Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig hiram.edu. NS
Answer
hiram.edu. 5 NS elaine.ns.cloudflare.com.
hiram.edu. 5 NS jeff.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0