It has been over a month since I asked the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their campus codes of conduct on bullying and harassment.
Their dithering and morally bankrupt answers were so shocking, the video went globally viral, becoming the most-viewed congressional testimony of all time.
What are the ramifications of a hearing viewed billions of times?
A reckoning. The forced resignation of two Ivy League presidents is just the beginning.
The problem was never just about three people or even three universities.
Their attempt to contextualize genocide of Jews was merely a symptom of decades of moral decay, intellectual laziness and dangerous radical groupthink at elite institutions across society.
Replacing the wallpaper is not enough when there is deep rot within the walls.
To remove that rot, we first need to keep exploring how deep it goes.
That’s why my colleagues and I on the House Education and Workforce Committee under the leadership of Chairwoman Virginia Foxx are conducting an extensive oversight investigation into numerous colleges and universities, including Harvard and its governance body, the Harvard Corporation, which backed the failed leadership of former President Claudine Gay and has done nothing to combat dangerous campus antisemitism.
For one, we want to understand their actions, such as their failure to protect Jewish students and the blatant attempt to cover up Gay’s plagiarism.
We know the Harvard Corporation acted in bad faith multiple times, including by sending a letter to the New York Post threatening legal action if it reported the facts.
We’re going to deliver transparency and find out why.
More than that, we will get to the bottom of the broader lack of moral clarity made clear by the reluctance to address the rise of antisemitism.
Much of this, we know, is the fruit of diversity, equity, inclusion, a radical racist ideology that classifies people as either oppressors or oppressed based purely on their race, gender or sexual orientation.
As a result of this disgusting ideology’s takeover of campuses, it is mainstream to teach capitalism is racist, Israel is racist and America is racist.
And these colleges received billions of taxpayer dollars in federal funds.
The committee is hiring investigators and dedicating extensive resources to uncovering how deep this goes and who is behind it.
We’re looking at foreign donations to our universities, the failure to protect Jewish students, the federal accreditation system, the assault on viewpoint diversity and free speech, the erosion in academic integrity and the extent to which taxpayers have been forced to bankroll the political indoctrination of young Americans.
We’ll release the results to the public so Americans can see colleges and universities for what they are, not what they pretend to be.
We know President Biden will refuse to sign meaningful reforms, but that won’t stop us from putting them forward, even if it means setting the table for the next Republican administration under President Trump.
We’ll also signal to states how they can move the needle, particularly on state universities.
I’ve been somewhat heartened to see actions already taken to scale back DEI and call out institutionalized antisemitism.
States like Florida and Texas have worked to ban DEI in public education.
Since the hearing, encouraging signs in the unlikeliest places — like the mainstream media — suggest the conversation is turning, which is significant because DEI has only survived this long through a climate of fear that suppresses conversation and criticism.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we’re going to continue shining light on the university system’s rot — not just at Harvard, MIT and Penn, but colleges and universities across the nation.
In my home state of New York, that includes the likes of NYU, Columbia and Cornell.
We must never forget these institutions exist to serve and benefit society.
When they no longer do, the best way to change them is to expose them.
The hearing proved it, and we’ve only just begun.
And as everyone knows, I will not be deterred in this important mission.
Elise Stefanik chairs the House Republican Conference.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
