Embattled UPenn Law Prof Amy Wax Sets the Record Straight: “mainstream media coverage has been agenda-driven”

Embattled UPenn Law Prof Amy Wax Sets the Record Straight: “mainstream media coverage has been agenda-driven”

Last week, a family friend—a prominent, politically conservative, with-it lawyer—came over to talk during a visit to the West Coast. I was anticipating my next Amy Wax update, so I decided I would pick his brain: What does he think about the embattled UPenn Law professor, facing termination and loss of tenure for her outspoken rightwing opinions?

Wax, LI readers will remember, first triggered the woke campus mob by  unapologetically expressing conservative views in a 2017 op-ed.

Rather than engage her in discussion and debate, students and faculty demanded from an all-too-willing Dean Ruger that she be fired for being a “racist.”

It was not long before the dean caved to the students’ demands and took up their cause in the conflict that escalated as Wax continued to voice her unorthodox views over the years. Finally, as we wrote here, last 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 termination.

Our lawyer friend follows her story, which we’ve covered from the beginning:

• Students Demand Denunciation and Investigation of Professors: 1966 China or 2017 U. Penn?
• Academic Freedom Alliance Comes to Defense of U. Penn Prof Amy Wax, Who was Threatened With Sanctions For Wrongthink
• Paul du Quenoy: Penn Law Professor Amy Wax Deserves Our Support
• Roger Kimball: “for stating such obvious truths” Prof. Amy Wax “is being dragged into the Star Chamber at Penn”
• How A Weak Penn Law Dean Weaponized Student Hurt Feelings Against Dissident Prof. Amy Wax
• U Penn Law Prof. Amy Wax Seeks Dismissal Of University Disciplinary Proceedings: “Premature, Unwarranted, and Prejudicial” 
• Tables Turned: Prof. Amy Wax, Charged With Wrongthink, Files Counter-Grievance Against U Penn Law Dean
• It “Sucks” That Prof. Amy Wax Still Employed, U Penn Law Dean Declared On Recently Released 2019 Audio

And he agrees with her views, including her “third-rail” observations about racial disparities:

“When she says that black students rarely appear at the top of the class,” he confided, “everyone knows it’s true—but, you just can’t say these things to students.”

Our friend is not the only one who believes Wax crosses the line when she says what she thinks out loud. Of all the charges leveled against her, that one has given pause even to one of her warmest supporters, Brown University professor Glenn Loury.

And less sympathetic critics like Columbia University professor John McWhorter say that Wax’s incendiary comments about race send a message to minority students that “You don’t belong here”:

Here she is, saying actual obviously racist things right in front of them. … How can [we] expect students not to feel that they’re being judged. … How do they participate in discussion? It’s gonna throw them.

It is one thing to think it, or even write it, McWhorter explains, but another to say it. Amy says it.

But did she, in fact, make the statements alleged by Ruger? As we wrote here, Wax and her lawyer say the dean’s charges against her are so vague and incoherent and ripped out of context, they can’t tell what they are. And 95% percent of them, Wax says, are based on extramural speech—speech that is fully protected under her tenure contract.

Meanwhile, an “agenda-driven” media repeats the allegations, condemning her in the court of public opinion before her case is adjudicated by the Faculty Senate. And the University denied her the opportunity to be in the room, much less respond, when students aired their grievances against her. No wonder that our West Coast friend and others like McWhorter have already convicted Wax before she has even been tried.

Wax Tells Her Side of the Story

At a webinar sponsored by FIRE earlier this month, Wax addressed the most egregious statements alleged by Penn Law’s Dean Ruger and featured in a recent New York Times article:

• “You only got into Ivy League schools because of affirmative action“

Wax denies that she told a student (who graduated more than ten years ago) that she only got into Ivy League schools because of affirmative action. But, she asks, even if she had, what would be so “racist, so traumatizing, so harmful” about it? If affirmative action is an acknowledged good, necessary to achieve diversity, why is it “racist” to say a student benefitted from it?

• Gay Professor Accuses Wax of Homophobia and Bigotry

Penn Law Professor Tobias Wolff accuses Wax of homophobia and bigotry, she says, because of negative statements she made about gay marriage. But as Wax explains, context matters. The statements he objects to were made at an academic panel at Penn Law that took place before the United States Supreme Court decided Obergefell (requiring states to recognize gay marriage).  She was invited to present arguments from one of her scholarly articles about gay marriage, including the implications for children who would not be raised by their natural parents.

Ten years later, Wolff claims that he is personally offended. Wax isn’t buying it:

Tobias Wolff is trying to turn a valid academic presentation into an instance of bigotry. Should we allow him to do that? Consider the consequences. … Academic presentations [will] have to be submitted for approval. … Perhaps Tobias Wolff would supply us with a list of the arguments that are allowed to be made and not allowed to be made. … Do we really want to live in that world?

• At an unspecified event where students gave their names, Wax allegedly said to one of them, “Finally an American. That’s a good thing.”

Wax says there are very few details about when and where the gathering took place at which she is accused of saying, “Ah, finally an American. That’s a good thing.” Nor does she remember it. Students were supposedly going around the room saying their names, and Wax says she has a history of “mangling exotic names.” So her remark might have been: “Finally an American name,” an expression of relief at being able to pronounce it. By dropping one word, Wax says the allegation misrepresents her true intent. Still, she denies making such a “flippant” remark.

Wax says the dean’s charges are baseless and she’s prepared to fight them to the finish. If she prevails, she says it will be a victory not only for herself, but for the “integrity of free speech and free inquiry within the University.”

Too Many Accusations

As the FIRE webinar drew to a close, an anonymous professor brought the meeting back to the core question: Can we believe Amy Wax when so many students have claimed to be “hurt,” “traumatized,” and “harmed” by her?

Like our lawyer friend, the professor has already made up her mind:

I don’t believe … Amy Wax … I would have believed her if these accusations had occurred one to three times, scattered upon the decades. Yet the accusations are not that. They are everywhere. I read the [University’s] letter on Ms. Wax and there are too many accusations.

But that is exactly the kind of witch-trial evidence admitted by the court in Salem, where basic rules of fairness yielded to hysteria. In those notorious cases, each of the individual accusations of witchcraft, standing alone, were “trivial; but there being such a course of them, it made them the more to be considered.” The Salem witch trials ended badly for the 19 blameless victims sent to their deaths. And they marked the total breakdown of the rule of law in colonial Massachusetts.

Wax says her case is part of a broader project, and she fears the same demise of the rule of law today:

Make no mistake, the wokeistas want to get rid of that rule. Their ultimate agenda … is to bring down our entire system of safeguards … of proof, of evidence, of rigor, of logic, of consistency, of due process, of the adversary system … all of those precious parts of our glorious legal system which is the envy of the world. Their goal is to demolish it … because [it is] ‘racist.’

If you believe the piling on of accusations without proof is enough to fire professors with unpopular views, Wax says, “then you are part of that project.”

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