Penn Professor Amy Wax Punished for ‘Inconvenient Facts’

By The Free Press | Created at 2024-09-26 02:50:41 | Updated at 2024-09-30 05:22:43 4 days ago

The beginning of the end of law professor Amy Wax’s career came on August 9, 2017. That’s when Wax and another law professor, Larry Alexander, published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer declaring that “all cultures are not equal.”

“It was the most innocuous thing you can imagine,” Wax told me over the phone on Tuesday.

The thesis of the 827-word piece was that some people—“working-class whites” with “antisocial habits”; “inner-city blacks” with their “anti-‘acting white’ rap culture”; and Hispanic immigrants who resist assimilation—are at a profound disadvantage in the game of life. This, they argued, is why we should all embrace a 1950s-style “bourgeois culture” that smooths over differences, paving the way for greater national cohesiveness.

“These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans,” Wax and Alexander wrote.

The article ignited a neutron bomb at the University of Pennsylvania, where Wax had been a tenured faculty member since 2001, having previously taught at the University of Virginia and worked in the Solicitor General’s office, arguing fifteen cases before the Supreme Court. The graduate students union called it “hateful and regressive.” An education professor at Penn sarcastically tweeted that the 1950s “was a better time because white people were nicer to each other and people of color stayed in their place.” Helen Gym, a Philadelphia City councilwoman and Penn alum, called the article “miserable.”

As far as Wax was concerned, all this amounted to rank hypocrisy among her bourgeois colleagues. “All my colleagues follow all those rules, so why are they attacking them?” she told me. “You know—getting married, staying married, working hard, getting an education. To paraphrase Charles Murray, they ‘live the fifties and talk the sixties.’ ”

In 2022, Penn law school dean Theodore Ruger called on the Faculty Senate to consider “major sanctions” against Wax for the views that she expressed in her article and repeated in speeches and media appearances over the years.

Finally, on Monday, the Faculty Senate, in an unprecedented move, sanctioned Wax for “flagrant unprofessional conduct”—suspending her for one year with half-pay, the loss of her title of Robert Mundheim Professor of Law, the loss of summer pay, and the understanding that she will not represent the university while speaking publicly.

When I asked Wax for her reaction to the sanctions, she laughed. “What do you think my reaction to it is? I think that our country and our university system are deteriorating in a very serious way. It’s becoming Third World.”

She pointed out that conservatives—and some liberals—had been writing some version of her 2017 op-ed since Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “Defining Deviancy Down” was published in 1993.

She wondered about the character of her colleagues—what they believed in, what values they wanted to transmit to future generations.

“What is it you teach your children?” she asked. “You teach them to commit crimes? Don’t work hard for your employer? Don’t complete your education? Is that the lesson that these people who are condemning me are conveying to their own?”

I asked Wax whether she had said or written anything over the years that she now regrets.

“That’s a hard one,” she said. “I would say, I don’t have regrets. I would say, if I had to do it over, I would try not to say things in a way that enabled people to lift these provocative sound bites out of what I said.”

L’affaire Wax illuminated what The Campus—at Penn and at countless places of higher learning across the United States—now considers acceptable and unacceptable. Which opinions comport with the new, smoothed over, corporatized, identitarian culture, and which ones do not. One could erect tents on the quad and celebrate jihadists and denounce “the Zionist entity.” But one could not ask questions like: Should we admit immigrants from underdeveloped countries that have no liberal-democratic tradition?

When she was hauled in front of Congress in December 2023, to testify about antisemitism on campus, Penn’s president Elizabeth Magill made the mistake of trying to pretend that there was no divide, that we were all free-speech enthusiasts now. Except everyone knew that was a lie, that the parameters of acceptable discourse had been narrowing at the university for years, that one could not question, for example, gender fluidity, but that it was perfectly reasonable to call for the “genociding” of the Jewish people.

“I’ve never been one to get hung up on antisemitism,” said Wax, who grew up in a decidedly bourgeois Jewish home in Troy, New York. “But yes, there is a double standard, and the oppressed must always be defended, and the First Amendment neutrality principle goes down the drain.”

Neatly illustrating that point was the case of Dwayne Booth, a lecturer at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. Earlier this year, Booth posted cartoons on his personal website that he had drawn depicting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a blood-soaked butcher’s smock surrounded by Jews sipping Palestinian blood out of wine goblets.

It’s true that the university’s interim president, J. Larry Jameson, took to Instagram to denounce the cartoons, which seemed to spring from some medieval fever dream, calling them “reprehensible,” “antisemitic,” and “incongruent with our efforts to fight hate.”

But it’s also true that, among the faculty and students, Booth’s cartoons had stirred none of the outrage that Wax’s op-ed had sparked. So far, the university has done nothing to punish Booth.

Alex Morey, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told me that sanctioning Wax has set a dangerous precedent.

From now on, she said, whenever anyone—on the right or left—says something that upsets the powers that be, “all they have to do is say he or she or they were ‘unprofessional.’ I’m not saying that Amy Wax is right or wrong. What I am saying is that an elite university like Penn is the place where we have those debates. Administrators there should not be in the business of deciding what gets to be debated on.”

Morey added that Penn’s handling of Wax is in keeping with a broader trend that has swept American campuses.

“There has been this corporatization of higher ed that has really taken off in the last decade,” Morey said. “Schools are very broadly concerned with the big business of being in higher education, and when you have people like Amy Wax, who are bad for the brand, that is DEFCON 5 for the PR consultants and the comms people.”

Robert George, the Princeton political theorist and legal scholar, agreed with that sentiment in a tweet on Monday: “A flagrant case of hypocrisy and double standards. Professor Amy Wax will now, I have no doubt, sue the University of Pennsylvania. The case will take time to make its way through the courts, but she will in the end prevail.”

Wax declined to say whether she was planning to sue the university, noting only that she and her attorney were exploring their options.

For now, she said, she was more concerned about the illiberalism that had engulfed the American campus. Students, she said, had been conditioned to ward off any ideas that do not meet with their own opinions or experiences.

“They have such a fence around their brain,” Wax said. “They see unpolitically correct thoughts coming from 1,000 feet away, and they zap them off. That is bad for their intellectual development. But you know what it’s really bad for? Our democracy, our republic, if we can keep it. We’re not going to keep it.”

Wax, 71, grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, and her father had been a small-business owner who was a card-carrying member of the ACLU and a Republican, and her mother was more of a “left-leaning, bleeding heart Jewish woman.” Politics were not that important in the Wax home, in the same way that, for the great majority of Americans, there are much more important things to talk about: family, work, a book, the Yankees.

“It was fine to be in disagreement,” Wax recalled. “They agreed on basic values.”

She said her upbringing set the stage for a serious intellectual life—one that did not view political differences as a bad thing but an opportunity.

“I was in college in the ’70s,” she said. “That was a whole other world—and you know what, it was a better world. And why was it a better world? Because we could really explore ideas about really important issues of history, policy, politics, anything you could think of—science, the professions—across the spectrum. We were familiar with and we were exposed to a much broader range of ideas.”

She added: “I consider young people today in a kind of mental prison. They come into my Conservatism class—they’ve never heard of Frederick Hayek, they’ve never heard of Edmund Burke, let alone know what they had to say and the arguments that they made. They’re clueless. They’re totally clueless. They hear only one point of view.”

It could be that Wax made things especially hard for herself with her uncompromising position. She never apologized or backed down. In fact, she went on to double down on her comments. One month after her article ran, she appeared on a podcast with Brown University economist Glenn Loury, saying, “Here’s a very inconvenient fact, Glenn. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half.” In a 2019 speech, she lavished praise on Enoch Powell, saying that the British politician—widely regarded as a far-right xenophobe—was “a prophet without honor” who “argued that a large influx of non-Anglo and non-Western immigrants would sow division in Britain and undermine its core Anglo-Protestant culture.”

(Glenn Loury, one of a handful of black conservatives on campus who has challenged progressive orthodoxies about race, told me in an email: “I’m perplexed and outraged by Penn’s transparent railroading of Wax, using pretextual arguments to punish her for thought crimes.”)

In April 2022, Wax appeared on then–Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show and said “blacks” experience feelings of “resentment and shame” when comparing themselves to the white majority.

She also invited a far-right speaker to campus, and she was quoted as saying America would be better off “with more whites and fewer non-whites.” (When I asked Wax about this, she responded, “I never said that. I said we should have more cultural compatibility in our immigration. We should have fewer Third World peoples, because they’re harder to assimilate.”)

University administrators have also accused her of saying gay couples are unfit to raise children and Mexican men are likelier than whites to rape women.

To be clear, very few of these things were said inside a lecture hall.

But Wax appeared to enjoy provoking students and fellow faculty—although, she said, she’s not a fan of the word provoke, which she called a “lefty term.” Just like she doesn’t care for racist, the meaning of which, she said, is now unclear given how frequently it’s bandied about.

She never felt the need to censor herself, because she thought the university should be a place where one could debate the big issues of the day without fear of reprisal.

“These ideas are out there,” Wax said. She meant questions about U.S. immigration policy and racial differences and the root causes of poverty—all the bogeymen you were supposed to skirt in the lecture hall. “But they are absolutely banned from campus, and that’s not an education. That’s not preparation for the real world.”

The campus didn’t want to hear this, Wax said. It preferred to pretend that no one was saying or thinking these things, and it was perfectly content if it graduated young people who could not think critically.

The administrators at the University of Pennsylvania “don’t like me peddling my ideas to the students, who are craving them—well, some of them—by the way,” Wax told me. “They don’t like that I’m putting a little wedge in their closed universe.”