Elise Stefanik: The Moment The Ivy League Lost The Country

The following is an excerpt from the new book ​​”Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities,” by Elise Stefanik (Threshold Editions, April 14, 2026)

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America’s higher education system is in the midst of a historic reckoning. The compact that existed for generations between our republic, the American people, and our institutions of higher learning has irrevocably broken down. Universities once dedicated to the pursuit of truth and academic excellence have become centers of radical political indoctrination—all while being generously subsidized by hardworking American taxpayers.

Americans of both parties, college-educated and non-college-educated, have lost faith in our universities at a staggering pace. A September 2025 Gallup poll revealed an astonishing trend; only about one-third (35 percent) of Americans today think that a college education is “very important.” That’s a rapid drop from 2019, when 53 percent of Americans agreed with that proposition. In 2010, it was 75 percent.

This hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Colleges and universities across the country have actively undermined their standing in the public imagination. They have chosen to embolden the most radical members of their faculty and staff. They have forced the divisive and discriminatory “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) regime as gospel. They have proactively silenced and canceled students and teachers who disagree with the groupthink progressive political agenda.

Just look at the data. Democrat faculty outnumber Republicans by at least eight-to-one at any major university. And political bias isn’t the only troubling issue. More than one-third (34 percent) of college students now say “using violence to stop campus speech” is acceptable. This is an absolutely stunning statistic and even more disturbing after the nation saw the horrific footage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination on a university campus during one of his iconic college tours where the main purpose of the event was to engage in respectful discourse and peaceful debate. Many on the Left, including some Democrat elected officials, viciously celebrated the loss of this young man’s life, saying it was somehow justified and deserved. This is a deeply disturbing and dangerous turning point for our national fabric and political culture.

Cover credit: Threshold Editions

Activism has come at the cost of education. Students are not learning the skills in the classroom that once defined a college graduate. Not only are they showing up academically unprepared, but they are leaving uneducated, unemployable, radicalized, and deeply out of touch with American values. Approximately one-third of college students require remedial classes before they begin earning credits. But once they start taking classes, grade inflation is worse than ever. They know less, but get better grades, than previous generations. More than 60 percent of college students admit to cheating.

Meanwhile, college tuition has increased at a preposterous rate as the value of a degree has declined. The average college student leaves school saddled with $40,000 of debt. A mere 30 percent of 2025 college graduates found entry-level jobs in their chosen field, while nearly half felt unprepared even to apply for entry-level jobs.

The American people are smart. We know that something has gone catastrophically wrong, and we are tired of being asked to foot the exorbitant bill on autopilot for a broken system that morphs students into anti-American zealots.

This didn’t happen overnight. The tremors leading up to this earthquake have offered warning signs for decades. An education system that was the envy of the world is now facing questions of its importance, quality, and meaning. A course correction is long overdue—so overdue, in fact, that the questions are no longer about minor improvements and reform; they have become existential. Questions such as: Are American colleges educating or indoctrinating? Can higher education even be reformed, or do we need to completely rebuild it from scratch? What is being taught in the classrooms, and why? When colleges and universities lose their way, how do we hold them accountable? How much foreign money is funding American higher education? Is a traditional college education even remotely worth the absurdly out-of-reach tuition price tag? Are these “elite” colleges and universities even worth saving? Americans are right to ask these hard questions. And the toughest questions are being posed to the most “elite” schools.

The most prestigious colleges and universities in America make up what is known colloquially as the Ivy League. The Ivy League, nestled in the Northeast and scattered across New England, is made up of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Brown, and Cornell. While each university has its own distinct character with unique qualities, these institutions taken as a group have historically been considered the bellwether and compass of American higher education. They set the standards and norms that other universities aspire to achieve, not just in the United States, but around the world.

Historically, Ivy League colleges were known for their institutional prestige, academic excellence, esteemed faculty, rigorous and extremely selective admissions processes, groundbreaking research, and extraordinarily successful alumni networks. Attending an Ivy League school was supposed to guarantee professional success for graduates. They were the crown jewels of the entire higher education system worldwide. For generations, admission to an Ivy League school meant winning a golden ticket to the American dream.

Today, that once-pristine reputation has been sullied. Most Americans understand the Ivy League schools as something different. Instead of bastions of knowledge and vibrant intellectual life, they are considered hotbeds of radical ideology, groundless elitism, intellectual laziness, and anti-American hatred. The reputation of these schools has declined dramatically. It has been poisoned.

This process of institutional decay, almost entirely self-inflicted, culminated in a once-in-a-generation congressional hearing on antisemitism with university presidents in December 2023. This was the moment Americans decided that enough was enough. Our universities were failing us and our next generation of leaders.

At that hearing, a single line of questioning revealed the depths of the moral and academic rot in higher education. The presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were asked to testify before Congress on the wave of antisemitism on their campuses after Hamas’s terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. One question went viral and quickly became the most viewed congressional testimony in United States history. It was truly the hearing heard around the world. 

I know because I asked the question. 

“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct on bullying or harassment?” This was not a political question. It was a moral one. I thought it would be the easiest, most straightforward question of the hearing. I assumed their answers would be a resounding yes. But to my shock, the presidents of MIT, UPenn, and Harvard, arguably the most prestigious universities in the world, answered one after another deadpan and nearly verbatim: “It depends on the context.” And the world heard.

Haiyun Jiang/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Their morally bankrupt answers astonished everyone who heard them, including me. These university presidents were supposed to be some of the most learned, intelligent people in America, if not the entire world. They were the people responsible for teaching the next generation of leaders in every field imaginable. They were the leaders of the most prestigious universities in the world. My immediate reaction was apparent to everyone watching. I couldn’t hide my shock. I questioned them further, asking them to elaborate on what they meant—giving them an opportunity to correct the record and state the obvious. And still, they refused to give a clear statement. They refused to state clearly that calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ codes of conduct.

I knew immediately that this was a significant hearing. I didn’t realize in the moment, however, that it would become a historic earthquake that instantly reshaped the debate on higher education overnight. The hearing changed the trajectory of higher education. In the weeks and months that followed, campuses exploded into riotous antisemitic encampments. Subpoenas poured into campuses as Congress opened multiple investigations. Scandal-plagued university presidents and compromised trustees resigned. Campus chaos shaped a presidential election.

Today, as a result of this hearing, elite campuses are in the midst of a generational upheaval. Governance structures are in question. Faculty and curricula are under scrutiny. Billions of dollars in foreign funding have been exposed. The long-standing relationship between the federal government and universities is being revised. Matriculation trends are shifting. Nothing is the same.

Nor should it be. Our hearing reset the course of American higher education. It was a reset that I firmly believe was long overdue.

This book tells the inside story of what is happening on America’s campuses and why. It goes in depth, with an insider’s view, into the deep moral and intellectual rot in higher education. What began as a question about antisemitism triggered a watershed moment.

In the long term, the hearing lit the match for not only accountability, but a far-reaching educational reform movement that has only just begun. This very dark chapter for American colleges and universities can and must lead to light at the end of the tunnel. Our institutions of higher learning have fundamentally lost their way. They strayed far from their founding missions and grew nearly unrecognizable. But that does not mean that the American people have to settle for this rotted and poisoned status quo.

We can and must fix our higher education system and return our colleges and universities to their founding mission. It is within the American people’s power to correct when these schools fundamentally lose their way. And it is our responsibility to ensure that we are educating and not indoctrinating our next generation of leaders. Our colleges and universities should promote academic excellence, intellectual inquiry, and our nation’s highest ideals, not left-wing indoctrination, heinous antisemitism, and anti-Americanism. That’s why it is important to look at what went wrong in this particular moment in history in painstaking detail. By seeing where and why our most elite schools failed, we can chart a better course for the future.

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This excerpt is taken 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. Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission.