Virginia Foxx, the Republican congresswoman from North Carolina, has spent the last few months challenging elite schools.
As chairman of the House Education Committee, he oversaw a tense hearing in December that prompted the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. He has led an investigation into half a dozen institutions over their handling of allegations of anti-Semitism. He has subpoenaed internal documents and called Jewish students to testify.
On Wednesday, he will preside over another hearing, this time with Columbia University officials.
The plagiarism is part of a Republican campaign against what they see as double standards at elite educational institutions — practices they say favor some groups over others and equality over meritocracy. Others see it as a partisan attack.
Rep. Foxx, 80, doesn’t 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 driving through her district, which cuts 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. In her years of service, she has repeatedly told her life story, that she grew 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 house, so “we went into the woods,” he recalls.
She went on to college, state college, and graduate school, eventually earning a doctorate from the University of North Carolina, working her way through intertwined careers in politics and education, and becoming the president of a community college.
But it’s her religious beliefs and identification with the outsider, she said, that inform how she deals with bitter campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
“People here believe that the Jews are God’s chosen people, and I was raised in the Baptist Church believing that,” he said.
After reading news accounts last fall about rising anti-Semitism on prominent college campuses, she said she decided to research these institutions that most of her constituents can’t imagine ever attending.
“It was unconscious what was happening,” he said. “The students were not safe and the administration did nothing to help them.”
“As chairman of the committee,” he said, “how can I ignore this?”
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 that we’ve never seen before. She sets the agenda.”
Representative Foxx represents a solidly Republican district in a purple state, and her views reflect that.
He is against abortion rights and against allowing transgender women to compete on women’s teams in college sports.
He has said he has “little tolerance” for students who graduate college with heavy student loan debt.
Arguing against a hate crimes bill in 2009, he called it a “farce” that University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard had been killed a decade earlier because he was gay. After an outcry, he apologized to his mother.
He voted against federal aid to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and once said there were more to fear from Obamacare than from terrorists.
When a reporter asked about Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 election at a press conference, the congresswoman told her to “shut up.”
On a tour of the district, on winding, two-lane mountain roads, she seemed keen to show a softer side, bringing along a beloved cousin, Helen Pritchard.
Dr. Fox was born in New York City, the first of four children to parents who never made it past the ninth grade. Her father, Nunzio Palmieri, a construction worker, was the son of Italian immigrants to New York. Her mother, Dollie Garrison, was the daughter of a miner.
In 1950, when she was 6, they moved to western North Carolina, sharing a house with Mrs. Pritchard’s family.
To get there, “you had to cross the river and then open two cattle gates,” Dr. Fox said. “No, seven,” corrected Mrs. Pritchard.
Just then, the driver pulled over to bark at a dog that was blocking the car. “Go ahead,” urged Dr. Fox. “You can’t be carried away by a dog. That dog has sense enough to get out of your way.’
In high school, a teacher gave her a list of 100 classic books to read, advising her to go to college and marry a man with a degree.
She listened. She married Tom Foxx at 20 and had a daughter. It took seven tortuous years to earn her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working all the way.
He 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 had a different path, he became a carpenter. Because of him, she considers it her mandate to help people who are, as she put it, “without rank.”
“There are millions of people in this country who say the same thing my brother would say: ‘I don’t want to be a second-class citizen,'” he said.
In the same vein, she forbids her staff from using the “T word” – “training” – instead of “training”.
“You train dogs and you train people,” he said. “Electrician, plumber, I don’t care what the skill is, you need a man who can think.”
Her political career began in the mid-1970s after a friend encouraged her to run for school board.
When told she wasn’t qualified, he replied, “You mean 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 12 years.
As an assistant dean at Appalachian State, she campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, angered by a tire salesman who refused to give her a line of credit without her husband’s permission.
“I thought well, this is wrong,” he says now. “I can understand why there were people who were skeptical of the ERA, but at the time I was a supporter.”
On leave from the relatively liberal outpost in the Appalachian State in the mid-’80s and working for a Republican governor, she won the presidency of Mayland Community College.
She is touchy about anything that suggests community colleges are inferior institutions. “Community colleges use the T word a lot,” he said.
Her faith in these institutions is real, said 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 second cousins at the third table,” he said.
Her seven-year tenure at Mailland, however, was marred by a lawsuit accusing the college of purging Democratic administrators and professors, using financial pressure as a pretext. He says now that he didn’t care about their political affiliations and would have guessed they were Republicans, because almost all of them were. 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, she said, that she believes her concerns about anti-Semitism are more about politics. “It makes these liberal universities look bad, doesn’t it? he said.
Her political savvy helped land a term in the state Legislature before she entered Congress in 2005. And her latest crusade has catapulted her from local to national news.
He said he didn’t expect the Dec. 5 hearing to have such an impact. The presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn were asked, hypothetically, whether they would punish students who called for the genocide of the Jews. They infamously replied that it would depend on the context.
Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Elizabeth Magill, widely criticized and vulnerable on other grounds, resigned.
On Wednesday, the committee has scheduled a hearing with Columbia University President Nemat (Minouche) Shafik.
“No one escapes,” Dr. Fox said.
Her last stop in the area is her home on a hill with a stunning view of Mount Pappous. She explained her dedication to exposing anti-Semitism with Pepperidge Farm tea and cookies. He said that any kind of discrimination is wrong. And she knows her Old Testament, paraphrasing Genesis 12:3.
“There are verses in the Bible that the ministers will quote, that if you bless the Jewish people you will be blessed,” he said. “If you curse the Jewish people, you will be damned.”
Many of her constituents feel the same way, she said. “I believe I represent the community.”
Kirsten Noyes, Sheelagh McNeill and Jack Begg contributed to the research.
