April 11 - 12, 2026 Schools may be entering the fourth quarter, but Rep. Elise Stefanik is giving no quarter to our Ivy League schools. This week the New York Republican comes out with her broadside of a book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities. The Free Beacon‘s Ira Stoll gives us a review. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KHxl!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F694f8ba6-b146-456c-9171-17d06e8e0770_695x491.jpeg The right-wing jeremiad against decadent universities is a genre with a long history. The conventional list starts with William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1951 God and Man at Yale and continues through Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, and Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. You could take it back even further, to Irving Babbitt’s 1908 Literature and the American College: ‘The function of the college … should be to insist on the idea of quality.’ “Unlike Buckley and D’Souza, who came at it as students, or Bloom and Babbitt, who were professors, Stefanik brings the perspective of a politician. With that hearing questioning Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill, who both subsequently resigned, she ‘reset the course of American higher education’ and changed the perception of Ivy League institutions. ‘Instead of bastions of knowledge and vibrant institutional life, they are considered hotbeds of radical ideology, groundless elitism, intellectual laziness, and anti-American hatred,’ she writes. “’The leaders of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning flunked the most basic moral test imaginable,’ says Stefanik. ‘They acted like a brainwashed herd, all trotting out the same lawyerly verbiage and bureaucratic talking points.’ “Stefanik is particularly good on Harvard, where she went to college. This book includes details that I didn’t know about, and I follow this stuff very closely. For example, the senior fellow of Harvard’s governing Corporation, Penny Pritzker, ‘had hired her own legal team separate from Harvard’s.’ And, ‘at Pritzker’s deposition, there was a heated disagreement when her lawyers would not allow the Harvard lawyers into the room.’ Stefanik also reports a meeting she had in 2024 with Alan Garber, then the interim president of Harvard. ‘Garber seemed surprised and dismissive when I told him that Trump would win, and he insinuated that was not what he was hearing from Harvard’s pollsters and professors about the presidential election.’”