Cameron Henderson
01 October 2024 12:32am
A professor suspended for making comments deemed racially offensive has claimed she was targeted for expressing “anti-woke” opinions.
The University of Pennsylvania law school has suspended Amy Wax, a law professor, for a year with half pay after she was accused of making racist, sexist and homophobic remarks.
The allegations against Dr Wax include that she said that “on average, blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites”, that the country would be “better off with fewer Asians” and that “women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men”.
She is also alleged to have said that some non-Western countries are “s—holes” and that adverts depicting “black men married to white women in an upper-class picket-fence house” are unrealistic.
However, Dr Wax has dismissed the allegations of abuse or discrimination against students as “totally bogus and made up”, telling the New York Sun they have “been fabricated and tacked on as a cover for penalizing me for standard-issue, conservative anti-‘woke’ opinions and factual observations that are not allowed on campus.”
Dr Wax, who once invited a white nationalist to speak to her class, added that she was committed to exposing students to “opinions and viewpoints they don’t want to hear” and said she feared campuses like Penn were “raising a generation of students who can’t deal with disagreement”.
Disciplinary proceedings were first launched against Dr Wax in 2022, when Ted Ruger, the Penn Law School dean, demanded a “major sanction” be imposed against the professor for showing a “callous and flagrant disregard” for university standards with her “incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements”.
White supremacist
The 12-page charge sheet noted that Dr Wax in 2021 invited “renowned white supremacist” Jared Taylor to speak to her class. It came after the professor gave an interview to the US journalist Tucker Carlson in which she claimed that black Americans and “non-Western groups” were resentful towards “Western people.”
Dr Wax’s views have long sparked controversy. In 2018, she was removed from teaching first-year students after the law school dean accused her of having spoken “disparagingly and inaccurately” about the performance of black students.
Then in 2021, a student petition calling for her to be sacked reached 2,500 signatures after she said that “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration”.
Following nearly two years of deliberation, involving more than 700 pages of transcript and 70 exhibits, a five-member hearing board ruled in June 2023 that Dr Wax had “committed a major infraction of the university’s behavioural standards,” according to a letter from Liz Magill, the former Penn president.
The board said Dr Wax had displayed “flagrant unprofessional conduct that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal opportunity to all students to learn from her”.
‘Discriminatory and disparaging’
It found she had a history of making “sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status”.
In addition, Dr Wax was accused of breaching student-teacher confidentiality by publicly speaking about the average grades of law students by race, and making “discriminatory and disparaging statements,” some in the classroom, “targeting specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify”.
Dr Wax, a multi-award-winning professor with degrees from Yale, Oxford, Harvard and Columbia, appealed the decision, claiming that the sanctions were based on “vague, novel, and undefined allegations of offences”.
However, the university said last week in a notice posted in its almanac that the board’s ruling had been upheld.
Responding to the ruling, Provost John L Jackson Jr said that academic freedom “is and should be very broad” but teachers must convey “a willingness to assess all students fairly” and must not engage in “unprofessional conduct that creates an unequal educational environment”.
Mr Jackson added that Dr Wax’s conduct left many students “understandably concerned” about her being able to impartially judge their academic performance.
David Shapiro, Dr Wax’s lawyer, told the campus newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, in November last year that officials propped up their case against Wax by throwing in “a handful of isolated, years-old allegations [which are highly contested]” about alleged interactions with “a few minority students”.
The law professor has not been fired or stripped of her tenure, but has been told she will lose her named chair and summer pay, and must note in public appearances that she speaks for herself, not as a university or law school member. The decision will come into effect from 2025.
Following the announcement, Dr Wax said she intended to stay at the school as a “conservative presence on campus”, adding that her treatment amounted to “performance art” that underscores the fact that the university “doesn’t want conservatives like me on campus”.
Alex Morey, a campus advocacy lead from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the ruling against Dr Wax represented a dangerous erosion of academic freedom.
“Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn’s willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor.” Mr Morey said. “After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook.”
Penn State’s treatment of Dr Wax will fuel allegations of double standards, after the university hosted a Palestine Writes literature festival in September, which critics say included speakers with a history of making anti-Semitic remarks.
The university also came under fire last year for resisting calls to discipline faculty members for allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and for its delay in removing a pro-Palestinian encampment that was allowed to remain in situ for more than two weeks.
Virginia Foxx, the Republican congresswoman who leads the House Education and Workforce Committee, previously said: “Penn has demonstrated a clear double standard by tolerating anti-Semitic … harassment, and intimidation, but suppressing and penalising other expression it deemed problematic.”
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