflict, even if one side is obviously barbaric, terroristic, and immoral. Americans are also allowed to call for extreme, disgusting injustices so long as they do not take an action toward such ends, and speech alone does not fulfill the requirement. That’s true, at least, in America under current First Amendment jurisprudence. And it’s even more the case at a college whose role is to challenge common sense.
Common sense cannot easily be marshaled against the principle of challenging common sense.
This perspective protects the people whose ideas I hate. It also protects me against the people who hate my ideas. Yes, I want to erase trans identities because people with mental illness need help, not coddling. Yes, I want all non-Christians to see the light and convert so they don’t end up in Hades. Yes, I also want non-Protestants to stop worshiping images, idols, and persons while claiming they don’t. The book of Genesis is symbolically but not literally true. And I’m a deep climate change skeptic.
Which authority controls common sense or the truth regarding these fundamental questions? I don’t want a secular college to enforce any moral truth beyond the principles necessary for peaceful execution of the college’s mission. Individual campus leaders may have perfect moral clarity and be correct, but they have no business imposing speech restrictions on faculty members or students. That’s one thing neutrality entails.
When speech is part of a larger environment of discrimination, however, the situation differs from speech alone. The trouble is that there’s no easy answer when a campus environment includes a mix of clearly illegal antisemitic behavior, as this book amply adduces, and individual instances of protected speech that, added up, exacerbate the hostile environment.
That is, the context of expression does, in fact, matter for disciplinary purposes.
This argument shows why a congressional hearing, as a political forum, is badly suited to reasonable academic discourse. Yes-or-no questions do not accept justified nuances and exceptions. This argument also shows why a university president shouldn’t smirk when facing the people’s representatives.
Even less should a Harvard president smirk and hide behind free speech when the overwhelming weight of evidence shows that Harvard has zero respect for it. Years earlier, Harvard had canceled Rep. Stefanik’s role on a board because of her own speech, which she relates in the book. “It struck me,” Stefanik writes about the congressional hearing, “that the only time Harvard had so vociferously and passionately defended freedom of speech was when it was calling for the genocide of Jews.”
Although abysmal originally meant bottomless, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression applied a mercy rule and gave Harvard a zero and a rating of “abysmal” for free speech in its annual report.
Harvard, indeed, deserves no quarter. It has failed in its core mission. In childish petulance, it recently hired a drag performer with the adopted surname Vagistan to show its defiance. It deserves no federal dollars. The rest of the Ivies are nearly equally poisoned. If they actually met the minimum standards of a respectable university, no book like Rep. Stefanik’s would be necessary.
Adam Kissel is a Visiting Fellow in Higher Education Reform at the Heritage Foundation and Senior Fellow at the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy. Kissel previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Higher Education Programs in the U.S. Department of Education, and he has held senior roles at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the Philanthropy Roundtable. Kissel currently serves on the board of the National Association of Scholars.
Photo by Gage Skidmore on Flickr