she posted to X, formerly known as Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\nMore than achieving vindication, Stefanik opened a new front in the culture wars \u2014 all while scrambling the Democratic Party\u2019s traditional coalition of well-educated voters and their institutions of higher education.<\/p>\n
Mitch Daniels, the retired former president of Purdue University and a former Republican governor of Indiana, called it \u201chigher ed\u2019s Bud Light moment\u201d \u2014 referring to the beermaker\u2019s divisive ad campaign featuring a transgender influencer \u2014 \u201cwhen people who hang out with only people who adhere to what has become prevailing and dominant ideologies on campuses and suddenly discover there’s a world of people out there who disagrees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Republicans, of course, have been the loudest voices defending Stefanik. Daniels, who has also testified before hostile lawmakers on behalf of his university, mocked that the administrators Stefanik questioned retained the white-shoe law firm WilmerHale to prepare.<\/p>\n
\u201cWere they unprepared?\u201d Daniels said in an interview. \u201cYes, they were unprepared by a lifetime of being cloistered in an ideological bubble and groupthink.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking at an event Monday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a graduate of Harvard Business School, told Bloomberg the contentious exchange on Capitol Hill marked a \u201ccultural moment.\u201d He added: \u201cThere is a tipping point, and we have to be clear on where that tipping point is. And extermination speech is clearly on the wrong side of that tipping point.”<\/p>\n
But it is the movement against the university presidents from a chorus of Democrats that suggests a possible realignment of a traditional political alliance, one that could see bipartisan pushback against the elitism of the ivory tower.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe president believes strongly that this is a moment to put your foot down and to ensure we have moral clarity,\u201d White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said during a gaggle on Monday, as President Joe Biden headed to Pennsylvania for an unrelated event.<\/p>\n
Josh Shapiro, the high-profile Jewish Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, called for Magill\u2019s ouster.<\/p>\n
Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat and an alum of both Harvard and MIT, said it\u2019s \u201ctoo soon to tell\u201d whether the bipartisan backlash would become an issue in next year\u2019s election. He attributed the larger cultural conflict to a \u201ctension between individualism and identitarianism.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fundamentally about hypocrisy,\u201d said Auchincloss, whose great-grandparents fled the pogroms, emigrating to the U.S. around World War I. \u201cAnd, at least for me, what I reacted to viscerally from the testimony was particularly Harvard, which has an abysmal track record on championing and incubating free and open speech \u2014 now, [they’re] into the First Amendment, when it’s about antisemitism? That was more striking to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the presidential campaign trail, the issue was finding new life.<\/p>\n
\u201cFinally, the veil has been lifted on the ugly underbelly of what’s going on in our culture, including in our universities and our educational institutions,\u201d Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who authored “Woke, Inc.,” the 2021 book that railed against social justice, told POLITICO.<\/p>\n
Prior to last week\u2019s hearing, many candidates, including Ramaswamy, had largely relegated talk of wokeness to the back burner after finding it did not resonate with primary voters.<\/p>\n
But that has changed for now, and Ramaswamy welcomed the new discourse. He called on universities to rewrite their speech codes to include antisemitism and said university presidents should be fired not just for their testimony, but for failing to \u201cactually embrace free speech and open expression, embrace the true purpose of seeking knowledge as opposed to indoctrination.\u201d<\/p>\n
At least for now, Stefanik\u2019s criticism has wrenched open whole lines of attack in the campaign.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m gratified that I think people have opened their minds on both sides to the arguments that I was making back then,\u201d Ramaswamy said.<\/p>\n