Foxx cites life story as she pursues bias probes of colleges
Officials from Columbia are due to testify next
Virginia Foxx, a Republican member of Congress from North Carolina, has spent the past few months giving elite schools a hard time.
As the chair of the House committee on education, she oversaw a tense hearing in December that spurred the resignations of the presidents of University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. She has led an investigation of a half-dozen institutions for their handling of antisemitism claims. She has subpoenaed internal documents and called Jewish students to testify.
On Wednesday, she will preside over another hearing, this time with officials at Columbia University.
The drubbing is part of a campaign by Republicans against what they view as double standards within elite education establishments — practices that they say favor some groups over others and equity over meritocracy. Others see it as a partisan attack.
Foxx, 80, does not like the term “elite” and questions whether these schools even deserve the title.
“I call them the most expensive universities in the country,” she said the other day while traveling around her district, which winds 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. Over her years in office, she has repeatedly told her life story of 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 recalled.
She went on to junior college, state college, and graduate school, eventually earning a doctorate from the University of North Carolina, leveraging 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 is dealing with the bitter campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
“The people here believe that the Jews are God’s chosen people, and I grew up in the Baptist Church believing that,” she said.
After reading news accounts last fall of rising antisemitism on prominent campuses, she said that she resolved to investigate these institutions that most of her constituents cannot imagine ever attending.
“It was unconscionable what was happening,” she said. “Students were unsafe, and the administration was doing nothing to help them.”
“As chair of the committee,” she said, “how do I ignore that?”
Others see a not-so-hidden agenda.
“Both sides are using higher education as proxies in a culture war,” said Jon Fansmith, head of government relations for the American Council on Education, a trade association. “And to a real degree, we’ve seen that reflected in this Congress in the Education and Workforce Committee, in a way we haven’t before. She sets the agenda.”