Another Year, Another Controversy Over Penn’s Grenade-Throwing Legal Scholar. How Will This One Play Out?

As a legal scholar, Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania gets decidedly polarized reviews. As a rhetorical grenade thrower, however, she clearly aces, becoming a conservative icon while putting Penn in a very uncomfortable position.

The latest ruckus stems from a talk she gave at a mid-July National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Edmund Burke Foundation.

“Let us be candid,” she reportedly said during a panel discussion. “Europe and the First World, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white for now. And the Third World, although mixed, contains a lot of nonwhite people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”

Vox’s Zack Beauchamp reported those and other remarks, sparking a petition by Penn law students and alumni, among others, accusing Wax of racism and demanding that she be relieved of all teaching duties. She had already been barred, in 2018, from teaching any mandatory courses in the first-year curriculum after disparaging, in an interview with the Brown University professor Glenn Loury, the performance of Penn’s black law students. (It was not only the insult of her remarks but the falsity of them that were cited by the law school’s dean, Ted Ruger, in making the decision to curtail her teaching duties.)

In 2017 she took heat for a co-written op-ed arguing that “all cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.”

Initially, a conference organizer challenged Beauchamp’s reporting, but other reporters backed him up. The Edmund Burke Foundation had not released a transcript as of Wednesday. Wax herself, reached by phone, said that “nobody has a complete transcript” and that “the vast majority of people who weighed in were not even at the conference.” Asked if she had prepared notes that she could share to shed light on the matter, she said she did have such notes but would not share them.

“I’m kind of under deluge right now. Everybody has contacted me. The New Yorker wants to interview me,” she said, but declined to comment further, describing The Chronicle as a “totally lefty publication” and saying she had “gotten burned by publications like yours before.”

Before the 2018 restriction, Wax’s teaching load included a first-year course in civil procedure and a yearlong seminar in conservative legal and political thought. Last year she taught the full-year upper-level elective seminar on conservative legal and political thought. Both spring semesters, she also taught an upper-level elective on legal remedies.

Ruger said in a written statement about Wax’s latest remarks: “At best, the reported remarks espouse a bigoted theory of white cultural and ethnic supremacy; at worst, they are racist. … Such views are repugnant to the core values and institutional practices of both Penn Law and the University of Pennsylvania.”

Wax will take a planned sabbatical this coming year but told Bloomberg Law by email that she had “no plans” to leave Penn permanently. “The students need me,” she wrote Bloomberg. “When I’m gone, the place goes full North Korea. (It’s 95% there).”

Richard Seamon, a professor of law at the University of Idaho, is a friend of Wax’s who worked with her several decades ago in the U.S. solicitor general’s office. Wax is, he said, “probably one of the most intelligent people I have ever known” and “a very original thinker.”

Seamon said her outlook had been informed by her professional history. Before getting her law degree, she earned a medical degree and worked as a neurologist. Over a lunch, he recalled, she once told him that one of the things that burned her out in medicine was patients’ seeking care for conditions that “were really largely the result of their own poor health choices” — smoking, poor dietary habits, and the like. Some government policies don’t necessarily encourage people to take control of their own lives, and that led Wax to feel, Seamon inferred, that “maybe she wasn’t accomplishing much as a doctor … seeing the same patient a dozen times for the same problem.”

He said that she had chafed in the solicitor general’s office at having to argue the official line. (She argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court.) “She resists categories,” he said. “The current level of public discourse just really doesn’t permit an adequate expression of her views, and unfortunately she’s become fodder for this ridiculous naming and blaming and shaming.”

He said that legal academia is “accurately portrayed as overwhelmingly leftist,” and that the prevailing idea of Wax as a proponent of white nationalism “is absurd and wrong, and anyone who knows her would tell you the same.”

“I consider Amy Wax to be in the absolutely finest tradition of higher education. She’s willing to speak truths that no one wants to hear.” But, he said, “Amy to some extent has already been marginalized, it seems to me.”

Loury, of Brown, said the Penn law dean’s decision to limit her from teaching mandatory first-year courses was “outrageous.” She is not a racist, Loury said, but “she is a racial provocateur … she does take some relish in pushing the envelope.”

A Penn law colleague of Wax’s, who spoke to The Chronicle on the condition of anonymity, said that faculty members were unhappy about the effect the cycle of Wax controversies is having on Penn law school’s brand. The law school is reproached on the left for putting up with her provocations and on the right for not defending them better.

The colleague said faculty members hope Wax will take a job with a right-wing think tank or in some other way depart. The university could try to buy her out, the colleague said. It’s unlikely Penn would fire her unless students found her so racist that she could no longer be effective in her job, the colleague said. Even then, since Wax has tenure, such a tactic would be dicey.

Musa al-Gharbi is a senior fellow at Heterodox Academy, an academic group that promotes a diversity of viewpoints on campuses. Heterodox Academy, he said, believes that whether from the right or the left, public denunciations and attempts at punishing academics for their speech are generally less productive and less fair than good-faith arguments.

But speaking not as a representative of Heterodox Academy but from his position as a graduate fellow in sociology at Columbia University, al-Gharbi said Wax was making it harder for Penn and her supporters to defend her. The idea that people in Western countries value democracy, pluralism, liberalism, and the rule of law while people in other countries don’t is “somewhat empirically dubious,” he said. And as a public intellectual, he said, Wax has a responsibility to make her arguments clear to a broad audience. By repeatedly failing to do so, he said, she makes it difficult to extend “the benefit of the doubt.”

Anita L. Allen is Penn’s vice provost for faculty, overseeing hiring, promotion, tenure, and retirement in all 12 of its schools. She also taught in the law school for 15 years. She agrees that faculty members worry about how the Wax controversies affect the law school’s reputation, but she stresses that the university takes academic freedom and freedom of speech very seriously. When faculty members make remarks counter to the university’s values, colleagues may find those remarks repugnant, she said. But in her 20 years at Penn, she knows of no faculty member who was ever fired or saw their position eviscerated for such statements.

Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.