Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by City Journal on February 26, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
At American colleges and universities, radicals are harassing the few remaining dissenters into retirement. The most notable case is that of Amy Wax, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), whose career has now been capped by a suspension and demotion. How it happened tells us much about the corruption of academia.
This story began in 2017, when Wax and San Diego Law professor Larry Alexander published an opinion essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.” That culture, Wax and Alexander wrote, was characterized by its work ethic, respect for law and authority, civic-mindedness, and patriotism. It was sustained by the two-parent family, because single-parent children were more prone to “academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.” The loss of bourgeois values had been especially damaging to disadvantaged groups, and the authors blamed “academics, media, and Hollywood,” who they urged to “relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden.”
In just a few sentences, Wax and Alexander struck at everything the campus Left holds dear. Bourgeois values are the chief impediment to radicals’ ambitions. The nuclear family is a conduit for traditional American values, so campus activists hate it. Minorities, progressives believe, are permanently handicapped by racism and oppression. Wax and Alexander’s assertion to the contrary—and their defense of traditional values—infuriated leftist faculty.
Demands for Wax’s firing came rapidly, with a petition calling for her ouster. Penn initially took no action, however, because the essay was clearly protected speech. For the next five years, Wax continued to criticize campus orthodoxy sharply and relentlessly. Finally, the pressure on Penn officials became unbearable, and they folded.
Two disciplinary procedures exist for Penn faculty: one for academic issues, and the other for behavioral, mostly criminal, matters. Cases involving academic matters are heard by a standing committee of the faculty member’s school, in this case the Law School, whose membership is fixed in advance and thus cannot be manipulated. By contrast, the non-academic cases go to a hearing committee specially constituted for the case. Wax’s dean, Theodore Ruger, incorrectly initiated the second procedure, and that opened up the possibility that the committee’s membership could be slanted against Wax. What then happened is certainly dubious: of the six people involved—five committee members, and the person who chose them—no less than three were from the School of Education—a department certainly less likely than most to sympathize with Wax.
[RELATED: Penn’s Shameful Sanction of Amy Wax: A Blow to Free Speech and Academic Freedom]
Ruger’s charging memorandum opened with a heated personal attack on Wax, accusing her of “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements.” But it was soon obvious that his dispute with her was really about her skeptical attitude to radical dogma. He found sexism in her view that women and men have at least some different abilities. Saying as much is tantamount to a crime on campus, but it’s an issue on which reasonable people hold a range of views. (Why are no females on the latest list of the world’s 100 top-rated active chess players, for example?) Similarly, Ruger found racism in Wax’s view that black students are less prepared than whites because of affirmative action. But isn’t that the very definition of affirmative action? Ruger never compellingly addressed the obvious question: Aren’t these statements protected speech?
Ruger even included allegations that he had apparently not bothered to verify. Citing a student’s complaint, Ruger accused Wax of stating in class that “Mexican men are more likely to assault women.” But Wax had been citing the opinion of a juror in a case that she had been teaching to make a legal point.
What happened next illustrates the kangaroo court quality of the proceedings against Wax. The hearing board is in principle a neutral body that evenly weighs the arguments of the prosecution and defense. It must take each alleged offense individually, assess the arguments of one side against those of the other, and explain who, in its view, prevails.
Yet the hearing board’s report does not even mention the defense’s strong rebuttal arguments. For example, Wax’s team showed that she was citing, not expressing, the opinion that Mexican men assault women. Nonetheless, the hearing board repeated and credited this accusation—and every other—as if no rebuttal had ever been heard. Hearing committees are required to explain their reasoning, but that can’t happen without an appraisal of the defense’s case.
Worse still, the board rewrote the charges. The dean had proposed four charges; the board’s job was to address those, and only those. Instead, the board’s report lists three charges, none as stated in the dean’s charging letter. One of them, concerning Wax’s supposed “dereliction of her scholarly responsibilities,” was completely new. A charge never presented at a hearing deprives the defense of any opportunity to offer a rebuttal. The hearing board evidently had no idea what it was doing and no conception of its proper role. In effect, the kind of hearing required by Penn’s rules never happened.
The board’s new charge took aim at Wax’s scholarly competence, with disastrous results. It declared her guilty of “sweeping and unreliable conclusions,” “uncritical use of data,” “unfounded declarative claims,” and “unsubstantiated statements.” In spite of the plurals, only one example was given for each accusation, and the board provided no explication of the examples, which don’t even appear in the body of the report. In each case, we are referred to a footnote, which then shunts us to the appendix, where we find statements allegedly made by Wax listed without analysis.
None of the examples is persuasive. The example of Wax’s alleged “unfounded” statements is her saying that not all cultures are equal “in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” That sounds like a truism. The example of her “uncritical use of data” is her opinion that black students are less well prepared because of affirmative action. But the Dean’s original charges had used this instead as an example of Wax’s racism. Was the board trying to repair his case, having realized that his version wouldn’t fly? But theirs won’t, either. The “mismatch” theory to which Wax implicitly refers is well supported.
Faced with a bizarre radical orthodoxy, Amy Wax forthrightly challenges its every feature, and she does not mince her words. That’s exactly what Penn needs at this time: it should have more like her. The university’s trustees have already intervened once recently, ridding the school of a foolishly woke president. They should step in again now to stop this once-great university from disgracing itself.
Image: Penn campus Bryan Y.W. Shin on Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
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