Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities - Hardcover

Stefanik, Elise

 
9781668087534: Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668087537 ISBN 13: 9781668087534
Verlag: Threshold Editions, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik reveals how America’s elite universities, once proud symbols of academic excellence, have become centers of far-left indoctrination, division, and moral rot in this riveting, behind-the-scenes inside account. Drawing on her experience as the highest-ranking woman in Congress and the chief questioner of Ivy League university presidents in the hearing heard around the world, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik exposes the failures of American higher education and the reckoning facing universities.

For decades, conservatives have warned about the decline of higher education. Now, for the first time in modern history, Americans are taking action.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna herself, lit the fuse when she posed basic questions to the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, such as: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s rules on bullying and harassment? Their inability to answer with moral clarity sparked a national reckoning causing multiple Ivy League presidents to resign. It was the most-watched Congressional hearing of all time. But that was just the beginning.

Poisoned Ivies delivers an unflinching account of what has gone wrong on America’s college campuses. Stefanik exposes how the nation’s most prestigious institutions abandoned their founding ideals of freedom of thought, open debate, and academic excellence, and instead embraced a culture of censorship, radical leftist groupthink, antisemitism, and moral cowardice that has spread far beyond campus walls to every corner of American life.

Both a damning exposé and a blueprint for reform, Poisoned Ivies is a timely story of courage and conviction and the power of one voice to challenge the status quo in American higher education and delivers a long-overdue reckoning. A must-read for anyone concerned with the fight for our nation’s soul.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik represents New York’s 21st District and serves as the chair of House Republican Leadership. When she was first elected, Stefanik made history as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Congresswoman Stefanik is widely recognized as one of the most effective questioners in Congressional hearings. She graduated from Harvard College.

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Chapter 1: The Hearing Heard Around the World CHAPTER 1 The Hearing Heard Around the World
“It depends on the context.”

—Claudine Gay, Former President of Harvard University, December 5, 2023

While the decay within elite higher education had long taken root for decades, the story leading directly to the congressional hearing itself began half a world away in Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023.

At sunrise that morning, over five thousand Hamas terrorists, the Iranian-backed terrorist group in Gaza, launched a highly disciplined and coordinated attack on Israel. They started with an artillery barrage, launching thousands of rockets over the border. Then they came by land—surging over the border with bulldozers and pickup trucks. They came by sea—landing in boats at the coastal kibbutz of Zikim. They came by air—descending in paragliders on young Israelis gathered to celebrate peace and love at a music festival. The carnage that followed on October 7th constituted the bloodiest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Forty-six Americans were killed by Hamas terrorists.

In Kibbutz Be’eri, Hamas terrorists killed more than 130 people, or more than 10 percent of the total population. At the Nova music festival, an open-air event attended mainly by teenagers and young adults, nearly four hundred civilians, soldiers, and police officers were brutally murdered, many executed at point-blank range. At the kibbutz Kfar Aza, more than sixty residents were killed, including civilians tortured by dismemberment or decapitation.

The barbarity of the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists is difficult to put into words. Women were raped and butchered. Babies and children were shot. Civilian women, children, and the elderly were ripped from their homes, raped, and massacred. Jewish families were bound together and burned alive. Israeli soldiers were brutally beheaded. Documents recovered from the bodies of dead terrorists included instructions to kill as many Jews as possible. These were atrocities against humanity committed by Hamas terrorists.

Many Hamas terrorists wore body cameras with the purpose of filming the bloody slaughter for use as depraved propaganda. Months later, as a member of Congress, I watched nearly an hour of this horrific body camera footage. Like many of my colleagues, I sobbed. As a mother, daughter, wife, fellow human, and an American, these were scenes of heinous carnage that I will never unsee.

The death toll of that day is well documented, despite the efforts of Hamas sympathizers in the Western Left and their media allies to downplay it or explain it away. More than two days later, by the time the last Hamas terrorist had been expelled from Israel, more than 1,200 innocent people had been killed, including dozens of Americans; approximately 3,400 were wounded, and over 250 had been abducted into Gaza as hostages, including a dozen Americans.

The vast majority of the victims were civilians. Young, old, men, women, children, and babies—the terrorists made no distinction in their slaughter. Some were raped, some were burned alive, some were beheaded. Some were dragged back across the border and into Hamas’s hellish catacombs, dark tunnels where some hostages would be tortured in captivity for 738 days. In my many meetings with returned hostages and their families, I listened as the victims described the depths of inhumanity and torture. The pain of the hostages and the families awaiting their return was truly unfathomable.

When the rest of the world awoke to the shocking images and reports coming out of Israel immediately after October 7th, men and women of conscience were horrified by the savagery of the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists. Yet on America’s elite college campuses, arguably among the most “privileged” places in the world, thousands gleefully cheered.

In the days and weeks that followed Hamas’s brutal attack—the single bloodiest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust—colleges across the country played host to scenes reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany leading up to World War II. Hamas terrorists were still inside Israel’s borders when students and faculty at America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning exploded—not in condemnation, but in celebration.

At universities across the country, young people and their professors took to social media and poured onto campus quads to praise the terrorists. In a paroxysm of bloodlust, pro-Hamas apologists on these so-called elite campuses across America passionately cosplayed Hamas, calling for “intifada” and genocide, with signs saying “Final Solution,” while chanting “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.”

Students marched in “solidarity” with Hamas terrorists, chanting genocidal ravings about Israel and Jews. At George Washington University, one such genocidal slogan was projected onto the side of a campus building for all to see.1 At New York University, there were calls to “gas the Jews” and proclamations that “Hitler was right.”2 Some 70 percent of Jews at MIT reported that they felt the need to conceal their religious identity for their safety.3 At Cooper Union, a pro-Hamas mob surrounded a group of Jewish students, who were forced to barricade themselves in a room in the library while the pro-terrorist harassers violently pounded on the doors.4

Nowhere was the antisemitism targeted at American Jews worse than in the hallowed halls of some of the most esteemed universities in the world: the Ivy League. At Columbia, there were chants of “F*** the Jews” alongside those of “Free Palestine.” University of Pennsylvania students huddled in fear in their rooms as pro-Hamas protesters threw smoke bombs and called for an “intifada”—violence against Jews.

Harvard University, my own alma mater, was the worst offender of them all and unfortunately set the standard for American higher education’s morally bankrupt response, which would quickly unfold like wildfire. Harvard’s Jewish students were subject to sustained antisemitic harassment, intimidation, and even violent physical assaults. Only at Harvard was the university’s response to the attacks so meticulously well organized, and so sickeningly antisemitic.

The same day as Hamas’s terrorist attacks, when the streets of Israeli towns and villages were still littered with pillaged bodies, including those of Americans, and burned and mutilated civilian corpses, more than thirty Harvard campus groups issued a letter titled “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine” that declared, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”5 It was posted to Instagram the evening of Saturday, October 7, not even twenty-four hours after the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel.

Some brave students and a handful of faculty condemned the letter, and some student groups later did the honorable thing and removed their signatures. But Harvard...

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Verlag
Threshold Editions
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668087537
ISBN 13 
9781668087534
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
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