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The University of Pennsylvania has imposed punishments on law professor Amy Wax after a lengthy, faculty-led process.
In what may be the end of a years-long case over whether traditions of academic freedom protect speech that’s widely deemed racist or otherwise demeaning to students and others, a controversial law professor who has publicly declared that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites” is being punished.
After years of clamor over Amy Wax’s inflammatory statements and writings about Black Americans, Asians and others, the University of Pennsylvania has now publicly reprimanded her ahead of docking her pay. Some of Wax’s fellow faculty members handed down the sanctions, which have now been approved by both the past and current interim presidents of the Ivy League institution.
Despite persistent calls for her firing, Wax, who declined comment Monday, isn’t losing her job or her tenure. She’s been a Penn law professor since 2001.
But she is being suspended next academic year at half pay and will lose her summer pay in perpetuity. Further, she will no longer be honored as the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law—she’s losing that named chair. She was also publicly reprimanded today and must note in future public appearances that she speaks only for herself and not the university or law school.
Wax’s comments and the university’s efforts in recent years to punish her attracted both national media attention and calls from free speech and academic freedom advocacy organizations not to sanction her.
Wax has a long history of offensive statements. The Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper has reported that she’s repeatedly invited a white nationalist to speak to one of her classes, including last fall.
Theodore W. Ruger, the former dean of Penn’s Carey Law School, said the university already removed Wax from teaching any required courses back in 2018. That was after Wax commented “on the academic performance and grade distributions of the Black students in her required first-year courses,” Ruger wrote in 2022 to the then-chair of Penn's faculty senate.
Ruger's letter suggested that Wax’s speech had finally caught up to her. The dean specifically cited the white supremacist invitation as crossing the line and started a disciplinary process that could’ve led to Wax’s firing. “For at least a decade, Wax’s well-known and escalating conduct, some examples of which are outlined below, has created an environment where students, faculty and staff believe they would be subjected to Wax’s discriminatory animus,” Ruger wrote to a former Faculty Senate chair.
The former law school dean alleged that Wax hadn’t just made controversial public statements. Ruger said she told a Black student that “she had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” and she also said in class that “gay couples are not fit to raise children” and that “Mexican men are more likely to assault women.”
Ruger also alleged, among other things, that Wax told a Black faculty member that it’s “rational to be afraid of Black men in elevators.” He also cited some of Wax’s public statements, including that she allegedly said, “Given the realities of different rates of crime, different average IQs, people have to accept without apology that Blacks are not going to be evenly distributed through all occupations.”
The dean accused Wax of “incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements” and added that “Wax’s pervasive and derogatory racism and sexism expressed in public statements, taken together with her behavior in the classroom, leads reasonable students to conclude that they will be judged and evaluated based on their race, ethnicity, gender, national status or sexual orientation rather than on their academic performance and ‘true merit.’”
He called for the Faculty Senate chair to convene a hearing board to consider sanctioning Wax. That happened, but the case dragged on for two years. Some free speech and academic freedom organizations have defended her academic freedom all along the way.
Deferring to Faculty
In May 2023, about a year after Ruger’s letter started the process, five tenured professors hearing Wax’s case unanimously decided on the punishment she ultimately received. That’s according to an August 2023 letter from then–Penn president Elizabeth Magill on her own decision in the case.
Magill said those professors deemed that Wax engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct” that didn’t “offer an equal opportunity to all students to learn from her.”
“That conduct,” Magill wrote, “included a history of sweeping, blithe and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status.” She said Wax’s conduct also included “breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private.”
Magill wrote that it’s “long-standing policy” at Penn “that allegations of an infraction of university behavioral standards by a faculty member are to be adjudicated by faculty peers.” Magill wrote that she could depart from the faculty hearing board’s ruling only under “exceptional circumstances.” She identified none, upholding the punishment.
Magill herself would go on to resign from the university herself after her widely panned, televised responses to congressional Republicans’ questioning over her handling of reported antisemitism on campus. Not long before that congressional hearing, David Shapiro, a lawyer who represented Wax during the hearing process, publicly accused Magill and Penn of hypocrisy for how they treated controversial pro-Palestinian speech compared to Wax’s speech.
Wax appealed the rulings against her. In May, Penn’s Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility upheld the rulings, saying its own limited duty “is to determine whether there has been ‘a significant defect in procedure,’” and it found none. Finally, in a letter dated today, university provost John L. Jackson Jr. told Wax that “Interim president J. Larry Jameson confirmed and is implementing the final decision” and “the matter is now concluded.”
Eric A. Feldman, current chair of the Faculty Senate, wrote in an email that he couldn’t discuss the case because he was on a committee involved in it. But he added, “I do want to emphasize that this has been a faculty-driven process and that the decision in the case was reached after a significant amount of faculty time and thought, and is in accordance with the process set forth in the Faculty Handbook.”
In a March interview with Glenn Loury, a Brown University economics and social sciences professor and senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, Wax said she was being punished for “standard conservative takes on very important social issues” and called the university’s actions “bullshit.” She said the hearing board report, which she referred to as both “brazen and absurd,” indicates “there is one and only one set of very narrowly defined statements or opinions that one can make about these sacred, protected groups—and Blacks of course being the main sacred, protected group.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression continued defending Wax Monday, calling for Penn to reverse its punishment.
“Simply calling a faculty member unprofessional, absent serious misconduct like sexual misconduct and research fraud, it’s not enough” to warrant this punishment, said Zach Greenberg, a First Amendment attorney at FIRE. He said academic freedom is meant to protect controversial speech and viewpoints “even when they may offend others.”
“If there is evidence that her grading is based on race or other improper factors,” Greenberg said, “Penn has not shown that.”
