Penn’s Punishment of Amy Wax

​The University of Pennsylvania is punishing law professor Amy Wax with suspension and half-pay for her off-campus speech.
 
Wax has reportedly said in a podcast interview that “as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.” She also reportedly said that “Given the realities of different rates of crime, different average IQs, people have to accept without apology that Blacks are not going to be evenly distributed throughout all occupations. They’re just not, and that’s not a problem. That’s not due to racism.”
 
Wax is certainly provocative to a fault. Some see her statements as Socratic provocation, others as racist. For these infractions in her speech outside of the classroom, Wax has been given that one-year suspension at half pay as well as stripped of an academic chair in her name.
 
What is our take? Let us quickly admit that our ideal law professor would not be such an academic version of Don Rickles. But two things bother us about this case.
 
First, does academia deal with troubling remarks with an even hand? Would anyone in today’s academy have raised an eyebrow if Wax had instead said that America has too many Jews influencing U.S. foreign policy? Or if she had called for the end of Israel, as some professors have done?
 
Compare Wax’s treatment to that of Carol Christine Fair, the Georgetown law professor who in 2018 called for conservative Supreme Court Justices to die “miserable deaths” while being laughed at by feminists as “they take their last gasp.” Fair called for the dead Justices to then be castrated and to have their corpses fed to swine. Fair tweeted that she was merely trying to provoke thought by making people “UNCOMFORTABLE.” Georgetown reacted by dispatching Fair on an international journey for “university research” while things cooled down. Fair is now back teaching at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service where, presumably, she is not making the men in her class UNCOMFORTABLE. By comparison, after scholar Ilya Shapiro issued an ill-worded tweet about President Biden considering only black women to fill a Supreme Court seat.
Georgetown responded by squeezing out Shapiro for an offer to lead the Georgetown Center of the Constitution.
 
Secondly, the principle of academic freedom should confer broad protection for speech outside of the classroom. The Academic Freedom Alliance recently warned against the dangers of this kind of “selective protection of academic freedom” and urged Penn not to sanction Wax. We agree. Penn’s Statutes of the Trustees permits discipline for “flagrant disregard of the standards, rules, or mission of the University, or the customs of scholarly communities.” The Statutes also say that “when speaking or writing as an individual, the teacher should be free of institutional censorship or discipline.” Wax’s provocations should fall well outside of the university’s wide standard.
 
Such controversies highlight the need for university and college leaders to quit hiding behind their desks and be bold in standing for free speech and academic freedom – even when it means defending the disagreeable.