The University of Pennsylvania has made another serious error of judgment.
After several years of bullying her, the university took its campaign against law professor Amy Wax to a new level. It announced yesterday that Wax would be suspended from teaching during the 2025-26 academic calendar. For that period, she would also be put on half salary and permanently lose her named chair and her summer pay. She has also been directed: “that you note in public appearances that you speak for yourself alone and not as a University or Penn Carey Law School faculty member.”
These stipulations were made public in the Penn Almanac under the title, “Final Determination of Complaint Against Professor Amy Wax.” That statement begins with a declaration by Penn’s interim president, J. Larry Jameson, who cites the procedure that led to this outcome but then shifts the whole sorry business onto one of his immediate predecessors:
For the benefit of the University community’s understanding of the matter, I have elected to publish in full the decision by then President M. Elizabeth Magill to accept the recommendations of a faculty hearing board which found Professor Wax responsible for major infractions of University behavioral standards and recommended the imposition of major sanctions, along with a timeline of the case appended to President Magill’s decision. As Interim President, I am confirming and implementing this final decision.
Wax’s troubles at Penn date back to August 2017, when she co-authored a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Paying the Price for Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.” In it she argued that having and raising children in stable families and prioritizing values such as obeying the law and paying your way are the best ways to ensure the welfare of all Americans. The article underscored:
The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.
These words provoked a strong reaction among some progressive faculty members and students in Penn’s law school and set in motion several years of confrontation between Wax and the then-dean of the law school, Theodore Ruger.
Wax did not back down. Rather she continued to make public statements that Ruger and others declared were unacceptable. The details of this long-running dispute would take too long to recite here, but some of the more prominent accusations can be found in the New York Times’ and Inside Higher Ed’s accounts of Penn’s punitive actions.
Amy Wax has served on the NAS Board of Directors since 2014. In 2018, NAS awarded her its Peter Shaw Memorial Award for Academic Courage. She has written for our journal, Academic Questions. In August, she spoke on an NAS panel, “Wax, Weiss, Widdowson: This Time It’s Personnel,” which can be watched here. Her presentation deals with the current controversy.
Penn’s retribution against Wax for exercising her academic freedom has brought forward several important statements about free speech including one from FIRE and an article on Minding the Campus from Richard Vedder.
We can add to that the National Association of Scholars is outraged—though not at all surprised—by Penn’s action. Penn like a lot colleges and universities these days cowers in the shadows of progressive political orthodoxy. When accusations fly that someone has transgressed by saying something counter to the ruling victimologies, the guardians of institutional sanctity (or sanctimony) must rush to make clear that they share the collective gasp. How can this thing be tolerated? It can’t. We must act. How? Never mind individual rights and due process. A pretext is needed, and a pretext will be found.
Wax has been found to have transgressed on virtually every protected category known to what now passes as the civilized order. She criticized her school for racial double standards, which, in Dean Ruger’s eyes, violated the privacy of students whose mediocrity was an important state secret. She dared to say that the sky-high illegitimacy rate in black communities has significant consequences for black children. She criticized immigration policies that bring in large numbers of people who have little or no intention to assimilate culturally into the United States. Along the way, she found ways to irritate gays, Muslims, and women.
Those who take the time to dig out Wax’s actual statements will find a writer who has sensible criticisms of various public policies along with a certain swagger that grew the more she was told, “You can’t say that.” She could and she did, setting up the current collision. I know Amy, and I believe she welcomes this opportunity to establish that academic freedom is real. Penn is the transgressor, and it will take someone of Wax’s courage to drive the point home.
I could stop there, but I think it is worth returning to interim president Jameson’s blame-shifting statement announcing the punishments. He says he is “confirming and implementing this final decision,” i.e., it isn’t really his decision but that of his predecessor, Liz Magill. Why is her name so familiar?
Magill’s decision in the Wax case came a few months before her resignation in December 2023, following her disastrous testimony to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. On that occasion, Magill could find no clear grounds for considering calls for the mass murder of Jews as a violation of the university code of conduct. “It depends on context,” she stated.
That context included her reticence following a backlash against a literary festival in September 2023 which celebrated Palestinian writers known for virulently anti-Semitic provocation. And it included her anemic response to pro-Hamas demonstrations following the October 7th massacre in Israel. Magill had been appointed Penn’s president in 2022, and in little over a year in office, she had demonstrated her eagerness to appease whatever radicals on campus were making the most noise.
The radicals’ discontent with Amy Wax preceded Magill’s appointment. Still, she brought it to a boil by staging a tribunal where Wax’s enemies could unload their accusations on her outside any real judicial setting. Wax did have the benefit of an attorney, but when he tried to introduce me as a witness, the tribunal said, “No.” The outcome of this faux-judicial proceeding was set in advance.
Interim president Jameson probably realizes this “final decision” is not that. Wax will bring the matter to a real court, and Penn will find itself in a deeply embarrassing situation, having violated numerous contractual obligations. We will see how that plays out.
Wax's various statements on race, gender, ethnicity, immigration, inculturation, and other matters were entirely within the zone of academic freedom. This case should never have reached a tribunal, let alone the punishments that have been meted out. It is testimony to the mal-administration of Penn that it went so far. Penn has struggled under administrators who seem unable to maintain a community of open inquiry and civic order, and who instead promoted riotous dissension, anti-Semitism, and an environment that was (and may still be) threatening to students and faculty alike.
That some members of the Penn community disagree with her views does not make those views "unprofessional." It merely shows that the University of Pennsylvania has lost the thread of how to sustain intellectual diversity on campus.
I am proud that Amy Wax serves on NAS’s board. She has made herself a test case of fundamental principles. That takes courage, and that’s a quality she has in abundance.
Photo by the National Association of Scholars.
