Ivy League Miseducation

Higher education in the United States has been the subject of considerable criticism, especially in the last ten years or so. With the early beginnings of what we used to call “identity politics,” we saw an increase in ideology and a reduction in actual learning and helping undergraduate and graduate students reach their academic and professional goals.  

Humanities have been under the biggest attack from the radical ideologues. Unlike sciences and professional degrees, such as law, accounting, or engineering, the humanities allow for nuance in thinking and analysis. Thus, they make a perfect target for manipulation, eventual erasure, and destruction.  

Many essays, articles, and books have been written on higher education, and Elise Stefanik’s new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot in America’s Elite Universities, can certainly be added to this list. The immediate issue with Stefanik’s thoughts on this problem is that the subtitle is misleading. It is neither the “inside account” nor does it focus on education issues. Rather, it is a book about increased anti-semitism on America’s Ivy League campuses. 

Stefanik, a Congresswoman representing New York’s 21st District, uses a 2023 congressional hearing to expose the prevailing antisemitism at a few universities. Titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism,” the hearing brought as witnesses presidents of major universities: Harvard, UPenn, MIT, and Columbia.  

Stefanik’s book is quite straightforward, divided into chapters that assess and analyze anti-semitism on campus. Stefanik focuses on anti-Israel protests following the Hamas terrorist group’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Rightfully, Stefanik describes the events that followed, especially the suffering and death of many hostages Hamas took. The protests that occurred not only at America’s Ivy League schools but also at other colleges were hardly peaceful. They were disruptive and often involved threats to the Jewish students on campuses, bad enough that Jewish students began to feel unwelcome and, most of all, unsafe. 

Without a doubt, the safety of students should come first. If students do not feel safe because of threats to their lives, they will be unable to do what they ostensibly came to do–study and earn a degree. At the hearing, Claudine Gay (as well as other university presidents who were called to testify) rarely offered clear answers to Stefanik’s questions. Indeed, students have the right to feel safe, but Gay was largely evasive and ambiguous about what that entails. 

Stefanik’s hearing did have an impact. Most of the presidents who were called to testify resigned. But does that really matter? This was most likely just a symbolic act since most of them moved on to different positions, in some cases, leadership positions at other universities. In other words, nothing has changed.  

Even the fact that the universities were stripped of their federal funding wasn’t exactly as clear-cut as we’d like to think. As Stefanik writes, “In April 2025, the Trump Administration froze approximately $1 billion in research funding to Cornell, citing its ongoing investigation into whether the university failed to protect the civil rights of Jewish students.” The government reached an agreement with Cornell in which the university “will pay $30 million in fines and invest $30 million in agriculture-related research in exchange for the restoration of frozen research funding.” This is hardly a win against ideology or anti-semitism. Maybe the “agriculture-related research” will involve an exploration of transgender bovine traits or why cucumbers are misogynistic. What substantive reforms did Cornell take to ensure that pervasive anti-semitism doesn’t recur? 

Stefanik is not wrong at all in pointing out what ails higher education. However, her scope is extremely limiting, and her approach rather superficial. The book is filled with clichés and platitudes about the “moral bankruptcy” of higher-education institutions. All true, but education (especially in the humanities) is filled with intellectual nuances and questioning. These are not present in Stefanik’s overview. To be sure, she is concerned about the direction higher education is taking, but we are left to assume that this includes wrestling with the ideas that make up the humanities. Stefanik is not obligated to write a primarily intellectual book; but, when engaging with such issues, it is necessary to explore the philosophical and fundamental reasons for what constitutes good education. Instead, Stefanik mentions that American colleges and universities have stepped away from “American values,” but she never defines what these values are.  

There are several distractions in the book, and it’s consistently unclear what Stefanik is attempting to do. There is a strange mixture of the need to fight anti-semitism and political narcissism. This is especially evident at the beginning of the book, which reads more like an overture for a candidate running for office than an exploration of the higher-education crisis. Stefanik also indulges in self-congratulatory remarks about various accomplishments as a woman in Congress. If indeed we ought to move away from ideology, should one’s gender matter at all? 

On another occasion, Stefanik praises her methodology in executing congressional hearings: “After the first hearing with the university presidents, many fellow committee members and particularly freshmen members of Congress reached out to me directly to adjust and better hone their questioning style to more effectively cut to the chase.” The book is filled with many such examples in which Stefanik wants to tell the readers that she is intelligent, rational, and careful. All of these may be correct, but ultimately, her exposition of these self-evaluations distracts from the issues at hand.  

Stefanik makes many assumptions throughout the book. Some are completely correct, such as the fact that Jewish and often conservative students feel they are unable to speak freely in academia. I can vouch for this, having spent many years at university as both a student and a teacher. The pervasive feeling is that if one does not believe in a leftist ideology, that person will feel like an outcast and will remain silent. However, it’s important to note that for every ideologue, there are many excellent teachers and thinkers in these same institutions that fight those battles every day in the most appropriate way–teaching their students how to think. 

Stefanik misses that point, which is why many of her other assumptions are not as self-evident as she would like them to be. For instance, when writing about the protests, she never asks a question about whether the protestors were actual students from that university or possibly random people who were paid to protest and disturb. Of course, the larger point remains true: institutions enveloped by various ideologies allowed these paid or student protestors to drone on for weeks, months, and entire semesters. The rot is deep. 

Stefanik is correct that the Ivy League institutions receive a lot of funding from foreign countries, especially from Qatar and China, but is a reduction of foreign students on campuses the answer to the problem of anti-semitism? These are fair questions, and again, extremely nuanced. Stefanik does, rightfully, name many radical professors who are hardly teaching humanities but serving as ideological agitators, and this is a parallel problem to the foreign funding of the universities. This is especially true in relation to Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, which employs many so-called scholars driven only by agitating an ordered society, rather than contributing to the American fabric of free thought.  

Stefanik also illuminates the hypocrisy of Ivy League universities when it comes to free speech. “We embrace a commitment to free expression,” said Harvard president Gay, but as Stefanik points out, “everyone listening to that exchange knew that Harvard cracked down ruthlessly on disfavored speech.” Cancel culture has been alive and well for at least a good decade, especially when it comes to the leftist dictatorship. But certain factions of the Right have been doing similar things. When someone doesn’t fit neatly into “conservative” category, when they have the audacity to think for themselves and consider other thoughts, they are ostracized or simply ignored.  

The leadership at the Ivy League schools is clearly willing to overlook anti-semitism on campus. But Stefanik’s book reads like a prescription for limiting free thought. She assumes that there are self-evident truths for her, but these assumptions are not necessarily shared by everyone else. It is as if we are not allowed to question any examples of anti-semitism she brings up. She mentions a Yale student, Sahar Tartak, who claimed that she was “stabbed in the eye” by pro-Palestine protesters. But it turned out she didn’t have any injury. The point is that she, too, was an activist (pro-Israel in this case) in this entire situation. We face a problem of political madness and exaggeration, fueled by influencer culture. Of course, she should not be attacked for being Jewish, and of course, there is anti-semitism in America, but the very fact that I have to make such a disclaimer indicates that we are living in a culture of censorship and self-cancellation. Objectivity simply does not exist.  

Naturally, we can all agree that anti-semitism is evil, but the question is, should its expression be forbidden? Reporter and writer Nat Hentoff famously supported the right of the Nazi Party to march in Skokie, Illinois. Hentoff was a libertarian and was of the persuasion that if we start banning repugnant speech, then anyone can be censored for anything. But what happens when free speech, however offensive and repugnant it may be, turns into violence? Quite simply, it ceases to be free speech.  

Out of incredible frustration, many conservatives who are not steeped in any intellectual and philosophical traditions are engaging in their own soft totalitarianism. Eliminating different opinions is one of the most anti-American acts, especially in institutions of higher learning. The leftist leadership has been doing such a thing for decades, but I do not think that the answer to that problem is more thought police and more censorship.  

In 1952, a young William F. Buckley, Jr. published a book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”. In it, he exposed, analyzed, and evaluated the lack of academic freedom at his alma mater, Yale University. Buckley found that many professors were not open-minded and dialogic, which are ideally traits of academic institutions. They regularly inserted leftist ideology in fields like economics. (In Stefanik’s exposition of this problem, we see that things have eroded even further with ideologies such as decolonization and critical race theory.) 

Collectivism was prized over individualism. Buckley, known for his precise and crisp thought and prose, writes: “I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level. I believe that if and when the menace of Communism is gone, other vital battles, at present subordinated, will emerge to the foreground. And the winner must have help from the classroom.”  

Buckley understood what the battle between culture and ideology truly means. We are, of course, not living in Buckley’s times, nor should we assume that Buckley’s proposal or solutions may work for us now. However, without a proper intellectual foundation, we will be unable to fight any ideology, be it from the left or the right. We do not need more activism. A conservative activist may have a short-term success, but it will never match the activism of a leftist because leftism at its core is only interested in a perpetual disruption of order. Activism is not only the vehicle of this disruption but also a basic tenet of leftism.  

We have become entrenched in ideology. We do not think individually but only as a collective. We follow social media trends and assume this is the way to fight leftism. Language, too, is slowly eroded, and so we are left with platitudes and cliches.   

I am not suggesting that we sit back and philosophize the problem away. However, a problem as large as the corruption in higher education cannot be solved by sacrificing objectivity and analysis of specific situations. Stefanik’s book is valuable insofar as it provides a timeline of the protests and the hearing she led. Oftentimes, things that go viral quickly fall off the radar, and in this case, Stefanik has cemented the events in time. But unfortunately, nothing here indicates this is an insider account of the hearing and protests. Stefanik makes a mistake by assuming that the reader will naturally agree with everything she writes. By not engaging with ideas and ideologies that fuel hatred and violence, she misses an opportunity to expose a problem that is, at its core, cultural and metaphysical.  

Emina Melonic writes about culture, film, and books. Her work has been published in American Greatness, Claremont Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Age, and The New Criterion, among others. She’s currently working on a biography of Edward G. Robinson and a book on Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood years.