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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 real time capsule. In taking on this book project, Stefanik clearly wanted to cement her moment of political stardom—that one time in late 2023 that she asked the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn a yes-or-no question at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, and those presidents answered disastrously—into a launchpad for her political career. Poisoned Ivies recounts how, on the day of the hearings, Stefanik was playing the Congressional version of Michael Jordan’s flu game—she was sick, but went to work anyway, “armed with Kleenex, cough drops, and doused with over-the-counter cold medicine.” Dramatically, Stefanik describes dithering over whether to accept a colleague’s offer to yield their minutes: “The question heard around the world almost didn’t happen.” And of course the fact that the hearing was so zeitgeisty as to appear on Saturday Night Live makes it into the book—though Stefanik describes the resulting sketch, which mocked her as well as college presidents Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and Liz Magill, as “the worst cold open ever,” you better believe it rates a mention.
It’s awkward, then, that the political career Stefanik wanted to fuel by memorializing the 2023/2024 campus politics fights in book form seems to have come crashing to a halt. The once moderate 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 spotlight, and Trump came back into office in 2024, Trump seemed to reward her loyalty by nominating her to be ambassador to the United Nations in early 2025. But the rest of last year was all downhill: Trump rescinded Stefanik’s ambassadorship nomination because he didn’t want to lose her congressional seat in a special election. Then, the president declined to endorse her campaign to win the Republican nomination for governor in New York state. In December of last year, a mere two years after the hearings that put her on SNL, Stefanik announced she was suspending that gubernatorial campaign and leaving Congress at the end of her term in 2026. She has a 4-year-old son, and says she’ll be spending time with him; although she’s young and likely to return to public life, she hasn’t hinted at that yet, even to a friendly recent interviewer in the Wall Street Journal.
Instead of trying to see Stefanik’s future in this book, you can read Poisoned Ivies as an alternate reality: a narrative of what happened on campuses after Oct. 7 that manages to avoid description of any aspect of what was occurring in Gaza, to characterize Jewish campus response without mentioning that there were many Jewish students and faculty members who publicly declared themselves to be nonsupporters of the war, and (in one vivid and illustrative example) to describe the occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia without telling the story of Hind Rajab, whose name the occupiers used to rename the hall.
Former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s famous response to Stefanik’s question at those hearings—Stefanik: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct?”; Gay: “It depends on the context”—reappears multiple times over the book, as an epigraph, and as the kicker at the very end. (“Truth and light will win. It does not depend on the context.”) Writing at the time of Gay’s resignation, A.O. Scott of the Times described that word 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 realize that I’m following Gay into Stefanik’s trap by pointing out that the very thing Poisoned Ivies lacks is context. But reading Poisoned Ivies, you realize that if you tell the story of campus protests post–Oct. 7 without invoking Gaza, then the protesters, the faculty supporting them, and the administrators who struggled to figure out how to respond all sound incomprehensible—antisemitic at the very least; possibly also possessed by demons.
That’s no mistake. The book cites many of the conservative outlets and posters that covered campus politics around the time of the biggest protests: the New York Post, Tablet magazine, Bill Ackman, City Journal, the Free Press, the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission. Reading it feels like reading right-wing X in the spring of 2024. There are plenty of real instances of rhetorical excess from pro-Palestinian campus groups to cite, and Stefanik certainly latches onto those, but doesn’t stop there, mixing these examples with uncritical reproduction of certain stories of campus antisemitism that will be very memorable to anyone who was online during that time, but that look somewhat less verifiable in hindsight. Eyal Yakoby, a Penn student 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 judge last year. The former Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who was investigated by Columbia for allegedly harassing and doxing student activists and Columbia faculty, is, Stefanik writes, a “liberal” who favors a two-state solution and denies any wrongdoing. But that investigation was dropped after Davidai left Columbia in the summer of 2025 and no longer had the status of employee. Stefanik describes how Sahar Tartak, a Yale undergrad, said 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 watch the video of this “jabbing,” it’s far from clear that’s what happened. As the New York Times corrected an April 2024 Bret Stephens column that covered 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 more complex case of flattening-out, Stefanik lauds the “patriotic frat boys” who thwarted activists who replaced an American flag with a Palestinian flag at the University of North Carolina, restoring Old Glory to its place and guarding it against further interference. Stefanik praises them without mentioning that some frat boys on other campuses taunted pro-Palestine protesters with racist and demeaning chants—or, that some of the frat boys at UNC later told the media they didn’t enjoy being canonized by conservatives fighting culture wars on the national 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 said to the Times in September 2024, after right-wingers online raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for a “rager” so the boys could celebrate.
Stefanik pats herself on the back for kicking off the “generational upheaval” of the relationship between the federal government 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 may be somewhat true, even if Trump, who doesn’t love to share credit, might find it annoying to read. But things look different in 2026 than they did in 2024, and they don’t always evolve in a straight line. In the weeks before Poisoned Ivies was published, as the war on Iran unfolded, Tucker Carlson called Donald Trump a “slave” to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the BBC, and Marjorie Taylor Greene called for Trump to be removed from office. Last week, the Pew Research Center published a survey showing that majorities of adults under 50 in both political parties now have a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable view of Israel. In hindsight, what happened on America’s elite campuses in 2023 and 2024 started something—but it’s far from clear what that something might be.
