Elise Stefanik's ‘Poisoned Ivies' Excerpt on the Hearing That Went Viral

In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, American college campuses were engulfed by protests and widespread accounts of antisemitism. The need to protect free expression while banning discrimination-and the failure of some universities to strike this balance effectively-quickly became front-page news and attracted the attention of Congress. A bright spotlight shone on the issue on December 5, when the presidents of three top universities appeared before the House Committee on Education and Workforce responding with lawyerly hedges to questions from Representative Elise Stefanik. In 2014, as the youngest woman elected to Congress at the time, Stefanik then went on to become the House Republican Conference chair, making her the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress. But it was this hearing that propelled her to broader national recognition. This excerpt from Stefanik's new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities, offers the congresswoman's perspective on that hearing and its aftermath.

"Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university's code of conduct?"

Simple. Straightforward. Not political. I expected them each to say "Yes." In fact, I assumed they would say yes without hesitation. And my plan was to follow up with a question on what disciplinary action they had taken against those who violated the code of conduct.

Turns out, I wouldn't get the opportunity for the follow-up.

Not in a million years did I imagine their response.

MIT's President Sally Kornbluth admitted that she had heard chants that might be antisemitic "depending on the context." But she couldn't commit. University of Pennsylvania's Liz Magill hedged and smiled when asked about genocide. It was, she said, a "context-dependent decision." Harvard President Claudine Gay said over and over again regarding calling for the genocide of Jews: "It depends on the context."

That was how the three university presidents responded.

Across all three campuses, terrorist-sympathizing students and faculty were calling for the eradication of Jews at home and abroad. That was the "context."

The leaders of America's most prestigious institutions of higher learning flunked the most basic moral test imaginable.

I was stunned. Truly astonished.

The question was not a political one, it was a moral one. And it was a question that if you asked everyday Americans, they would know how to answer correctly. I thought of my approximately 700,000 constituents-take a mom, a farmer and a small business worker from upstate New York. All three would know without hesitation how to answer the question with an unequivocal yes. You don't need an Ivy League degree to know that calling for the genocide of Jews is wrong and does not depend on the context. Yet these three university presidents of the most elite colleges on Earth utterly failed the most basic test of humanity, intellectual fortitude and moral compass. And in that moment, they exposed the deep rot in the fabric of American education that had been brewing for generations.

Their disgraceful attempt to contextualize genocide of Jews was a symptom of decades of moral decay, intellectual laziness and dangerous radical groupthink at so-called elite institutions across society. The fact that they essentially mimicked one another to give nearly verbatim the same answer-"it depends on the context"-encapsulated to me the depth of academic indolence and lack of independent thinking that have perverted our college campuses.

It would later be revealed that all three university president witnesses were prepped by the same overpriced law firm: WilmerHale. Almost worse than their answers was the fact that they didn't even understand in the actual moment that what they had said was so morally wrong. Upon reflection, one of the most disturbing parts of the hearing was that after my final question and their unacceptably perverse answers, which concluded the hearing, the three university presidents stood up and went on their way acting certain that they had answered the question correctly.

Little did they know that the hearing would set off an unprecedented, gigantic earthquake.

Video of my exchange with the three university presidents went viral across all social media platforms at warp speed. By the end of one week, the video would rack up more than 1 billion views, shattering all records of congressional testimony in history. That number would climb to the multiple billions in short order.

Calls echoing my demand for the university presidents' resignations were swift and overwhelming. The cacophony of condemnations went from the highest-ranking elected officials and candidates like President Donald J. Trump who had watched the hearing closely, to corporate titans, prominent university board members and donors and everyday people across the country and around the world. It ignited a flame across the political spectrum of real-world America. Republicans' condemnation was near universal and immediate.

Of course, there were a handful of the usual apologists in the mainstream media doing cleanup for the Left, claiming it was a carefully laid "trap" or a gotcha question. It wasn't even a prepared question. I specifically worded it to be an easy, straightforward moral question. Despite these efforts by some in the media, the pressure was immense to condemn the university presidents. Even the White House under President Joe Biden felt compelled to distance itself from the university presidents' comments. "It's unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country," said a White House spokesman.

Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who is Jewish, declared UPenn President Magill's comments "unacceptable." The day after the hearing he told reporters: "It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews, genocide against anyone else. I've said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test. There should be no nuance to that-she needed to give a one-word answer."

Even Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe admitted that the hearing was alarming: "I'm no fan of @RepStefanik but I'm with her here," he wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. "Claudine Gay's hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends."

But it wasn't just politicians and academics. What was so astonishing was just how much the hearing permeated popular culture.

Dave Portnoy, a popular sports and politics commentator, entrepreneur and the owner of the Barstool Sports franchise, called for the resignation of the university presidents and swore never to hire another Harvard graduate. David Schwimmer, who famously played Ross Geller on the hit sitcom Friends, posted footage of the exchange on his Instagram page.

Billboards went up in Israel in Jerusalem. My chief of staff's email crashed daily for months as he received hundreds of thousands of emails in various languages referencing the hearing. I've been in plenty of high-profile hearings, but I had never experienced a hearing like this one. In a single moment, the moral bankruptcy of an entire educational system was exposed. And it caught the whole country's and the world's attention.

For the next few months, the hearing and its fallout saturated the news. There were endless headlines, op-eds, think pieces, essays, podcasts, television appearances, all on repeat analyzing the aftermath of the hearing and its repercussions. It even led to what would become known as Saturday Night Live's worst cold open ever, which applauded the presidents' antisemitic testimony and instead attacked the hearing and me and was nearly universally panned on social media. It was everywhere all the time.

The university presidents desperately tried to do damage control, but it was too little, too late. The world had heard their answers. They had been exposed.

Four days after the hearing, Magill was forced to resign as president of UPenn after her floundering attempt to do damage control. The pressure had been intense. Just 24 hours after the hearing, more than 3,000 people affiliated with the university had signed a petition calling for her resignation. Major donors had threatened to withhold further contributions-more than $100 million worth. Pennsylvania's Governor Shapiro urged university trustees to meet immediately to address the situation.

"One down, two to go," I tweeted.

The writing was on the wall.

Harvard's Gay held out a little longer. In the days following the hearing, faculty, alumni and the Fellows of the Harvard Corporation rallied to Gay's defense. It was less than a week after the hearing when multiple sources uncovered an extensive history of alleged plagiarism by Gay across her academic career.

Less than one month later, on January 2, 2024, Gay was forced to resign.

Two down.

The third witness, Kornbluth, clung on to her post and is still the embattled president of MIT.

But the consequences were far more than the university presidents' subsequent resignations. Our hearing launched a reckoning in higher education that has only just begun. It led to an unprecedented congressional investigation leading to even more resignations. This oversight revealed not only the systemic antisemitism, but the larger crisis within American higher education.

Within the week, I passed a resolution in Congress condemning the college presidents' testimony and calling for their resignations. It passed 303-126, an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote-a rarity in today's Washington.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce hired dedicated investigators and allocated resources to help deliver transparency and accountability. The committee hired an exceptionally talented lead investigator, Ari Wisch, who did yeoman's work with our office to dig deep into these universities. Subpoenas started flying out the door. University faculty, staff, students and board members sat for depositions. The universities were forced to turn over to the committee more than 100,000 documents. We uncovered foreign donations to universities, and how foreign donors were influencing university policy in ways that hurt American students. We examined the federal accreditation system, which helped enforce progressive ideology at universities under the guise of "accountability." We investigated universities' countless assaults on viewpoint diversity and free speech, especially under the DEI regime. We looked at the erosion of academic integrity. And, of course, we devoted significant resources to a fulsome assessment of the comprehensive failure to protect American Jewish students, faculty and staff.

What was started in Congress went into hyperdrive with the second inauguration of President Trump. I know firsthand that he had been watching what was happening on American college campuses closely. He also followed the hearing in real time, as well as the news at each university. He and I spoke many times in depth about this particular subject, about the hearing testimony and the situation at each school. He was typically one of the first calls or texts I would receive when another university president resigned or there was breaking news related to these hearings. People often forget and the media often tries to brush it under the rug that Trump himself is a graduate of the prestigious Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. He knows the Ivy League very well, as do his children and many of his closest, longtime business friends. Some of them have experienced elite academia's prejudices firsthand. All were universally appalled at how far these once great institutions had fallen.

Combating antisemitism and digging out the rot in higher education became a mainstay of Trump's messaging and rallies on the campaign trail. It became an incredibly important part of his promises to the American people. This hearing resonated in such an intense way that to this day, it is consistently the loudest applause line from voters when I reference the hearing. It struck a chord that continues to reverberate around the world.

With the stroke of his pen on Day One of his second term, Trump kept good on his promise to combat antisemitism and began establishing policies that have already transformed the landscape of higher education. Building on my questions and our congressional investigation, the Trump administration launched major investigations of universities that failed to protect American Jewish students and were out of compliance with federal policies. Some, like Harvard and Columbia, had lawsuits filed against them. Many more have had billions of dollars of federal contracts, including research dollars, frozen or ended. The Trump Department of Justice established a multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. "Anti-Semitism in any environment is repugnant to this Nation's ideals," declared Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Leo Terrell.

In less than one year, because of the higher education oversight work of Congress, the Trump administration has reached or is in talks to reach many multi-hundred-million-dollar settlements with universities in the Ivy League and beyond.

Parents and college students are also voting with their feet and their wallets. They're abandoning the poisoned Ivies and so-called elite academia for sunnier, politically friendlier and more affordable destinations. What's happening right now is the most important moment in American higher education in generations. These schools proved incapable of fixing themselves. But under pressure from the federal government and from the self-inflicted mistakes of a forced radical ideology, American higher education, especially elite academia, is being transformed.

From POISONED IVIES: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities by Elise Stefanik. Copyright © 2026 by Elise Stefanik. Reprinted by permission of Threshold Editions, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Read Stefanik’s interview with Newsweek.

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This story was originally published April 14, 2026 at 2:00 AM.