The charges against Wax started in March 2018. She was relieved of some teaching duties after she voiced a politically incorrect observation during an interview with a professor from Brown University. After Wax said she has never seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, Ruger then barred her from teaching mandatory first-year civil procedure law class, and she is not allowed to serve on any committees. She was labeled as a “racist, xenophobe, white supremacist.”
Wax’s grievance states: “Dean Ruger’s decision to seek major sanctions against Prof. Wax undermines the integrity of the Law School and the education offered thereby signaling to the entire University community that dissenting views will not be tolerated and will potentially be met with adverse consequences, including exclusion from the University.”
What Wax Is Facing
Wax said she is not sure what results to expect after filing the grievance. “The complaint is really unprecedented. It’s a new thing to complain, so comprehensively and aggressively, about a professor just due to their opinions,” Wax said.“My dean is seeking major sanctions, that can be anything from a slap on the wrist, to stripping me of tenure and my job, it can be anything at all. So that’s in the hands of the committee that is supposed to hear my case, and ultimately, the president of the University.”
Wax objects to what Ruger is doing to her, saying “I deny that I’ve done anything wrong.”
“That’s just 100 percent antithetical to everything law school is supposed to stand for professors who are independent-minded, who think for themselves, who present many different sorts of arguments which students have to deal with and are going to have to deal with in their future life,” she said.
Wax has a tenure contract, but she wants to know what tenure means, and what tenure protects, as it is an issue that is crying out for clarification.
“I have a lot of support from my family and a few close friends also who have been very loyal to me. And so that does help me. But at the end of the day, this is a lonely fight. It is. One person saying no to the zeitgeist, and that always gets you in trouble.”
Loss of Academic Freedom
Wax believes that the loss of academic freedom is mainly because of a “woke takeover.” She said: “it is part of this so-called woke takeover of the academy. It is proceeding a pace across many fronts in law schools and universities generally and undergraduate education and graduate education, in medical schools.”The term “woke” is used by both liberals and conservatives to describe a number of more radical progressive ideologies, including critical race theory, social justice, and gender theory.
Wax said: “The radical Professoriate ‘Tenured Radicals’ (Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education), as Roger Kimball puts it, and they have enshrined in the university, these Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bureaucracies, which are massive, enormous, powerful, and super expensive. And they control every aspect of the university, admissions curriculum, who gets hired, who gets promoted, what is taught.”
“Those ideas and those dogmas also affect accrediting institutions,” Wax said. “The institutions who are brought in from the outside to tell us whether a university is meeting the standards that they have set down, most of which have to do with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, not knowledge creation, not truth, not preserving our heritage for future generations, none of that traditional stuff ... But a university to get accredited has to go along with these far-left notions.”
Wax continued: “to enshrine Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion sounds wonderful, but in fact, is hideously pernicious as the top priority of our institutions. All those other priorities are going to be shunted aside.”
Wax said she sees it every day within the university.
“I hear the rhetoric. I understand what people are saying: tests are no good; merit is a delusion; it’s a white conspiracy; racism is everywhere; we have to put forward black people and other lagging minorities; no matter what, single standard is racist; colorblindness is racist; we have to have double standards.”
Supporting Academic Freedom
Organizations like the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment charity) are trying to push back against Wax’s charges, which violate the principles of academic freedom.“The AFA calls upon the leadership of the University of Pennsylvania to reaffirm and adhere to its free speech principles by making clear that Professor Wax will not be sanctioned in any way for her constitutionally protected speech.” Keith Whittington, chair of the Academic Committee at Academic Freedom Alliance, Wrote to Penn president Amy Gutmann in January 2022.
AFA is a non-profit organization formed by college educators to defend free expression. Its website states: “An Attack on Academic Freedom Anywhere is an Attack on Academic Freedom Everywhere.”
Paul S. Levy, wrote to Penn president Gutmann, resigning as trustee emeritus and a Law School overseer, on April 6, 2018, because “the treatment of Amy Wax is unacceptable.”
“I hope you bear in mind what universities like Penn are essentially about. Their highest goals are the pursuit of knowledge through debate and discussion and the defense of the ideal of free expression,” Levy wrote at the end of his letter.
Wax said some of her students told her: “What they’re doing to you is a warning, it’s a warning to us, keep your mouth shut.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Ruger and Gadsden, but they did not respond by publication time.
