Right idea … wrong scope.

Elise Stefanik has not finished with her alma mater or the other Poison Ivies, and the rest of the House GOP has begun developing policy responses to their refusal to deal with intimidation of Jews on campuses. Stefanik and others now plan to target federal subsidies flowing to colleges and universities that don’t provide equal protection to Jewish students. If successful, this could cost Harvard and others billions of dollars in income:

Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican whose questioning of Gay at the House Education and Workforce Committee last week left the college leader’s career in crisis, told The Post she wanted to “defund.”

“We must defund the rot in America’s higher education,” she said.

“It is unacceptable and un-American that any taxpayer dollars are going to universities propping up their promulgation of antisemitism by supporting professors, students and staff many who have openly called for the genocide of Jews.

“We will use every tool at our disposal to ensure that schools that protect and encourage antisemitism are cut off from any and all federal funds.”

And lawmaker Eli Crane (R-Az) told The Post he is introducing a bill to make Harvard and other colleges face real financial consequences if they are found to have fostered antisemitism on campus in the wake of the October 7 terrorist massacres of Israelis by Hamas.

Again, count me in favor of the “defunding.” After last week’s haughty and incompetent testimony from the leaders of the Poison Ivies, one would have imagined that their boards would have repented by finding new leadership. Only Penn did, and that’s only because they lost a $100 million endowment while Pennsylvania’s Democrat governor heaped scorn on Penn and Liz Magill.

Both MIT and Harvard circled the wagons around Sally Kornbluth and Claudine Gay, neither of whom has lifted a finger to apply their professed “principles” of free speech or discipline on bullying by anti-Semites on their campuses since. Gay’s administration actually canceled a scheduled event that featured speakers critical of her leadership two days after declaring Harvard’s commitment to free speech, in fact.

Nevertheless, the scope and intent on this is too limited, and too constrained to one particular diseased outcome. The issues in Academia go well beyond anti-Semitism; they go directly to the heart of what it means to be educated rather than indoctrinated. For the last several decades, progressive activists have transformed the former into the latter and imposed tribalism via DEI. That has created an environment on most campuses of extreme intolerance to differing points of view, and created leadership that quashes debate and dissent from the progressive-woke orthodoxy.

The proper approach is to defund Academia entirely, at least at the federal level. The federal government had no business goosing Academia’s business model in the first place, and the six-decade experiment has utterly failed. It has not improved education, but contributed to its destruction. The federalized loan program has turned at least two generations into debt paupers, and incentivized “debt forgiveness” at the expense of taxpayers who pay their own bills. And the tuition-support flood has created a massive administration class that operates politically rather than scholastically.

As I wrote in October, this paroxysm of anti-Semitism is just a symptom of a deeply systemic problem. And that requires a deeply systemic reform:

In other words, we need to end the student loan programs. We need to end Pell grants, and every scholarship from the federal government, even the ones for left-handed Laplanders with Lyme Disease. We need to end the transmission of every federal dollar into the bloated, corrupt Academia as it exists now and has existed over the last several decades. Its main product has become a blizzard of non-performing administrators and crops of moral idiots, the latter of whom emerge with crippling lifetime debt and nihilist fantasies that many of of them will never outgrow.

To put it another way that might appeal to our progressive partners: We need to Defund the Fleece.

This violates no rights. It doesn’t dictate speech codes to college campuses, another point on which conservatives should know better than to impose. Not a single thing will change, except that we will finally kick the financial struts out from underneath a persistent parasite that has finally come close to achieving its goal of killing its host.

Stefanik and her colleagues do have the right idea — but they need to aim higher and wider.