Who’s Afraid of Virginia Foxx?
Katherine Knott
March 9, 2023
The longtime Republican congresswoman sees an opportunity to finally reauthorize the Higher Education Act of 1965 in her second stint as leader of the House education committee and is pledging oversight of the Biden administration.
Representative Virginia Foxx is planning to leverage the decline in public perception of higher education to usher in a new era of stronger accountability for the nation’s colleges and universities in her role as chairwoman of the House education committee.
This is “exactly the right time” to reauthorize the Higher Education Act of 1965, Foxx said in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed. The last reauthorization was in 2008, and the law is supposed to be renewed every five years. Foxx and other lawmakers have tried over the years to pass comprehensive higher education legislation—only for those efforts to fail—and observers are skeptical that meaningful higher education bills can pass both chambers during this session of Congress.
