In the early 2000s, after my father moved into a new house, he introduced himself to his neighbor. While he might have engaged in the basic protocol of offering his name (I’m not sure), the man immediately told my dad that his son went to Harvard. It might have been Penn or Columbia (my memory perhaps gets it wrong), but it was definitely an Ivy League school. The point is that the man did not welcome my dad to the neighborhood or engage in any small talk typical of an introduction. His pride was so overwhelming that he felt the overwhelming need to blurt out that random fact.
That was more than two decades ago. But even just a decade ago, 75% of Americans felt a college education was very important. Now only one in three Americans say that. That shocking statistic is included the introduction of Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-N.Y.) new book Poison Ivies: Why this new mistrust of our higher institutions of learning? Stefanik says they have lost their way. No longer places that focus on academic excellence and rigor, they are now no more than centers of far-left political indoctrination. Stefanik explains:
Frankly, they’ve embraced anti-Americanism. As we saw after October 7, pro-Hamas encampments took over many of these schools. There was a skyrocketing of anti-Semitism, oftentimes fueled by professors or Middle Eastern Studies programs funded by foreign dollars, as well as propped up by U.S. taxpayers. It’s not reflective of the American people’s values.
When Stefanik speaks of the American people’s values, she’s referring to people like her constituents in New York’s 21st Congressional District, not the administrators at these elite universities. That point is driven home by an anecdote she shares about “The Hearing Heard ‘Round the World,” held on December 5, 2023. At the hearing — officially titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism” — Stefanik famously questioned the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania about the fact that Jewish students had become the victims of targeted physical and verbal harassment on campus. Many felt unsafe attending class on campuses where swastikas had been painted on walls, and some even hired private security.
It was a question she asked at the very end of the hearing — “the question that took down the Ivy League,” as PragerU labels it — that led to what Stefanik refers to as “horrific, morally bankrupt testimony” being seen by over a billion people. She calls it an obvious question, not a trick question, one that the majority of her constituents could immediately answer “yes” to.
The question was: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct?
Stefanik thought they were going to answer yes and that she would follow up with why they didn’t take disciplinary action. But as we all know, they shamefully said it depended on the context, which led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and Penn amid the firestorm that followed. But the most shocking thing, Stefanik explains, is that they had no sense of the seriousness of what they had said.
And what was really eerie about it was there were hardly any people in the committee hearing room at that point because it was the end of the day. There were hardly any media, just the C-SPAN cameras. Those university presidents stood up, didn’t realize anything they said was wrong and went on their way, which to me highlights the disconnect. Cause you take my constituents — a farmer, a mom, a small business worker — they know how to answer that question without hesitation. Something is deeply wrong with the higher education ecosystem at the most elite level if you have that type of failure on display and they don’t even realize it.
It is instructive to compare the reactions of two men — Barack Obama and Donald Trump — to the hearing.
The Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers held scheduled meetings in December 2023 while pressure was building on Harvard President Claudine Gay’s to resign. Stefanik says that Obama called board members — many of whom had served in his cabinet or finance team — to defend Gay. Why? So as not to give Stefanik a win. Forget the students facing harassment. For the former president, it was all politics.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, has launched investigations into over 50 universities and withheld billions of dollars in federal funding from schools like Harvard University, Northwestern University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Brown University. Stefanik supports the White House’s actions, saying universities had their chance to fix themselves but instead dug in deeper and deeper during the Biden administration years. They have to be forced to address the “rot” on their campuses.
Stefanik diagnoses the problem, if these universities care to listen. She blames DEI, which she argues is rooted in antisemitism and has shifted universities away from academic and merit-based exceptionalism. She also warns about foreign funding flowing into universities, which she says influences curricula and hiring decisions. The U.S. Department of Education reports $62.4 billion in foreign funding to U.S. universities, with Qatar accounting for $6.6 billion alone. Stefanik gave examples of Northwestern and Georgetown, which both rely on funding from Qatar and thus couldn’t speak out against the October 7 Hamas attacks.
With more than 1.5 million foreign students enrolled in U.S. colleges, the congresswoman states that a foreign student via is a privilege, not a right, and that those who engage in antisemitic or criminal behavior should be deported. She suggests a cap on the number of foreign students at no more than 15% at each institution.
Unless and until these changes are made, a comment such as the one made by my dad’s neighbor — that one’s kid goes to an Ivy League school — will no longer be a badge of pride, but instead a mark of shame.
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