Penn Professor Amy Wax Punished for ‘Inconvenient Facts’

The beginning of the end of law professor Amy Wax’s career came on August 9, 2017. That’s when Wax and another law professor, Larry Alexander, published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer declaring that “all cultures are not equal.”

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The thesis of the 827-word piece was that some people—“working-class whites” with “antisocial habits”; “inner-city blacks” with their “anti-‘acting white’ rap culture”; and Hispanic immigrants who resist assimilation—are at a profound disadvantage in the game of life. This, they argued, is why we should all embrace a 1950s-style “bourgeois culture” that smooths over differences, paving the way for greater national cohesiveness.

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The article ignited a neutron bomb at the University of Pennsylvania, where Wax had been a tenured faculty member since 2001, having previously taught at the University of Virginia and worked in the Solicitor General’s office, arguing fifteen cases before the Supreme Court. The graduate students union called it “hateful and regressive.” {snip}

As far as Wax was concerned, all this amounted to rank hypocrisy among her bourgeois colleagues. “All my colleagues follow all those rules, so why are they attacking them?” she told me. {snip}

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When I asked Wax for her reaction to the sanctions, she laughed. “What do you think my reaction to it is? I think that our country and our university system are deteriorating in a very serious way. It’s becoming Third World.”

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