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

To Be Confirmed Threshold

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668087537 ISBN 13: 9781668087534

Publisher: Threshold Editions, 2026

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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 University, then led by President Claudine Gay, initially remained silent, refusing to denounce this blatant antisemitic and inhumane attack. Harvard’s silence set a tone and stoked a campus environment for Harvard and across America where antisemitism exploded on college campuses, leaving American Jewish students and faculty under serious threat.

Statements like Harvard’s, blaming Israel for Hamas’s terrorist attack, appeared at colleges and universities across the country—at Rutgers in New Jersey, at UC San Diego, at the University of Minnesota, and at American University in Washington, D.C. In a social media post just hours after news of the attack broke, the Students for Justice of Palestine chapter at UC Berkeley praised “the resistance, the liberation movement,” and declared that it “indisputably supports the Uprising.” The student group later held a vigil for the “martyrs in Palestine” (i.e., dead Hamas terrorists).6

Amid still-incoming reports of the mass slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of American and Israeli Jews, many radical college students in America declared: they had it coming.

The students weren’t the only ones. Members of the elite faculty were all too eager to join in. Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history at Cornell, called the Hamas terrorist attacks “energizing” and “exhilarating.”7 Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia, praised “the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” in an article published a day after the terrorist attack.8 In response to a post on Bluesky condemning Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, Zareena Grewal, an anthropologist at Yale, replied: “Settlers are not civilians.” Later, she added: “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.”9

These were only the first expressions of support for Hamas. Faculty all over the country signaled, in ways large and small, that they were aligned with the terrorists. They signed open letters. They occupied buildings. They held classes in pro-Hamas encampments. Many violated their universities’ policies and students’ civil rights in their insatiable eagerness to show their blatant antisemitism and loyalty to the pro-Hamas cause.

If you’re wondering what life was like for American Jewish students and faculty in the weeks that followed, consider the following.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an anti-Israel “Day of Resistance” sponsored by the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter was advertised with a flyer that featured the silhouette of a paraglider—a reference to the Hamas fighters who crossed Israel’s border by air. The image circulated widely online and was adopted at other schools.10

Penn Against the Occupation hosted the “Collective Walk Out for Palestine,” a rally on campus. One speaker demanded Jews “go back to Moscow, and Brooklyn and f**king Berlin where you came from.” According to a lawsuit filed against the university, protesters harassed a Jewish student wearing a yarmulke and shouted profanities at other Jewish students wearing Star of David necklaces. Masked protesters at the edge of the rally told one Jewish student, “You’re a dirty little Jew, you deserve to die.”11

At New York University, students held a silent vigil in support of Israel on the perimeter of a SJP-sponsored “Rally for Palestine” in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Pro-Palestinian protesters made throat-slitting gestures, shouted, “Hitler was right!” and “Gas the Jews!,” and threatened to rape them.12

In Washington, D.C., several students returned to their dorms at American University to find swastikas drawn on their doors.13

At Cornell, messages posted to an online forum included a commenter who threatened to “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews.” The university’s Center for Jewish Living issued urgent warnings to students to stay away from the building and the campus kosher dining hall.

At UPenn in early November, several staff members received an email threatening a mass shooting against UPenn’s Jewish community, specifically its Hillel Center.14

That’s only the first month after October 7, 2023, a small sample of countless instances of antisemitic intimidation, assault, vandalism, and more. Across the country, American Jewish students and faculty were threatened, harassed, bullied, assaulted, and worse.

For many American students, accessing basic university services became difficult, even dangerous.

At UCLA, pro-Hamas rioters encamped between the iconic Royce Hall and the Powell Library, the main undergraduate library, and established a “Jew Exclusion Zone.” The encampers set up checkpoints and barriers, refusing to let students through unless they disavowed the State of Israel’s right to exist. Those who agreed were given wristbands. Students who refused were prevented from walking through the encampment, effectively cutting off their access to the library and to certain classrooms.15

At Yale, protesters forcibly blocked Jewish students from crossing one of the campus’s quads. When a Jewish student tried to document a pro-Hamas rally, she was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag by a protester and had to be rushed to the hospital. Nearby police failed to intervene.16

Violently taking over university buildings and property became a dangerous and regular feature of the campus chaos.

Hundreds of protesters stormed the UCLA School of Law amid chants of “Death to Jews!” Earlier on the same day, a “UC Divest” rally featured an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was used as a piñata. At least one protester was heard shouting, “Beat that f**ing Jew!”17

In late April 2024, pro-Hamas protesters, including some faculty, occupied Princeton’s historic Clio Hall for several hours. Several of them were arrested, although charges were eventually dismissed.

At Columbia, the day after the Princeton incident, the pro-Hamas encampment occupied the historic Hamilton Hall for twenty-four hours, until the NYPD was finally allowed by the university to secure the building. During their destructive romp, the rioters caused extensive property damage and assaulted and abused a university janitor who was helplessly caught in the chaos when the mob invaded the building.

And, of course, there was the horror at Cooper Union in Manhattan. Jewish students were forced to barricade themselves inside the school’s library for safety when masked protesters surrounded the building and began banging on the outside glass and shouting at them.

Imagine being an American Jewish student or faculty member trying to learn, teach, and participate in campus life under these circumstances. Imagine being any student trying to learn, teach, and participate in campus life under these circumstances. In the weeks and months after October 7th, students and faculty found themselves in the middle of a waking nightmare.

These episodes were attacks on fellow Americans solely because they were Jewish. These students and faculty were targeted not for anything they had said or done, but for who they were. The shocking reality was that the echoes of the horror of 1930s Germany were being felt in the 2020s in the United States of America.

How did university leaders respond?

They did not condemn the pro-Hamas encampments nor the riotous takeover of campus property. They did not condemn the sustained antisemitic attacks and physical assaults on Jewish students. They did not discipline the perpetrators of this vile antisemitism who had clearly broken university rules. Instead they responded with academically lazy moral bankruptcy.

Emails and text messages that our congressional committee subpoenaed showed that many university presidents engaged in tortured conversations with trustees, fellow administrators, and staff about the politically correct (i.e., morally bankrupt) way to react to the attacks and the emerging pro-Hamas riots.

Ivy League administrators, from presidents on down, did not want to confront the antisemitic protesters who were creating havoc on their campuses. Some were cowardly. Some supported and wanted to encourage the protesters. What they did not do, or want to do, was come to the defense of Jewish students. When American students became the targets of sustained antisemitic harassment and even violence—that is to say, when open antisemitism began parading around Ivy League campuses—university leaders silently looked the other way.

As members of Congress, we have the responsibility to hold universities and their leaders accountable when they violate federal law. It didn’t take long for us to start hearing from students, faculty, and university employees about the scourge of antisemitism taking place on college campuses—a violation of civil rights and of the universities’ obligation to safeguard those rights. It was crystal clear to me from the get-go that university leaders were failing to lead and needed to be held accountable. I knew we needed to haul these university presidents in front of Congress.

I encouraged my colleague Virginia Foxx from North Carolina, the highly revered chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, to host a hearing with presidents of the highest-profile universities who set the morally repugnant tone that ignited the scourge of antisemitism reverberating across higher education. There was no question in my mind that the unflappable Dr. Foxx would be up to this job.

A dear friend and a mentor, Virginia has a spine of steel and a heart of pure gold. Virginia Foxx is a no-nonsense, legendary member of Congress not just among Republicans, but across the aisle. One of Virginia’s close friends and mentors is former Speaker John Boehner, who described her this way: “She’s just a bull, and she just charges in every day, nonstop, from sun up until way after the sun goes down.”18 At age eighty-two, Virginia puts many fellow members of Congress to shame with her dogged work ethic and determination. She keeps a packed schedule that would tire out even the spriteliest Gen-Z movers and shakers.

Virginia’s extraordinary personal story and path to Congress is one of American true grit and educational opportunity. Born to Italian American parents in the Bronx, Virginia would share her memories with me of speaking fluent Italian with her grandmother who spoke no English. Virginia was raised by her parents in the mountains of Appalachia with no running water and no power. Her dedicated and loving parents had only ninth-grade educations. Virginia would go on to be the first in her family to graduate from high school, and she worked her way up to the highest halls of Congress by her bootstraps. She worked as a janitor, started a small business with her husband, earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate, taught in the classroom, and served as a president of a community college. Virginia ran unsuccessfully for school board, then was elected to the state senate and then Congress. She deeply understands the tremendous opportunity American higher education has to change the course of your life—she lived it herself.

Virginia was a kindred spirit in sharing my deep concern that American higher education had morally and academically lost its way and that the antisemitism exploding on elite college campuses was the canary in the coal mine exposing the intellectual and moral rot infecting American academia and in turn the students who would go on to be our next generation of leaders.

The hearing, titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism,” was booked by Chairwoman Virgina Foxx for December 5, 2023—less than two months after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. The witness list included the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT. Notably, one witness was not included because they were unavailable due to a scheduling conflict. That was Columbia’s president. More on that later in this book.

Our three witnesses—Claudine Gay, then president of Harvard; Liz Magill, then president of UPenn; and Sally Kornbluth, president (then and now) of MIT—led three of the most prestigious universities in the world. And it was clear to me that they were directly responsible for the failure to address the college campus crisis of antisemitism. What was happening on their campuses was a travesty and a disgrace, and it unmasked how truly anti-American and out of touch these elite institutions had become. They had failed to lead these institutions, and they deserved tough questions from Congress.

I expected these university presidents to come armed with lawyers and lobbyists who had prepped them to oblivion. I expected them to have well-prepared and rehearsed answers to easily anticipated questions. I expected them to double down on their excuses for permitting and stoking the rise of antisemitism engulfing their institutions. I expected that the mainstream media would give them cover. After all, our elite chattering class had to protect their own and would continue to sugarcoat and insist that there was no antisemitism problem on American campuses.

What I did not expect was what actually happened at the hearing. Throughout my decade serving in Congress, I have been in some of the highest-profile hearings imaginable: Cabinet secretaries under oath, tech leaders sputtering, blockbuster hearings on election integrity and the Russia collusion hoax, and front and center in historic impeachment hearings. But I had never participated in a hearing quite like this one, where complete moral bankruptcy was on full, obvious display. And the truth is, I almost wasn’t able to attend.

The night before the hearing, I had started to come down with a severe flu. Attempting to ignore it, after my two-year-old son Sam went to sleep, I stayed up late working through reams of research that I had worked with my staff to pull together. Hundreds of pages of insider accounts from students on what was happening on college campuses were supplemented by my own materials collected with close college friends and fellow alumni who were still deeply in touch with the goings-on at Harvard. I pre-drafted several rounds of questions based on this research and firsthand accounts. I called a few longtime key contacts and policy experts who I knew were following what was happening at these college campuses as closely as I was. They gave helpful suggestions and feedback. I went to sleep well past midnight hoping to feel better in the morning.

On the day of the hearing, I woke up at 5:30 a.m. with one of the worst flus that I’ve ever had. But I knew how important the day was for so many brave students who had come forward and shared their horrific experiences facing antisemitism on campus. Armed with Kleenex, cough drops, and doused with over-the-counter cold medicine, I was at the FOX News studio by 6:30 a.m. for a Fox & Friends interview to preview the importance of the hearing. After the media hit, I attended my weekly Republican members’ House Intelligence Committee meeting in the classified SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility). At 9 a.m., I chaired the weekly House Republican Conference meeting with all Republican members of Congress. When serving in top leadership as Conference chair, I was responsible for chairing this weekly meeting, which is the only time all Republican House members come together when Congress is in session. I was responsible for leading and developing the communications and messaging strategy for the House Republicans, working closely with the Speaker of the House, Majority Leader, and Majority Whip on a daily basis. After gaveling out the hour-long Conference meeting, I kicked off and led the weekly Republican leadership press conference at the Capitol. And then I had a few minutes to clear my head to prepare for the hearing, walking swiftly with my box of Kleenex, which you can see in the hearing footage, and taking my seat on the top dais in the Education Committee room.

Harvard, UPenn, and MIT’s presidents were escorted in and sat at the witness table under oath. Students who had come forward to the committee recounting their horrific experiences on these campuses sat in the rows directly behind the witnesses. The room was packed to the brim. Members all took their assigned committee seats. The press was crawling and crouching down on the floor to take photos of the witnesses. Spectators in the audience were riveted. Millions of Americans tuned in live.

Chairwoman Foxx dropped the gavel to begin.

The hearing lasted the entire day.

Early in the hearing, I had focused my initial five minutes of questions on Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, as I was the most invested and connected to what had been happening on Harvard’s campus. I came at the hearing from the perspective not only as a congresswoman, but also as a Harvard graduate, the first in my immediate family to even have the opportunity to graduate from college.

What was happening at Harvard was unrecognizable to me from my experience as an undergraduate student nearly two decades earlier. I asked President Claudine Gay direct questions about Harvard’s failure to combat antisemitism, the discriminatory double standard applied toward Jewish students, and Harvard’s hypocrisy of hiding behind its sudden defense of free speech when they had consistently ranked at or near the dead bottom of free speech ratings for years. I think that because of the effectiveness of my initial questions, during the course of the hearing, other Republican members yielded me their remaining time so I could ask more rounds of questions. That happened organically and was not planned, and I am grateful to my colleagues for the opportunity.

Throughout the hearing, I felt that the university presidents were squirreling out of giving direct answers. The whole hearing felt like this. The three presidents were evasive and lawyerly. They leaned on canned prepared lines and bureaucrat-speak. They couldn’t bring themselves to utter a real word condemning the antisemitism that was raging on their campuses.

The crucial moment came in the last three minutes of the hearing. I want to take you behind the scenes of that moment. After many hours, the hearing paused temporarily for House votes, which is when members leave the committee room and go to the House floor to cast legislative votes on behalf of our constituents. I happened to run into my Republican colleague Erin Houchin, a hardworking congresswoman from Indiana, during these votes on the House floor. At the time, Erin was a newly elected freshman and filled the most junior seat on the Education Committee. I have known Erin for many years and supported her when she first ran for Congress and lost nearly a decade ago. Eventually, Erin would win her seat in Congress and go on to serve as a great teammate and a very effective representative for her constituents. Erin asked me if I was going back to the hearing. She said that if I was, she would yield any of her extra time to me to close out the hearing.

I will be honest, I hesitated because at this point at the end of the day, I had already asked more questions than anyone else and I was uncertain what additional revelatory information I would be able to uncover. I hesitated because I had other scheduled meetings. I hesitated because I was so frustrated with the university presidents’ vague and unacceptable answers. And I hesitated because I still had that horrible flu. I turned to my longtime loyal chief of staff Patrick, and we agreed and I said, “Yes, I think I might try one more round of questions.” I share this because the question heard around the world almost didn’t happen.

When I came back from voting on the House floor, the hearing room was almost completely empty. Everyone had seen enough. The press who had packed the room in the morning had all but disappeared. There were a few scattered people left in the audience along with Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, the ranking Democrat Congressman Bobby Scott, freshman Congresswoman Erin Houchin, the university presidents, a small handful of other members, and me.

Still unclear whether I would even have a chance to ask any questions, depending on whether Erin used her full five minutes, my mind remained on the exchanges from the morning.

I thought to myself, How can I ask this in a very simple way, a moral way, that will force them to answer YES?

I quickly scratched out a question in pencil on a scrap of paper, barely legible.

“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct?”

Simple. Straightforward. Not political. I expected them each to say “Yes.” In fact, I assumed they would say yes without hesitation. And my plan was to follow up with a question on what disciplinary action they had taken against those who violated the code of conduct.

Turns out, I wouldn’t get the opportunity for the follow-up.

Not in a million years did I imagine their response.

MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth admitted that she had heard chants that might be antisemitic “depending on the context.” But she couldn’t commit. UPenn’s Liz Magill hedged and smiled when asked about genocide. It was, she said, a “context-dependent decision.” Harvard President Claudine Gay said over and over again regarding calling for the genocide of Jews: “It depends on the context.”

That was how the three university presidents responded.

Across all three campuses, terrorist-sympathizing students and faculty were calling for the eradication of Jews at home and abroad. That was the “context.”

The leaders of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning flunked the most basic moral test imaginable.

I was stunned. Truly astonished.

The question was not a political one, it was a moral one. And it was a question that if you asked everyday Americans, they would know how to answer correctly. I thought of my approximately seven hundred thousand constituents—take a mom, a farmer, and a small business worker from Upstate New York. All three would know without hesitation how to answer the question with an unequivocal yes. You don’t need an Ivy League degree to know that calling for the genocide of Jews is wrong and does not depend on the context. Yet these three university presidents of the most elite colleges on Earth utterly failed the most basic test of humanity, intellectual fortitude, and moral compass. And in that moment, they exposed the deep rot in the fabric of American education that had been brewing for generations.

Their disgraceful attempt to contextualize genocide of Jews was a symptom of decades of moral decay, intellectual laziness, and dangerous radical groupthink at so-called elite institutions across society. The fact that they essentially mimicked one another to give nearly verbatim the same answer—“it depends on the context”—encapsulated to me the depth of academic indolence and lack of independent thinking that have perverted our college campuses.

It would later be revealed that all three university president witnesses were prepped by the same overpriced law firm: WilmerHale. Almost worse than their answers was the fact that they didn’t even understand in the actual moment that what they had said was so morally wrong. Upon reflection, one of the most disturbing parts of the hearing was that after my final question and their unacceptably perverse answers, which concluded the hearing, the three university presidents stood up and went on their way acting certain that they had answered the question correctly.

Little did they know that the hearing would set off an unprecedented, gigantic earthquake.

As I walked back to my office, I called my longtime senior political advisor Alex and said: “I think I just asked an important question that led to a very important moment in that hearing.” My staff quickly scrambled to get up to speed. Other than my chief of staff, Patrick, most of my staff were busy doing constituent services or other legislative work, unaware that I had even gone back for additional questions, so they did not see the final moments of the hearing live. I knew it was a significant moment because I was so stunned, but I couldn’t fathom how big it would become, and how quickly.

Video of my exchange with the three university presidents went viral across all social media platforms at warp speed. By the end of one week, the video would rack up more than 1 billion views, shattering all records of congressional testimony in history. That number would climb to the multiple billions in short order.

Calls echoing my demand for the university presidents’ resignations were swift and overwhelming. The cacophony of condemnations went from the highest-ranking elected officials and candidates like President Trump who had watched the hearing closely, to corporate titans, prominent university board members and donors, and everyday people across the country and around the world. It ignited a flame across the political spectrum of real-world America. Republicans’ condemnation was near universal and immediate.

Of course, there were a handful of the usual apologists in the mainstream media doing cleanup for the Left, claiming it was a carefully laid “trap” or a gotcha question. It wasn’t even a prepared question. I specifically worded it to be an easy, straightforward moral question. Despite these efforts by some in the media, the pressure was immense to condemn the university presidents. Even the White House under President Joe Biden felt compelled to distance itself from the university presidents’ comments. “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said a White House spokesman.

Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who is Jewish, declared UPenn President Liz Magill’s comments “unacceptable.” The day after the hearing he told reporters: “It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews, genocide against anyone else. I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test. There should be no nuance to that—she needed to give a one-word answer.”

Even Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe admitted that the hearing was alarming: “I’m no fan of @RepStefanik but I’m with her here,” he wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Claudine Gay’s hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends.”19

But it wasn’t just politicians and academics. What was so astonishing was just how much the hearing permeated popular culture.

Dave Portnoy, a popular sports and politics commentator, entrepreneur, and the owner of the Barstool Sports franchise, called for the resignation of the university presidents and swore never to hire another Harvard graduate.20 David Schwimmer, who famously played Ross on the hit sitcom Friends, posted footage of the exchange on his Instagram page.21

Billboards went up in Israel in Jerusalem. My chief of staff’s email crashed daily for months as he received hundreds of thousands of emails in various languages referencing the hearing. I’ve been in plenty of high-profile hearings, but I had never experienced a hearing like this one. In a single moment, the moral bankruptcy of an entire educational system was exposed. And it caught the whole country’s and the world’s attention.

For the next few months, the hearing and its fallout saturated the news. There were endless headlines, op-eds, think pieces, essays, podcasts, television appearances, all on repeat analyzing the aftermath of the hearing and its repercussions. It even led to what would become known as Saturday Night Live’s (SNL) worst cold open ever (more later in the book). It was everywhere all the time.

The university presidents desperately tried to do damage control, but it was too little, too late. The world had heard their answers. They had been exposed.

Four days after the hearing, Liz Magill was forced to resign as president of UPenn after her floundering attempt to do damage control. The pressure had been intense. Just twenty-four hours after the hearing, more than three thousand people affiliated with the university had signed a petition calling for her resignation. Major donors had threatened to withhold further contributions—more than $100 million worth. Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro urged university trustees to meet immediately to address the situation.

“One down, two to go,” I tweeted.22

The writing was on the wall.

Harvard’s President Claudine Gay held out a little longer. In the days following the hearing, faculty, alumni, and the Fellows of the Harvard Corporation rallied to Gay’s defense. It was less than a week after the hearing when multiple sources uncovered an extensive history of alleged plagiarism by Gay across her academic career.

Less than one month later, on January 2, 2024, Gay was forced to resign.

Two down.

As for the third of our witnesses, Sally Kornbluth clung on to her post and is still the embattled president of MIT.

But the consequences of my exchange with university presidents at the hearing were far more than the subsequent resignations of these particular university presidents. Our hearing launched a reckoning in higher education that has only just begun. It led to an unprecedented congressional investigation with more university president hearings leading to even more resignations. This oversight revealed not only the systemic antisemitism, but the larger crisis within American higher education.

Within the week, I passed a resolution in Congress condemning the college presidents’ testimony and calling for their resignations. It passed 303-126, an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote—a rarity in today’s Washington.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce hired dedicated investigators and allocated resources to help deliver transparency and accountability. The committee hired an exceptionally talented lead investigator, Ari Wisch, who did yeoman’s work with our office to dig deep into these universities. Subpoenas started flying out the door. University faculty, staff, students, and board members sat for depositions. The universities were forced to turn over to the committee more than one hundred thousand documents. We uncovered foreign donations to universities, and how foreign donors were influencing university policy in ways that hurt American students. We examined the federal accreditation system, which helped enforce progressive ideology at universities under the guise of “accountability.” We investigated universities’ countless assaults on viewpoint diversity and free speech, especially under the DEI regime. We looked at the erosion of academic integrity. And, of course, we devoted significant resources to a fulsome assessment of the comprehensive failure to protect American Jewish students, faculty, and staff.

What was started in Congress went into hyperdrive with the second inauguration of President Donald J. Trump. I know firsthand that President Trump had been watching what was happening on American college campuses closely. He also followed the hearing in real time, as well as the news at each university. He and I spoke many times in depth about this particular subject, both in person and on the phone, about the hearing testimony and the situation at each school. He was typically one of the first calls or texts I would receive when another university president resigned or there was breaking news related to these hearings. People often forget and the media often tries to brush it under the rug that President Trump himself is a graduate of the prestigious Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. He knows the Ivy League very well, as do his children and many of his closest, longtime business friends, particularly those from New York. Some of them have experienced elite academia’s prejudices firsthand. All were universally appalled at how far these once-great institutions had fallen.

Combatting antisemitism and digging out the rot in higher education became a mainstay of President Trump’s messaging and rallies on the campaign trail. It became an incredibly important part of his platform of promises to the American people. This hearing resonated in such an intense way that to this day, whether it is in my district in rural Upstate New York or delivering a keynote speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, consistently the loudest applause line from voters comes when I reference my important questions from the hearing. It struck a chord that continues to reverberate around the world.

With the stroke of his pen on Day One of his second term, President Trump kept good on his promise to combat antisemitism and began establishing policies that have already transformed the landscape of higher education. Building on my questions and our congressional investigation, the Trump administration launched major investigations of universities that failed to protect American Jewish students and were out of compliance with federal policies. Some, like Harvard and Columbia, had lawsuits filed against them. Many more have had billions of dollars of federal contracts, including research dollars, frozen or ended. The Trump Department of Justice established a multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. “Anti-Semitism in any environment is repugnant to this Nation’s ideals,” declared Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Leo Terrell. “The Department takes seriously our responsibility to eradicate this hatred wherever it is found. The Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism is the first step in giving life to President Trump’s renewed commitment to ending anti-Semitism in our schools.”23

In less than one year, because of the higher education oversight work of Congress, the Trump administration has reached or is in talks to reach many multi-hundred-million-dollar settlements with universities in the Ivy League and beyond.

Parents and college students are also voting with their feet and their wallets. They’re abandoning the poisoned Ivies and so-called elite academia for sunnier, politically friendlier, and more affordable destinations. What’s happening right now is the most important moment in American higher education in generations. These schools proved incapable of fixing themselves. But under pressure from the federal government and from the self-inflicted mistakes of a forced radical ideology, American higher education, especially elite academia, is being transformed.

Why did the hearing garner so much attention—not just from politicians and academics, but everyone from pop culture icons to everyday Americans? Why did so many people—people who had never watched a second of congressional testimony before—watch this, post it, share it?

I believe it’s because the university presidents’ answers summed up something ordinary Americans have known for a long time. Our elite higher educational institutions, founded on timeless academic aspirations, are now fundamentally broken. They have fundamentally lost their way. They’ve succumbed to decades of moral decay, academic laziness, and radical groupthink. They’ve become hollow, empty, soulless. And so have their leaders. When the opportunity came to speak truth clearly and courageously, the leaders of some of our most coveted institutions failed. They acted like a brainwashed herd, all trotting out the same lawyerly verbiage and bureaucratic talking points. They exposed the moral bankruptcy that has rotted these institutions from the inside out. These once-great institutions, many of which predate the founding of our nation, have fallen so far from their founding missions.

This book is a deep dive into what happened on the most storied American campuses in the aftermath of October 7th. These elite schools, revered for their rich history and important contributions to our nation’s identity, were among the worst offenders propelling the scourge of antisemitism. The events in question were a seminal turning point in higher education. This book investigates how we got here and charts the path ahead to save American higher education.

Americans want, and deserve, better. Americans want clear moral leadership. They want institutions that embody and strive for academic excellence, prize independent thinking, value basic decency, prioritize American students, and that are not anti-American and anti-West. Americans want academic exceptionalism, not indoctrination.

This was never about a few presidents or a few universities. It’s not just about antisemitism.

It’s about saving American higher education, because it has proven incapable of saving itself.

Edition details

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1668087537
• ISBN 13: 9781668087534
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256