UPenn Law Professor Amy Wax is back in court. Last week, she filed a second lawsuit against the University, this time before a Pennsylvania state judge.
This new complaint strikes at her core conflict with the school, alleging Penn breached the academic freedom provisions of her employment contract when it punished her last year for expressing her conservative views.
When we last checked in on the outspoken law professor, a federal court had dismissed her earlier discrimination lawsuit against Penn, where she argued the school applied a double standard, tolerating antisemitic speech while punishing her protected speech. Wax’s lawyers are appealing the decision, with briefs due next month.
If you’ve been following our ongoing coverage of Wax’s saga, you knew she wouldn’t back down:
Wax’s travails with Penn, to recap briefly, began in 2017, after she triggered the woke campus mob by unapologetically expressing traditional American values in an op-ed. As soon as the attacks against her started, she doubled down, persistently and publicly commenting on hot-button topics such as the negative consequences of affirmative action—observing that Black students “rarely” finish “in the top half” of their law school classes—and immigration restrictions.
Rather than engage her in discussion and debate, students and faculty demanded from an all-too-willing Dean Ruger that the award-winning, tenured law professor be fired for being a “racist.” Wax’s remarks escalated student protests and a petition for her removal.
Wax’s later comments that America would be better off “with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration”—because Asian immigrants support the Democrat party responsible for ruining the country—prompted swift condemnation from the dean, and finally gave him the pretext to begin proceedings to terminate her.
Those proceedings began in 2022 and dragged on relentlessly—even as Wax battled cancer—culminating in the school’s decision last September to sanction her “for a major infraction of the university’s behavioral standards.”
The school said Wax’s “discriminatory and disrespectful statements to specific targeted racial, national, ethnic, sexual orientation, and gender groups with which our students and colleagues identify” created “an unequal learning environment.”
Earlier this year, Wax sued Penn in the Eastern District federal Court of Pennsylvania after it refused to lift the sanctions, which included suspension for one year at half pay, loss of her named chair, and public reprimand—though she was not fired and did not lose tenure. That lawsuit was dismissed, though an appeal is pending.
In the new state court filing, Wax’s lawyers allege Penn punished her for her extramural (i.e., off-campus) comments—comments on podcasts and in op-eds that should have been protected by the academic freedom enshrined in the Faculty Handbook.
According to the complaint, Dean Ruger’s attorneys told the school’s disciplinary Hearing Board that Wax should be sanctioned “to make a very clear statement” that her “racist” and “xenophobic ideology is not who we are. It’s not who we want to be, and we will not tolerate it.”
However, the Faculty Handbook states that “[w]hen speaking or writing as an individual, the teacher should be free from institutional censorship or discipline.”
Tenured professors can only be suspended for a “major infraction” of university behavior standards. It is a punishment specifically limited to “actions”—not speech that is merely offensive, the lawsuit adds.
Penn also violated Wax’s contractual rights, the suit alleges, by denying her basic fairness and due process during the disciplinary proceedings.
According to the court filing, the sanctions imposed on Wax were based not on actual student testimony or evidence, but rather on allegations by Dean Ruger.
Wax disputed the allegations as based on “unsupported accusations from students who did not testify, did not submit to cross-examination and, in some cases, did not even submit an affidavit,” depriving her of the opportunity to confront and question her accusers directly.
Wax’s state court case also alleges that Penn selectively enforces academic freedom by allowing antisemitic speech while punishing her protected speech. That double standard shows its failure to apply contractual protections to Wax.
Wax’s lawyers have asked the court to block the sanctions and award her damages.
In the end, “Penn wanted Professor Wax punished for her public statements,” the lawsuit says, pointing to the dean’s lawyer’s closing argument “that there’s certain expression . . . that is so discredited, so far outside of the mainstream, so outside of acceptable discourse . . . that it should not be protected, should not be tolerated, and it should be the subject of major sanctions.”
In other words, Wax should be punished for challenging the woke campus orthodoxy.
And that, as her lawyer said from the beginning, is what makes Wax’s case “sui generis”: The University was trying to fire a tenured professor for her speech.
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