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The new book Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, is a actual time capsule. In taking on this book challenge, Stefanik clearly needed to cement her second of political stardom—that one time in late 2023 that she asked the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn a yes-or-no query at a congressional listening to on campus antisemitism, and people presidents answered disastrously—into a launchpad for her political profession. Poisoned Ivies recounts how, on the day of the hearings, Stefanik was taking part in the Congressional model of Michael Jordan’s flu game—she was sick, however went to work anyway, “armed with Kleenex, cough drops, and doused with over-the-counter cold medicine.” Dramatically, Stefanik describes dithering over whether or not to simply accept a colleague’s provide to yield their minutes: “The question heard around the world almost didn’t happen.” And in fact the truth that the listening to was so zeitgeisty as to appear on Saturday Night Live makes it into the book—although Stefanik describes the ensuing sketch, which mocked her in addition to faculty presidents Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and Liz Magill, as “the worst cold open ever,” you higher consider it charges a point out.
It’s awkward, then, that the political profession Stefanik needed to gas by memorializing the 2023/2024 campus politics fights in book type appears to have come crashing to a halt. The as soon as average Republican and Harvard grad (’06) had gone full MAGA by the Joe Biden years, making various statements supporting Donald Trump’s 2020 “stolen” election claims. After the 2023 campus antisemitism hearings threw her into the highlight, and Trump got here again into workplace in 2024, Trump appeared to reward her loyalty by nominating her to be ambassador to the United Nations in early 2025. But the remainder of final 12 months was all downhill: Trump rescinded Stefanik’s ambassadorship nomination as a result of he didn’t wish to lose her congressional seat in a particular election. Then, the president declined to endorse her marketing campaign to win the Republican nomination for governor in New York state. In December of final 12 months, a mere two years after the hearings that put her on SNL, Stefanik announced she was suspending that gubernatorial marketing campaign and leaving Congress on the finish of her time period in 2026. She has a 4-year-old son, and says she’ll be spending time with him; though she’s younger and more likely to return to public life, she hasn’t hinted at that but, even to a friendly recent interviewer in the Wall Street Journal.
Instead of making an attempt to see Stefanik’s future on this book, you’ll be able to learn Poisoned Ivies as an alternate actuality: a narrative of what occurred on campuses after Oct. 7 that manages to keep away from description of any facet of what was occurring in Gaza, to characterize Jewish campus response with out mentioning that there have been many Jewish college students and school members who publicly declared themselves to be nonsupporters of the struggle, and (in a single vivid and illustrative instance) to explain the occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia with out telling the story of Hind Rajab, whose title the occupiers used to rename the hall.
Former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s well-known response to Stefanik’s query at these hearings—Stefanik: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct?”; Gay: “It depends on the context”—reappears a number of occasions over the book, as an epigraph, and because the kicker on the very finish. (“Truth and light will win. It does not depend on the context.”) Writing on the time of Gay’s resignation, A.O. Scott of the Times described that phrase as “a careful, neutral piece of language that struck some listeners as outrageous for precisely that reason: an attempt at anti-inflammatory rhetoric that had the opposite effect.” I notice that I’m following Gay into Stefanik’s entice by declaring that the very factor Poisoned Ivies lacks is context. But studying Poisoned Ivies, you notice that if you happen to inform the story of campus protests submit–Oct. 7 with out invoking Gaza, then the protesters, the school supporting them, and the directors who struggled to determine the right way to reply all sound incomprehensible—antisemitic on the very least; presumably additionally possessed by demons.
That’s no mistake. The book cites lots of the conservative shops and posters that lined campus politics across the time of the most important protests: the New York Post, Tablet journal, Bill Ackman, City Journal, the Free Press, the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission. Reading it seems like studying right-wing X within the spring of 2024. There are loads of actual situations of rhetorical excess from pro-Palestinian campus teams to quote, and Stefanik actually latches onto these, however doesn’t cease there, mixing these examples with uncritical replica of sure tales of campus antisemitism that might be very memorable to anybody who was on-line throughout that point, however that look considerably much less verifiable in hindsight. Eyal Yakoby, a Penn scholar who (Stefanik writes) “has bravely confronted and chronicled antisemitism on Penn’s campus since October 7,” had his lawsuit against Penn dismissed by a federal decide final 12 months. The former Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who was investigated by Columbia for allegedly harassing and doxing scholar activists and Columbia school, is, Stefanik writes, a “liberal” who favors a two-state resolution and denies any wrongdoing. But that investigation was dropped after Davidai left Columbia in the summertime of 2025 and not had the standing of worker. Stefanik describes how Sahar Tartak, a Yale undergrad, stated she was “jabbed in the face” with a Palestinian flag at a protest—“thankfully, she did not suffer any long-term damage to her eyesight,” Stefanik writes. But if you happen to watch the video of this “jabbing,” it’s removed from clear that’s what occurred. As the New York Times corrected an April 2024 Bret Stephens column that lined Tartak’s story: “A video of the incident shows a flag hit her face; it does not clearly show that a demonstrator jammed a flag in her eye.”
In a extra advanced case of flattening-out, Stefanik lauds the “patriotic frat boys” who thwarted activists who replaced an American flag with a Palestinian flag on the University of North Carolina, restoring Old Glory to its place and guarding it towards additional interference. Stefanik praises them with out mentioning that some frat boys on different campuses taunted pro-Palestine protesters with racist and demeaning chants—or, that among the frat boys at UNC later instructed the media they didn’t get pleasure from being canonized by conservatives combating tradition wars on the nationwide stage. “The use of our actions to promote a narrative that we were some right-wing, MAGA heroes has been a gross misrepresentation and a disservice to many of those who were actually there,” one stated to the Times in September 2024, after right-wingers on-line raised lots of of 1000’s of {dollars} to pay for a “rager” so the boys might have a good time.
Stefanik pats herself on the again for kicking off the “generational upheaval” of the connection between the federal authorities and universities that has unfolded in the first year of Trump’s second administration. “Our hearing reset the course of American higher education,” she writes. This could also be considerably true, even when Trump, who doesn’t like to share credit score, may discover it annoying to learn. But issues look totally different in 2026 than they did in 2024, and so they don’t all the time evolve in a straight line. In the weeks earlier than Poisoned Ivies was printed, because the struggle on Iran unfolded, Tucker Carlson called Donald Trump a “slave” to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the BBC, and Marjorie Taylor Greene referred to as for Trump to be faraway from workplace. Last week, the Pew Research Center published a survey exhibiting that majorities of adults beneath 50 in each political events now have a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable view of Israel. In hindsight, what occurred on America’s elite campuses in 2023 and 2024 began something—however it’s removed from clear what that something may be.
