Most ECU students probably don’t know that President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education is an education is an East Carolina University graduate, but faculty in the university’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literature do.
That’s because Linda McMahon was a French major before graduating from ECU in 1969. Since then, her McMahon Family Foundation established the Linda McMahon Distinguished Professorship in Foreign Languages at ECU in 2009. She was also the ECU’s commencement speaker in 2018.
President Trump wants McMahon to lead a department he has pledged to eliminate, with scores of employees already ordered on to administrative lead and other staff being pressured to voluntarily quit.
McMahon was born in New Bern and attended Havelock High School while her parents worked at Marine Air Station Cherry Point. She met her future husband, Vince McMahon, at 13, and after graduating high school, the two got married when she was 17. She then pursued her education at East Carolina University where, in 1969, she received ECU’s “Outstanding Senior Award.”
The couple moved to Connecticut and primarily lived there in the beginning of their marriage. As an only child, McMahon seemed to thrive as CEO for the professional wrestling promotion company her husband founded, WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment. In 2016, McMahon told Sports Illustrated, “I grew up as my father’s son and my mother’s daughter,” which she believes contributed to her success in the male dominated industry.
After almost 30 years with WWE, McMahon ran as a republican for U.S. Senate from Connecticut, but lost.
While McMahon doesn’t often publicly discuss Pirate Nation, she agreed to an interview in 2006 with Kristin Murnane, who wrote for The East Carolinian. In the interview, McMahon described her memories of “sitting in the stands and cheering” and has “all fond memories of being at East Carolina.” She added that in the years she attended, “it was just a nice, sleepy college town” with fewer than 10,000 students.
