WASHINGTON — Rep. Elise Stefanik’s new book about the rise of antisemitism and “anti-Americanism” at US universities has topped the Amazon bestseller list on the day of its publication, as the congresswoman announced a nationwide tour.
“Poisoned Ivies,” out Tuesday, comes nearly three years after the New York Republican’s highly watched confrontation in a Capitol Hill hearing with Ivy League presidents and aims to tell the story of how that “reset the course of American higher education” in the years to come.
“It became the most watched hearing in congressional history, more than Watergate, more than impeachment hearings, more than any other issue ever in the history of the United States Congress,” she told attendees at a book-signing event in Washington, DC, Tuesday, “and what it highlighted was the lack of moral clarity and moral leadership at our most quote unquote esteemed and elite institutions.”
Stefanik hadn’t even planned to ask the question, she noted, and expected the Harvard, Pennsylvania and MIT presidents to answer “yes” when she pressed them on whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” — referencing chants from protesters on their campuses — violated their universities’ codes of conduct.
“I worded it in a way that it was supposed to be an easy question and to my astonishment, one after the other after the other, MIT, Penn, and Harvard presidents said, ‘It depends on the context,’ and the world heard,” she added. “They tried to not only equivocate, but they tried to hide under legalese, under sort of moral relativism. That’s not acceptable.”
“Within 48 hours, the Penn president was forced to resign. Within 2 months, the Harvard president was forced to resign,” Stefanik recounted. “These institutions and higher education institutions at large are educating our next generation of leaders and they have fundamentally lost their way.”
Since then, there’s been “seismic shifts” in campus life that have revealed it’s “more competitive” to apply to Vanderbilt University and others that cracked down on antisemitism “than some of the Ivy League schools” still struggling to smother campus hate, Stefanik told The Post in a brief interview before the book signing event.
“Poisoned Ivies” is currently in the top 10 on Amazon’s overall bestseller list and reached first place for “Best Sellers in Political Conservatism & Liberalism.”
The Upstate pol is planning book tour stops in New York, DC, Florida, Texas and California.
The 256-page tome is not supposed to be “a typical political memoir,” Stefanik said, but a “behind the scenes” look at her efforts as House GOP leader and Education Committee member serving as a repository for “thousands and thousands of personal stories of what students were experiencing on campus.”
On Monday, she had appeared for an event at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute in New York City, where “some of the students who are actually featured in the book attended,” she noted, many of whom were harassed by anti-Israel protesters in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
But it also pulls back the curtain on disagreements that were occurring among leaders at the Ivies themselves — including “major infighting” between Harvard University and its governing board, as well as scuffles at Columbia University’s board over addressing antisemitic intimidation on campus.
Since President Trump’s re-election, many of the same universities have been targeted by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division over the issue, but Stefanik noted that there are several “positive examples” in the book of “schools that are doing it right like Vanderbilt, the University of Florida and Dartmouth.
Stefanik announced in December that she wouldn’t seek re-election to her 21st Congressional District seat on the same day that she ended her New York gubernatorial campaign — but told attendees at her DC event that she was “looking forward to the next chapter and working with so many of you in whatever, whatever capacity that ends up being.”
“Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities” is available now from Simon and Schuster’s Threshold Editions.
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