Penn’s Shameful Sanction of Amy Wax: A Blow to Free Speech and Academic Freedom

An extraordinary scholar and polymath, Amy Wax, has been formally sanctioned by the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), although not fired, as many of her detractors attempted to do.

Professor Wax has earned degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Columbia, including an M.D. in neurology, in addition to her law degree. She has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court. I have been impressed with Wax’s extraordinary acuity while serving with her on the board of the National Association of Scholars (NAS).

Penn is stripping her of her title—Robert Mundhein Professor of Law—and cutting her pay, presumably ending a years-long battle. I suspected that Penn was deliberately prolonging the ordeal hoping that Wax, a septuagenarian cancer survivor, would simply retire.

What is her sin? Did she steal money? Have an improper relationship with a student? Issue heinous attacks on individual colleagues? No, her cardinal sin was that she expressed her opinions on issues of the day that were not in accord with those of Penn’s woke supremacy.

For example, she once stated in class that her black students, over the years, typically were weak academically and decidedly below average. That may have been an impolitic thing to say, but it was absolutely correct, given Penn’s use of racial criteria in admission standards.

Wax’s other commentary was often irritating to the Penn community.

For example, she suggested that she believed that Western civilization was superior to others prevailing in other parts of the world. To Wax, the rest of the world has been trying, with varying degrees of success, to emulate it.

It is rich that one of the persons leading the charge against Wax was Elizabeth Magill, herself a lawyer and former Penn president, who resigned under pressure for a seeming unwillingness during congressional testimony to explicitly condemn anti-Semitic, non-peaceful demonstrations on her campus by pro-Palestinian protesters. Magill infuriated a broader public in parroting the campus party line, leading to major donors pulling millions of dollars of support from the university.

University presidents have tended to accede to the demands of leftist faculty and students in order to maintain campus peace. But in doing so, they violate behavioral norms expected in American civil society, including a respect for the First Amendment. Groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, NAS, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni protested vehemently and frequently to Penn’s persecution of Wax, to no avail. One group that apparently became concerned was Penn’s governing board or some members of it.

Universities live in two worlds: the woke leftist academic world and the real world, on which they depend for financial sustenance. Typically, the real world largely leaves the Academic World alone, grudgingly providing it with financial support. But that is changing.

Acts like shouting down federal judges—think Stanford—and denying distinguished scholars the right to speak at many schools are going too far, and hateful anti-Semitic demonstrations go well beyond the limits of tolerance. It starts to hurt reputationally—Ivy League Penn ranks below non-Ivies schools such as Duke, Northwestern, and Cal Tech, as seen in the latest U.S. News rankings. I suspect Penn is losing both donors and top student applicants. Trying to enforce a campus leftist political ideology, acceptable in 1970 Soviet Russia, is completely inappropriate in contemporary America.

Penn is trying to have it both ways even now. It is punishing Wax to appease leftist faculty and students, but it is not firing her, hoping that will appease believers in academic freedom and the First Amendment. This is an unprincipled response unworthy of a great educational institution. It is completely incompatible with the thinking of Penn’s founder, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote, “Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.”

It is time for some adult supervision of universities. And that supervision appropriately belongs in the hands of an efficient and meaningful governing board, a group of maybe nine to twelve trustees who share affection and dedication to the institution they serve. They need to subdue attempts to prevent universities from engaging freely in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, while promoting robust but civil discussion of the issues of the day.