A few weeks ago, at a National Conservativism conference in Washington D.C., one of the speakers, the University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, argued that the United States would be “better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the First World, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance.” Embracing this “cultural distance nationalism,” she continued, would be tantamount to “taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Conservatives should rally to this “best” policy, she said, rather than shrink from it for fear of being branded xenophobes or racists.
Her comments echoed previous remarks that have, in fact, led many to brand Wax herself as a racist. In a 2017 op-ed, Wax and a co-author argued, “All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” In a subsequent interview about the column and the controversy it spawned, Wax elaborated: “I don’t shrink from the word ‘superior’… Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” Minorities could “get ahead” in America, she said, if only they embraced Anglo-Saxon protestant bourgeois culture instead of their own.
Wax later declared, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half ... I can think of one or two students who’ve graduated in the top half in my required first-year course.”
Each of these statements was met with challenges to the accuracy of her claims, public condemnations from her dean and colleagues, and widespread calls for her dismissal.
Many have described Wax’s case as a difficult test of academic freedom and its limitations. It’s not. Tenure and academic freedom, as we currently understand them, were literally created in response to another prominent scholar’s getting canned for making inflammatory statements on race and immigration. That scholar was Edward A. Ross, and many of those troubled by Ross’s firing personally rejected — and even publicly repudiated — his views. Understanding why they nonetheless rallied in support of his academic freedom can provide important insights into the Wax controversy today.
In the late 19th century, Edward A. Ross was a pioneer in the fields of sociology and criminology and a professor at the nascent Stanford University. He was, like Wax, one of the most prominent scholars in his field. He also seemed to share a number of Wax’s views with respect to race and immigration.
He believed that whites were — in virtue of their culture and circumstances — superior to others. He held a restrictionist view on immigration. Ross was particularly averse to migrants from China and Japan, arguing that accepting large numbers of people from these countries would be tantamount to “race suicide” for whites — which would lead to America’s cultural, moral, economic, and geopolitical decline.
He frequently made his case at public events and, like Wax, often sought to provoke. “Should the worst come to the worst,” he allegedly said at one talk, “it would be better for us if we were to turn our guns upon every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores rather than to permit them to land.”
When these comments were reported in a local newspaper, Jane Stanford, co-founder of the university that bore her name, called for Ross to resign or be terminated. When a colleague protested, she fired him, too. This led to a wave of resignations from other faculty members, sparking perhaps the first major national public controversy about free speech, politics, and the academy.
The incident also spurred a wave of activism.
John Dewey was particularly troubled. In a series of talks and essays, he argued that professorial autonomy should not be contingent upon the whims of university administrators or trustees. The Columbia University philosopher rallied other professors to his cause, eventually leading to the formation, in 1915, of the American Association of University Professors.
Dewey served as the association’s first president. The organization’s top priorities were to strengthen and standardize tenure protections to ensure that professors (rather than administrators or trustees) played the central role in decisions to hire, promote, or dismiss faculty members.
The efforts by Dewey and his allies to realize these aspirations culminated in the landmark 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, jointly formulated by the AAUP and the then-fledgling Association of American Colleges & Universities. The statement has largely defined academic tenure — and academic freedom — in the United States ever since.
Dewey started a national movement to prevent what happened to Ross from happening to other scholars. This was not because he shared Ross’s eugenicist and restrictionist views — he didn’t. Dewey believed that all people were biologically equal. Although he viewed some groups as having cultural and technological advantages over others, he was also committed to closing those gaps. He likened racism to a “social disease” and in a 1922 essay titled “Race Prejudice and Friction,” he explicitly repudiated the anti-immigrant and anti-Asian sentiments espoused by Ross and his fellow travelers.
Nonetheless, Dewey was troubled by Ross’s termination because he recognized that it was dangerous for all academics — and harmful to the production of knowledge — if trustees, administrators, or public mobs were able to wield arbitrary power over professors.
In his view, faculty members should be able to follow the facts as they understand them, wherever they lead — and describe the world as they see it — even if it runs sharply against the ideological and political sensibilities of the people who run the universities, even if it cuts against trustees’ or donors’ material interests, even if the positions being advanced are unpopular with other academics or the public at large. Indeed, it is precisely in these instances where academic freedom matters most.
The protections originally built in response to Ross’s sacking were later evoked to defend socialist and communist professors during the Red Scare. They were central to civil-rights activism on campus, and for the establishment of fields like African-American studies. At every stage, people have attempted to censor scholars they disagreed with by appealing to the arguments now being marshalled against Wax. For instance, it was (and is still) argued that challenging white supremacy amounted, in practice, to fomenting racial hatred and division.
When the Temple University media professor Marc Lamont Hill argued for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” during a speech at the United Nations, he was accused of calling for the destruction of Israel. There were calls for his termination — a Temple trustee called these remarks “hate speech” and declared his intent to punish Hill. However, Hill was ultimately saved by the same tenure protections Wax is relying on today.
Many others are not so fortunate. In this sense, Wax’s critics have the issue precisely backward: The problem is not that Amy Wax is protected by tenure. The problem is that most other academics, especially women and scholars of color, don’t enjoy comparable protections.
Rather than trying to circumvent the protections afforded to Wax — which could make it easier to also terminate left-leaning scholars on political grounds — we should instead be working to shore up and expand tenure protections to cover a broader swath of the intellectual community. We should be working to complete Dewey’s project rather than dismantle it.
Musa al-Gharbi is a fellow in sociology at Columbia University and a senior fellow at Heterodox Academy.
