Nancy Mace Touts Bipartisanship, Warms To Harvard Students in IOP Visit

The night before Rep. Nancy R. Mace (R-S.C.) came to Harvard, she described its campus as enemy territory. But after her visit, she said her opinion of Harvard students had changed for the better, according to three people who attended her Thursday event at the Institute of Politics.

In the week before her Harvard appearance, the South Carolina congresswoman framed the event as a confrontation in posts on X, telling her followers that she was “bringing America First to Harvard” and taunting students as “blue haired Pro-Hamas kids.”

But she took a different tack in her Thursday study group, the attendees said, touting her bipartisanship and curbing her attacks against the University.

The off-the-record event was held on the fifth floor of the Kennedy School’s Taubman Building — a last-minute location change to accommodate increased interest, according to a student familiar with the IOP’s plans. Details of the event, including its new location, were restricted to registrants selected to attend.

Even so, three police cars and five officers stood outside the Taubman Building prior to the start of the event, and two security guards idled inside the lobby throughout the speech.

In the lobby, two IOP staff members restricted access to the elevator to confirmed registrants. Staff said the room could hold 50 people and registration numbers were “at capacity,” although students estimated there were around 40 attendees and said there were empty seats.

Those attendees spanned the political spectrum, students said. One attendee even prefaced their comments by acknowledging they were a “registered Democrat.”

Mace leaned into what she described as her bipartisan track record. She and conservative mentorship nonprofit founder Joe Mitchell — a spring 2025 IOP resident fellow and the host of Thursday’s study group — opened the conversation by touting Mace’s status as the 22nd most bipartisan member of Congress, said Irati Evworo Diez ’25, who attended the event.

That bipartisan emphasis set the table for what was an across-the-board polite conversation, attendees told The Crimson.

Mace, who entered Congress in 2021, has a record of bucking the Republican party line on some social issues. She is a well-known proponent of gay marriage, supports legalizing marijuana and has urged Republicans to moderate their views on abortion — positions she leaned into on Thursday, according to attendees.

But on many topics, Mace is also a vocal spokesperson for President Donald Trump and the right wing. She has led the fight against transgender rights and backed Elon Musk’s efforts to gut the federal bureaucracy.

And just a day before she came to Harvard, Mace crusaded against sanctuary cities in a Wednesday congressional hearing, attacking Boston Mayor Michelle Wu ’07 with a sequence of rapid-fire questions.

In a Wednesday interview with The Crimson, Mace espoused similarly combative views, calling for “pro-Hamas and pro-terrorism” students to be “deported from every single college campus” and saying transgender college athletes were “hijacking women’s sports.”

She gave no signs that Thursday would be any different, saying that she planned to touch on “all the hot button issues” — including antisemitism, immigration, the Middle East, and transgender rights.

While students said those topics did come up, they said that Mace was not defensive and did not antagonize Harvard or its student groups — an about-face from her provocative comments Wednesday.

“There have been groups on college campuses like Harvard that have promoted the ideology of Hamas, that have prevented Jews from going to class,” Mace said Wednesday. “This is not 1942 Germany. That will not stand in Donald Trump’s America.”

Whether or not Mace came to Harvard looking for a fight, she didn’t get one: the event concluded without protest or disruption.

In the only clip Mace posted from the off-the-record study group, she seems to be advising students on how to effect change in Washington.

“Less is more,” Mace says in the video. “The more simple the bill is — one line, one paragraph, one page, maybe a handful of pages, the fewer the pages — the better.”

Some attendees said they appreciated the dialogue.

“I’m vehemently of the mind that it should happen as much as possible,” Evworo Diez said. “TL;DR — I think it’s valuable.”

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.