Amy Wax Needs Your Help

I believe Professor Amy Wax of University of Pennsylvania Law School is the bravest, most outspoken dissident academic in America today. She has said countless sensible things about race, immigration, the sexes, and Western Civilization, but what seems most to outrage the Left is that she never backs down.

Every time an academic is made to grovel for saying something obviously true, it’s a defeat for all of us. Penn Law has clearly decided to make an example of a woman it cannot silence. It has initiated a rarely used procedure to revoke tenure and fire her. She is fighting for her career and her reputation, but she is fighting for much more: the right for all of us to speak the truth as we see it.

Amy Wax needs your help. Defending against this attack is now a full-time job, and Prof. Wax must spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Penn Law, of course, is full of lawyers eager to take the scalp of a “racist,” and will not stop until it is decisively defeated. Please see below how you can contribute.

The law school has been complaining about Prof. Wax for years, but now Penn Law School Dean Theodore Ruger is making a formal attempt to fire her. In a June 23 letter, he asked the chair of the Faculty Senate to convene a hearing board with the power to dismiss her. The 12-page letter is worth reading carefully. It is a classic expression of the bigotry that rules virtually every American institution and will be a document future generations read with horror. In just the second sentence, it explains that Prof. Wax’s crimes are “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements.”

Dean Ruger goes on about “pervasive and derogatory racism and sexism” (the derogatory kind, not the nice kind), “stereotypical, demeaning, and false statements,” and concludes that “Wax’s statements are a persistent and tangible reminder that racism, sexism, and xenophobia are not theoretical abstractions, but rather real and insidious beliefs in this country and on our campus.” She is such a danger, she must go.

Last year, Penn Law hired Daniel Rodriguez, former dean of Northwestern University Law School, to draw up a catalog of Prof. Wax’s sins, and this year, it hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to find victims of her awful behavior. Here’s a tiny sample of what it found: She reportedly said to a black student, “If blacks really and sincerely wanted to be equal, they would make a lot of changes in their own conduct and communities.” She reportedly told a Hispanic student that “Hispanic people don’t seem to mind living somewhere where people are loud,” and is said to have noted that “women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men” and “less intellectual than men.”

What appears to be the professor’s blackest crime was to invite me to lunch and to give a talk to one of her classes:

Finally, Wax’s decision in 2021 to invite a renowned white supremacist, Jared Taylor, to be the featured guest speaker in a regular meeting of her Law School course, and to have Taylor as her guest at a lunch with her students who were expected to attend, crosses the line of what is acceptable in a University environment where principles of non-discrimination apply. Although faculty members have broad discretion in their teaching and academic pursuits, Taylor’s explicit racism, hate-speech, and white supremacy contravenes the University’s express policies and mission, and his white supremacist ideology has been associated closely with those perpetrating violence towards minorities in this country and others. In both promoting this ideology herself, bestowing an honorific guest lecturer role on Taylor, and importing his views into our curriculum, Wax has caused profound harm to our students and faculty, and her escalating pattern of behavior raises risks of increased harm and escalating damage going forward.

That’s from page 1. I reappear on page 6, where someone named Apratim Vidyarthi, who wasn’t even in the class, spoke for all non-whites when he explained that “Taylor’s invitation on-campus felt ‘not just demeaning’ but ‘threatening’ to any student of color.”

The course was called “Conservative Political and legal Thought,” and the class to which I spoke was “The U.S. Radical Right.” The dean should be pleased Prof. Wax persuaded someone highlighted in Oxford University Press’s Key Thinkers of the Radical Right to speak to her class, but no. She is no longer “fit to perform the minimal requirements of the [her] job.”

Dean Ruger appears to have forgotten that in 2015 — 14 years into a distinguished career at the law school — Prof. Wax won the prestigious Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, based on her record in class and the opinions of admiring students. Not even hostile deans and outside lawyers could find a single example of classroom incompetence or unfair grading.

The purpose of this procedure against her is obviously to stamp out dissent. Penn Law wants to muzzle Prof. Wax, end her career, and ruin her financially. This is not just one woman’s fight. If the bigots can crush a widely published, highly regarded, tenured professor at one of the nation’s top law schools they can silence anyone.

Professor Amy Wax

Prof. Wax started with a GoFundMe account, but — true to its contemptible record — it froze her account. It is now unfrozen, but if you’d rather take no chances and want to avoid GoFundMe’s fees, the Palm Beach Freedom Institute has set up a defense fund. Please send a generous check made out to the institute, specifying that it is for the Amy Wax Defense Fund. Here is the address:

Palm Beach Freedom Institute
249 Royal Palm Way, Suite 301
Palm Beach, FL 33480
Attn.: Robert N. Allen, Jr.

This is a fight we must not lose!