Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chairwoman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, joins House Republicans to celebrate passage in the House of a bill that would bar federally supported schools and colleges from allowing transgender athletes whose biological sex assigned at birth was male to compete on girls or women’s sports teams at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, April 20, 2023.
House Education and Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) slammed the state of higher education in a Washington Examiner op-ed on Monday that argued congressional action may be needed to stop liberal censorship on college campuses.
Foxx decried what she called the “Left’s thought police,” a group of progressives who are comfortable with censoring and restricting opposing views. Foxx said these activists are at odds with traditional liberals on matters of speech and expression.
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“The tension is at the heart of United States politics,” Foxx wrote. “Have institutions, including the university system, been so thoroughly captured by anti-American and illiberal ideology that the government must step in to restore viewpoint diversity, free thought, and free expression?”
The chairwoman touted a report from the Education and Workforce Committee, which she said “paints a grim picture,” adding that “free speech is all but an illusion for many college students, teachers, and administrators.”
“Modern universities purport to be places of free debate and open discussion, but in fact, this freedom is often forced out of the classroom, where instead, students are expected to parrot their professors and peers,” she wrote.
The culture of the nation’s institutions of higher education, Foxx argued, is hostile to the idea of freedom of speech because faculty and administrators are overwhelmingly supportive of progressive censorship. Schools, she wrote, “require lock-step discipleship behind woke policies and politics.”
“The fundamental telos of every academic institution is, or should be, the relentless pursuit of truth,” Foxx said. “The rampant censorship described by the committee report undermines that pursuit, but the report also offers possible solutions.”
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To address the problem, Foxx said congressional action could be needed to rein in the censorious campus culture.
“If colleges and universities cannot safeguard diversity of thought among their students and faculty on their own, then Congress may look to where the law could assist institutions in upholding First Amendment rights,” she wrote. “Committee recommendations include institutional disclosure requirements, adoption of free speech statements, and prohibitions on the use of political tests.”