Wax’s disciplinary hearings involved ‘weepy 30-something graduates’ complaining about things Wax had allegedly said years earlier, she told NR.
In September, the University of Pennsylvania’s campaign against Amy Wax culminated in the school imposing sanctions on the controversial law professor after years of disciplinary proceedings.
The penalties included a suspension from teaching for a year, at half pay, revocation of her endowed chair, and an end to her summer pay in perpetuity. Theodore W. Ruger, the former dean of Penn’s Carey Law School, had argued that Wax had entertained “incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic” ideas that created a hostile environment in which students feared that she would discriminate against them.
Wax’s punishment was announced after an onerous three-day hearing, in which students testified to her alleged “inequitably targeted disrespect,” Wax told National Review. Abuse of students was added as a charge just before the hearing.
“These had these very weepy, 30-something graduates, from Penn complaining about something I supposedly said ten years ago, 15 years ago,” she said.
Wax could have avoided the entire ordeal had she agreed to the university’s demand that she sign a non-disparagement agreement. Wax argued it was comprehensive, far beyond a standard nondisclosure agreement, barring her from revealing anything about her experience with Penn since the disciplinary process began.
“So I said to myself, ‘I’m not signing that.’ Period. I don’t care what they do to me.”
Wax has not yet filed a lawsuit against Penn, the possible threat of which was involved in the bargaining process. But now that Penn has announced the sanctions against her, she said legal action is currently in the planning phase.
Under Penn rules, the faculty senate can convene a hearing board at the request of a dean if a faculty member is believed to have committed behavioral infractions, such as failing to show up for class.
“But not on the list is, ‘You upset students with your opinions, you talked, as you’re entitled to do of course, to the media, and said things that the students don’t like,’” Wax said, adding that this was the crux of the complaint against her.
Objections related to speech are typically put before the law-school committee on academic freedom and responsibility or the senate committee on academic freedom and responsibility. But Ruger, who left in July of 2023, insisted that Wax was engaging not in speech but in prohibited conduct.
“People went along with it, which is astonishing because it’s pure sophistry,” she said. “It’s sort of a collective delusion. As a result, they got to bypass the proper procedures.”
Wax was charged with abusing and discriminating against students. Penn commissioned an outside investigation and report by Dan Rodriguez, a professor at Northwestern, who found no evidence of discrimination, noting that Penn has blind grading. Penn hid that report from her, Wax said. She said she heard about it from Rodriguez eight months later.
“Last year, a five-member faculty Hearing Board determined that Professor Amy Wax violated the University’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students,” a Penn spokesperson said in a statement. “These findings are now final, following a determination by the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility that the proper process was followed.”
A significant portion of the hearing, according to Wax, involved listening to dredged-up anecdotes from years ago that allegedly revealed her racial insensitivity. A former student, an African-American woman, accused Wax of using the word “negro” in a civil procedure class because she was reading from a case that described a witness as a “negro male.” In her class discussion of Denman v. Spain, an obscure 1961 Mississippi case, Wax argued that the racial description suggested that his testimony could have been given less weight. The student waited until after class to take action, complaining to her adviser, an African-American professor, and the Black Law Students Association.
“They spent like 40 minutes on this at the hearing, and it wasn’t in the written charges,” Wax said. “You can’t even read from a case without putting your head in the guillotine.”
Penn president Liz Magill resigned following a congressional interrogation of her alleged mishandling of antisemitism on her campus after the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. After October 7, a cartoonist in Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, Dwayne Booth, created cartoons that depicted virulently antisemitic stereotypes, such as Jews drinking Palestinian blood and running concentration camps.
Penn’s interim president, J. Larry Jameson, issued a statement in which he called the cartoons “reprehensible.” But a few sentences later, he said that his hands were tied by academic freedom.
“At Penn, we have a bedrock commitment to open expression and academic freedom, principles that were unanimously reaffirmed last week by our Faculty Senate Executive Committee,” Jameson said. “We also have a responsibility to challenge what we find offensive, and to do so acknowledging the right and ability of members of our community to express their views, however loathsome we find them.”
Wax was not shown the same tolerance.
“I personally think these things are protected, but is that less offensive than anything I said?,” Wax asked. “What were they punishing me for? Something they made up, called ‘inequitably targeted disrespect.’ Well, if these cartoons aren’t inequitably targeted disrespect, I don’t know what is.”
That the pro-Palestinian protests demanding the violent reconquest of Israel “from the river to the sea” were considered unobjectionable while Wax’s “standard-issue conservative” remarks were punished demonstrates Penn’s double standard, she said. “The crusade has been simmering all along. From the time I wrote my innocuous op-ed about bourgeois values in 2017, there are people there that would oppose my appointment, who didn’t like it that I was on the faculty.”
Wax’s op-ed argued that the deterioration of certain cultural norms — having and raising children within wedlock, prioritizing education to secure gainful employment, having a strong work ethic, and practicing patriotism — led to societal decay and an unhealthy obsession with identity politics.
“All cultures are not equal,” Wax wrote. “Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.”
The op-ed ignited a backlash on campus fueled by activists and abetted by administrators: The Black Law School Association scoured the internet for dirt on Wax, with encouragement from certain faculty, she said.
Wax later wrote an article about Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Claremont Review of Books. But when quotes from the article were added to Penn’s public tribute to Ginsburg following her death, students bullied the administration to take them down.
“The students keep it alive,” Wax said. “And they’re expert at doxxing people and finding stuff on the internet and expert at lifting soundbites that totally distort what you say.”
At a luncheon years ago, Wax went around the room and asked students their names. Many foreign students were there. A student complained afterward that Wax said to a student, “Oh finally an American.” Wax insists she actually said, “Oh finally an American name.”
“I’m really bad with foreign names, and I need to work on that, which is a totally different statement of course,” Wax said. “But just leave off a few words, and there you go, I’m a xenophobe.”
After Jameson took over as president of Penn, Wax asked him whether she might be able to expedite the disciplinary process. That led to more than three months of settlement talks.
While Wax herself is paying a steep price for her disfavored ideas — the loss of summer pay will cost her an estimated half a million dollars over the remainder of her career — it’s Penn students who are really losing.
“My entire orientation in this matter . . . has been, what has been the effect on the student, on coming generations?” she said. “About whom I can tell you Penn does not give a damn. How is this going to affect our students and ultimately our democracy, where people are going to disagree? They can’t be demonizing their opponents, and that is what they’re being taught to do.”