Dr. Jill Biden will continue teaching, from the White House
The incoming first lady, who has a doctorate in educational leadership, will continue to teach at Northern Virginia Community College, where she was a full-time professor during her husband's eight-year vice presidency.
After four tumultuous years, Americans can hope that with the incoming first lady, Jill Biden, a more traditional presence will return to the East Wing of the White House. But before taking charge of her, Dr. Biden hinted that she would print her own style in charge of her.
That is, to her second job.
Dr. Biden, who has a doctorate in educational leadership, will continue to teach writing classes at Northern Virginia Community College, where she worked full-time when she was second lady during the Obama administration. As first lady, she will be the first to combine her professional career with public duties, something that her team has tried to give little importance to in order to protect her privacy.
"Dr. Biden will continue to teach at Northern Virginia Community College in addition to her public service," said her spokesperson, Michael LaRosa. Biden has also dismissed questions about her decision and she noted that she was not really thinking in "historical terms" since as a second lady she had already taught.
However, whether she advertises it or not, Dr. Biden, 69, will be the first to try to maintain that balance and inherit the scrutiny that comes with her most recent position. As her modern predecessors have realized, while being the first lady of the United States does not technically carry official responsibilities, it does require meeting the expectations of the president, the White House, American voters, and several thousand journalists.
In December, weeks before she arrived in the East Wing, Dr. Biden's professional credentials were called into question when The Wall Street Journal published an opinion column signed by writer Joseph Epstein asking her to stop using her. professional title along with your name.
"Forget the little thrill of being Dr. Jill and settle for the greater thrill of living the next four years in the best public housing in the world as First Lady Jill Biden," he wrote.
She politely refused.
"Together, we will build a world where our daughters' achievements are applauded rather than undermined," Dr. Biden wrote on Twitter.
Biden supported her husband's ambition as she built her own career, teaching at Delaware Technical Community College and later earning her Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 2007, but she did not always enjoy life under the reflectors.
She did not always endorse her husband's project to aspire to a higher position. In 2004, she objected to the current president running for the White House by circling his house with the word "No" written in marker all over her bikini-clad body. ("My temper got the better of me. I decided I needed to add to the conversation," she wrote about the episode in her memoir, published in 2019).
In the end she gave up: Biden was selected as Barack Obama's vice president in 2008, after failing in his run for the presidency. As a second lady, she enjoyed the relative anonymity afforded by her teaching and in interviews she commented that her students often did not recognize her. In fact, on the Rate My Professors faculty rating site, her alumni had more comments about her teaching style (one that abounds is “rate demanding”) than they did about her association with two presidential governments.
But on Wednesday, Dr. Biden came to the White House with a higher profile, a platform similar to the one she raised as second lady and an East Wing full of collaborators she trusts. Among them, Anthony Bernal, a senior adviser who has worked for the Bidens since the Obama campaign. Julissa Reynoso Pantaleón, who worked for the Obama State Department is her chief of staff.
Last week, Dr. Biden appointed Rory Brosious, a former Biden campaign adviser, director of the Joining Forces initiative, a program that supports military families that she launched with Michelle Obama when she was the first lady. Dr. Biden is also expected to promote free community colleges and dedicate herself to raising awareness about breast cancer prevention, her assistants said.
"He's not going to walk in the door and say 'what is my identity as first lady'?" Shailagh Murray, a former senior adviser to Obama and Biden, said in an interview. "It will just be the first lady's version of what she has always done."
Originally from New Jersey, she grew up in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Speaking plain and with a Philadelphia accent, Dr. Biden has taken her new role with the same rustic twist that her husband tends to use: “Tell me Jill!” She told allies who joined her at a meeting last week. Zoom call. But she has had outbursts in which she has revealed her character: During the presidential campaign she stood between her husband, then 77, and a group of unruly vegan protesters.
"I remember every slight against the people I love," she wrote in her memoir, in which she introduced herself as the protector of her family if she is not that head of grudges.
After a brief first marriage, Dr. Biden married Joe Biden in 1977, more than four years after Neilia and Naomi, his first wife and a young daughter, were killed in a car accident. She put her career ambitions on hiatus to raise his two sons, Beau, a Delaware attorney general who passed away in 2015, and Hunter, as his own. The Bidens' daughter Ashley was born in 1981.
Throughout most of Joe Biden's six terms in the Senate, two terms as vice president and three presidential races, Dr. Bien has stood by her husband's side. Government collaborators hope that she will assume responsibilities to continue supporting him and that she will join the president in his attempt to heal the political rift that affected the country during the term of President Donald Trump.
The first lady will also participate in the government's efforts to communicate to the public the work done to manage the pandemic, some aides said.
On the day of her inauguration, the pandemic disrupted the usual face-to-face celebrations that the incoming government deploys to appear before Washington, including the presentation that is usually expected of all first ladies. Dr. Biden did not have a housewarming gown, a garment that is often donated to the Smithsonian Institution.
Instead, Dr. Biden received her husband's inauguration moment in a teal coat by designer Alexandra O'Neill, and a matching mask.
