Virginia Foxxthe Republican congressman from North Carolina, has made things difficult for elite schools in recent months.
As chair of the House Education Committee, she oversaw a tense hearing in December that led to the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. She led an investigation into six institutions into their handling of anti-Semitism claims. She has subpoenaed internal documents and called Jewish students to testify.
She will preside over another hearing on Wednesday, this time with officials from Columbia University.
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The abuse is part of a campaign by Republicans against what they see as double standards within elite educational institutions — practices they say favor certain groups over others, and equality over meritocracy. Others see it as a partisan attack.
Foxx, 80, doesn’t like the term “elite” and questions whether these schools deserve the title.
“I call them the most expensive colleges in the country,” she said recently as she toured her district, which weaves through small working-class towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
She is known for her conservative views and blunt manner. But her current work, she said, is rooted in personal experience. During her time in office, she has repeatedly told her life story, about growing up in a sparsely populated rural area, in a house without running water or electricity. She and her brother Butch carried drinking water from a spring. There was no outhouse, so “we went to the woods,” she remembers.
She went on to junior college, state college, and graduate school, eventually earning a doctorate from the University of North Carolina, working her way into intertwined careers in politics and education, becoming president of a community college.
But it is her religious beliefs and identification with the underdog, she said, that inform how she deals with the bitter protests on campus over the war between Israel and Hamas.
“People here believe that Jews are God’s chosen people, and I grew up in the Baptist church believing that,” she said.
After reading news reports last fall about rising anti-Semitism on prominent campuses, she said she decided to investigate these institutions that most of her constituents couldn’t imagine ever visiting.
“It was incomprehensible what happened,” she said. “Students were unsafe and the administration did nothing to help them.”
“As chairman of the committee,” she said, “how can I ignore that?”
Others see a not-so-hidden agenda.
“Both sides are using higher education as a proxy in a culture war,” said Jon Fansmith, director of government relations at the American Council on Education, a trade association. “And to some extent, we’ve seen that reflected in this Congress in the Committee on Education and the Workforce in a way that we haven’t seen before. She sets the agenda.”
Foxx represents a solidly Republican district in a purple state, and her views reflect that.
She opposes abortion rights and allowing trans women to compete on women’s teams in college sports.
She has said she has “little tolerance” for students who graduate with large amounts of student debt.
She argued against a hate crimes law in 2009, calling it a “hoax” to say that Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming, had been killed a decade earlier because he was gay. After a cry, she apologized to his mother.
She voted against federal aid to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, once saying there was more to fear from “Obamacare” than from terrorists.
When a reporter asked at a news conference about Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Foxx told her to “shut up.”
During a district tour of winding, two-lane mountain roads, she seemed eager to show a softer side, with a favorite cousin, Helen Pritchard.
Foxx was born in New York City, the first of four children of parents who never made it past the ninth grade. Her father, Nunzio Palmieri, a construction worker, was the son of Italian immigrants in New York. Her mother, Dollie Garrison, was the daughter of a miner.
In 1950, when she was six, they moved to western North Carolina, where they lived in a house shared with Pritchard’s family.
To get there, “you had to cross the river and then open two cattle gates,” Foxx said. “No, seven,” Pritchard corrected.
At that point, the driver yielded to a barking dog blocking the car. “Go forward,” Foxx urged. “You can’t be intimidated by a dog. That dog has enough sense to get out of the way.”
In high school, a teacher gave her a list of a hundred classic books to read and advised her to go to college and marry a man with a degree.
She listened. She married Tom Foxx at the age of 20 and had a daughter. It took her seven circuitous years to earn her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working all the way.
She went on to earn a master’s degree in sociology from Chapel Hill and a doctorate in education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Her brother followed a different path: he became a carpenter. Thanks to him, she considers it her mandate to help people who are, as she put it, “uncertified.”
“There are millions of people in this country who say the same thing my brother said: ‘I don’t want to be a second-class citizen,’” she said.
In the same vein, she forbids her staff from using “the T-word” – “training” – in place of “education.”
“You train dogs and you train people,” she said. “Electrician, plumber, it doesn’t matter what the skill is, you need someone who can think on their feet.”
Her political career began in the mid-1970s, after a friend challenged her to run for school board.
When she said she wasn’t qualified, he replied, “Are you saying you’re not as qualified as those turkeys?”
“Like many women, I doubted my abilities,” she says now.
With her husband’s encouragement, she won in 1976 and remained on the board for twelve years.
As an assistant dean at Appalachian State, she campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, outraged by a tire salesman who refused to give her a line of credit without her husband’s permission.
“I thought, well, this is wrong,” she says now. “I can understand why there were people who were skeptical of the ERA, but at the time I was in favor of it.”
On leave from the relatively liberal Appalachian State outpost in the mid-1980s, and working for a Republican governor, she won the presidency of Mayland Community College.
She is sensitive to anything that implies that community colleges are lower-status institutions. “Community colleges in particular use the T-word a lot,” she says.
Her loyalty to these institutions is real, says Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law.
“The community college world sometimes felt like they were the second cousins at the third table,” he said.
However, her seven-year tenure at Mayland was dogged by a lawsuit accusing the college of purging Democratic administrators and faculty, using financial pressure as a pretext. She now says she didn’t care about their political leanings, and would have guessed they were Republican because almost everyone else was. A jury found for her and the trustees.
In an interview, John West Gresham, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said the faculty “were good people.”
She was so partisan, he said, that he thinks her concerns about anti-Semitism are more about politics. “It puts those liberal universities in a bad light, doesn’t it?” he said.
Her political acumen led to her serving in the state legislature before joining Congress in 2005. And her latest crusade has taken her from local to national news.
She said she didn’t expect the Dec. 5 hearing to have such an impact. The presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Penn were hypothetically asked whether they would punish students who called for the genocide of the Jews. They infamously replied that it would depend on the context.
Much criticized and vulnerable for other reasons, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of Penn resigned.
On Wednesday, the committee has scheduled a hearing with Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik.
“Nobody gets away,” Foxx said.
Her final district stop is her hilltop home with a spectacular view of Grandfather Mountain. She explained her commitment to exposing anti-Semitism over tea and Pepperidge Farm cookies. She said any form of discrimination is wrong. And she knows her Old Testament and paraphrases Genesis 12:3.
“There are verses in the Bible that preachers will quote, that if you bless the Jewish people, you will be blessed,” she said. “If you curse the Jewish people, you will be cursed.”
Many of her constituents feel the same way, she said. “I believe I represent the community.”
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