Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., may not be a committee chair, but perhaps no Republican lawmaker has clashed more forcefully with elite university leaders over how they handle anti-Semitism on campus.
Her questions at a hearing in December helped push the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania out of their jobs. Last month, she put the president of Columbia University in the uncomfortable position of negotiating faculty administrative decisions from the witness stand.
If past patterns hold, Stefanik now has a chance to question the leaders of a new crop of major universities.
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Stefanik, 39, was already a rising star within her party before the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas increased concerns about anti-Semitic incidents in American education. A Harvard graduate herself, she is the highest-ranking woman in Republican House leadership and is considered a potential running mate for the president.
But her conversations with leaders at Harvard and Penn attracted enormous attention and earned rare praise from reluctant liberals. In April, she was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024.
Stefanik struggled to land a clear punch during a hearing with Columbia President Minouche Shafik in April. But she still produced some of the most memorable testimony, demanding that Shafik remove from an academic leadership position a professor who used the word “great” in describing Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack.
Stefanik later called on Shafik to resign.
When Stefanik first won her seat in 2014, she was the youngest woman ever to serve in the House of Representatives. She defeated a centrist Democrat and took more moderate positions in the early days of her career.
Today she describes herself as “ultra MAGA” and “proud of it.” Democrats especially despise her close embrace of former President Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election.
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