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It “Sucks” That Prof. Amy Wax Still Employed, U Penn Law Dean Declared On Recently Released 2019 Audio

It “Sucks” That Prof. Amy Wax Still Employed, U Penn Law Dean Declared On Recently Released 2019 Audio

Audio confirms Wax’s firing was a foregone conclusion; it was just “gonna” take some time declared Dean Ted Ruger At Law Student 2019 Townhall Meeting.

The audio recording of a 2019 University of Pennsylvania Law School “town hall” meeting where students urged Dean Ted Ruger to fire outspoken Professor Amy Wax was released earlier this week by the Washington Free Beacon.

We featured the story of how Dean Ruger caved to the students’ demands this past summer.

And we have covered Wax’s conflict with Penn Law from the very beginning:

Wax’s battle with the University began when she triggered the woke campus mob by  unapologetically expressing conservative views in a 2017 op-ed. The students tried for two years to get her fired for her controversial opinions. But despite their best efforts (or perhaps because of them), Wax was still there at her desk in 2019.

That September, to address the “Amy Wax situation,” the group called a special “town hall” meeting. Only students were invited, to the private meeting, no faculty, to speak openly amongst themselves about her sins against them.

The town hall meeting was a 90-minute whining session with the dean:

At the meeting, one student complained:

Her language “makes it hard for all students in this room to thrive.” It “fuels … hate crimes” and “puts many of the people in this room at risk,” accusing the dean of legitimizing her comments by failing to fire her. “If you care about the health and wellbeing of our student body, especially students of color, why does Amy Wax continue to work here?  What’s taking so long?” he demanded of the dean. [2:03 -2:27]

Another student pleaded:

“This is having a severe impact on our student body. And why does it have to be the onus of the students … to be starting this process to get somebody out of here who is physically and emotionally harming all of us?” [2:50-3:02]

Dean Ruger made sure the students knew he shared their outrage:

“Her presence here…makes me angry, it makes me pissed off,” [0:22] he said, adding that it “sucks” [32:17] that she was still there. When students talked about wanting to fire her, he said, apologetically, that “the only way to get rid of a tenured professor is this process…that’s gonna take months.” [3:28]

If there was ever any question that the dean is biased against Wax—as her lawyer later argued in their legal memorandum seeking to disqualify him as a Charging Party in the proceedings against her—these comments captured in real time should put it to rest.

As we reported over the summer, it was not long before the dean took up the students’ cause in the conflict that escalated as Wax continued to voice her unorthodox views over the years.

This past June, he submitted a letter to the Faculty Senate calling for a review of Wax’s conduct for violation of University policy under the Faculty Handbook and a “major sanction,” including possible loss of tenure and termination. The letter initiated the ongoing proceedings against her.

Wax and her lawyer, David Shapiro, say the University is trying to fire Wax, who is a tenured professor, for her speech.

In the most recent and potentially game-changing development, they hit back by filing a Grievance against Dean Ruger with the school’s Grievance Commission. The dean’s charges, they argue, “are nothing more than an attempt to use the sanction process … as a means of punishing and silencing the most powerful dissenting voice on campus and preventing students from being exposed to important conservative ideas.” If Wax and her lawyer succeed in moving the proceedings to the Commission, Dean Ruger will be forced to finally prove his case against her—or drop it.

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Comments

Glenn Loury even turned her in, when he was more woke years ago. Loury had given a talk deploring how many blacks were then in prison, and Amy Wax raised her hand and said that she though more blacks ought to be in prison.

Now they’re on the same side, more or less, except about details.

    stella dallas in reply to rhhardin. | February 18, 2023 at 11:53 am

    Glenn Loury is not a paragon of virtue. Ever wonder why he would leave a tenured position at Harvard and then leave another one at BU and then move to Brown?

      Insufficiently Sensitive in reply to stella dallas. | February 19, 2023 at 6:42 pm

      Glenn Loury is not a paragon of virtue. Ever wonder why he would leave a tenured position at Harvard and then leave another one at BU and then move to Brown?

      Maybe because he sees opportunities he likes? Maybe because he owns himself and makes good decisions that you don’t like? Exactly what’s un-virtuous about that?

    artichoke in reply to rhhardin. | February 20, 2023 at 3:38 pm

    Glenn Loury just says enough to appease the right. He’s now their favorite. But put a white face on him and the same words, and it would be nothing special. He’s not taking on the civil rights industry, nor does he want to.

How dare you have an opinion!

    guyjones in reply to geronl. | February 16, 2023 at 10:28 am

    An opinion that diverges from and that rejects Dumb-o-crat orthodoxies, to be clear. It’s okay to have an opinion that’s in perfect alignment with the Dumb-o-crat ethos and playbook. Then, you’ll be safe from the Maoist thug mob.

Amy Wax – a profile in courage

Dean Ruger – a profile in putty

    SeiteiSouther in reply to fscarn. | February 16, 2023 at 10:03 am

    Jell-O has more structural integrity than Ruger.

    This woman is quite accomplished and intelligent. UPenn should be delighted to have her on staff. A medical doctor,* a lawyer, a professor, a writer.

    * A real doctor, the kind with an MD degree, not the phony kind like “Doctor” Jill Biden.

    Count on Wiki to slander the intelligent and observant, “She [Wax] has often made remarks about non-white people which have been described as white supremacist and racist.”

    Those remarks also happen to be true.

    Charles Murray in his Facing Reality (1921), “The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.”

    Mich in reply to fscarn. | February 17, 2023 at 9:11 am

    She is rare among men and women in her courage. I hope she wins and then sues the bastard. The worse rise to the top because they are basically unprincipled and will do what they think will protect them. I know I’m just sick of college students and their ideas. Defund the college instead of the police.

WildernessLawyer | February 16, 2023 at 9:32 am

You would think a law school dean would know enough not to admit to a room full of people that the proceeding against Wax is rigged. Amy Wax should send him a thank you basket.

    He’s scared of the paying customers (law students pay a lot) just like the president at Evergreen State a few years ago.

    He admits at 8:00 that they might not be able to remove Amy Wax. But he’s vowing to do alternative forms of wokeness to compensate.

    At 15:00, he admits that if he says “Amy Wax should be fired” he’s unable to participate in the attack on her, and maybe nobody would push it. But since he basically did imply that, shouldn’t this whole proceeding be nixed?

    The demanding tone of these students, rather than buckling down and trying to do better on exams, is amazing.

And these students are only there for a very few years. Somehow they manage to get through it and leave.

Dean Ruger’s language makes him sound like a gutter dweller.

And, bear in mind that many of the attorneys being churned out at UPenn, Columbia, NYU and the rest of the Leftist attorney mill will become future judges, corporate counsels and law firm partners, where they’ll continue to practice and spread this same utterly corrosive, vile, totalitarian and Maoist suppression of, punishment of and purging of, dissenting viewpoints, and, continue to bully and vilify the people who hold those views — this time, from positions of undeniable power and influence.

    Another Voice in reply to guyjones. | February 16, 2023 at 5:17 pm

    I want to think, hope, that when in the course of going out into the real world, these wokes’ will still find there is a level of accountability to earning a paycheck or creating a career on merit. Life is not college, a business, as in all those who were fired at Twitter, laid off by Google, Amazon and Meta have come to find out. There won’t always be a ‘pandemic’ with full government back-up funding. That they too may well be at the time in their life of paying rent/mortgage, buying groceries and supporting a family. If not with another, at least for themselves. And in the middle of ‘Adulting’ find the generation after them, turning on them for having created the worst environment that ever was. A what goes around comes around when they have an epitome of what they embraced. Utopia is not in the cards.

      artichoke in reply to Another Voice. | February 20, 2023 at 3:54 pm

      Being a leftist is very helpful esp. in the woke legal profession. They might survive better than conservatives with objectively far better legal skills.

      There’s been a change in what sells. I would like to see a proper study on this, but I suspect those people with “woke” degrees are doing pretty well economically, at least compared to their actual ability to do anything beyond recite wokeness. And we know that’s not too hard e.g. Rachel Dolezal and others had no problem pulling it off for years.

This is what happens when Professor Wax, a champion of merit and free speech, is being pilloried for doing her job of awakening students to the demands of the real world and there is a move to terminate her employment by a woke law school that is affiliated wih a university that accepted millions of dollars in donations by CCP members.

May Professor Wax be granted a speedy recover from her medical conditions

What did Amy Wax do? She expressed her opinion in an article:

“Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills.”

What’s wrong with that? It’s true isn’t it?

What’s wrong is, people of color think they are talking about them. “If you care about the health and wellbeing of our student body, especially students of color, why does Amy Wax continue to work here?”

    Paula in reply to Paula. | February 16, 2023 at 11:47 am

    Yes, it’s all true. Well, what should we do? Are we we going to fix it? Hell no. We’re going to fire Amy Wax for talking about.

    inspectorudy in reply to Paula. | February 16, 2023 at 5:41 pm

    Of course, it’s true, but since when has truth been held up as the goal of any debate? Just pick one of the things she said and try to make sense of the policies that ignore it. Diversity is the number one goal of every leftist in America but the crime stats show that may be one of the worst goals ever. Suppose you have a nice middle-class school where the big crime is smoking or some other non-life-threatening rule breaker. Throw in a group of inner-city black kids and watch what happens to your nice middle-class school in a matter of weeks. This is a fact but it is not mentionable in public. Who knows the cause of that problem? The professor was trying to address that but the triggered students didn’t want to hear it.

Them’s that can teach, teach.
Them’s that can’t, administrate.
Them’s that can’t administrate, teach “studies” courses….

Pathetically weak students afraid of their shadows and a dean, filled with malice, that coddles them.

    The students don’t sound afraid to me. They sound aggressive in demanding something other than what we used to call merit.

    And the dean doesn’t just coddle them, he works for them.

    The inmates have taken over the asylum. Good to hear Jacobson is still at Cornell until he retires.

Sadly, you end up with a lot of lawyers running law schools, still advocates, for what they’re told to advocate. Can’t really blame them. There’s good money in it, and it beats working.

It depends on what you want: get an advocate for teh feelz on the cheap, or an academic to learn new stuff, so you can do better using it. Administration is in the middle, doing stuff by the numbers because we know of stuff that come out better done that way.