A University of Pennsylvania law professor who once said the U.S. would be “better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites” was suspended this week following a two-year investigation into her long litany of incendiary remarks and incidents.
Amy Wax, 71, appealed the 2023 decision by an academic review board to sanction her for “a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status,” as well as “making discriminatory and disparaging statements targeted at specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify” both in and outside of her classroom.
But while the case was under appeal, Wax continued to court controversy.
Last November, according to the Daily Beast, she invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to speak to her class on “Conservative and Political Legal Thought.”
Taylor edits a publication that the Southern Poverty Law Center says “promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites.” It wasn’t the first time Wax had invited Taylor to speak to her students.
That initial invitation to Taylor kickstarted the university review.
Former Penn law school dean Theodore Ruger said in a 12-page report that Wax, a former assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General who has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court, “cross[ed] the line of what is acceptable in a university environment where principles of nondiscrimination apply.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports Wax is the first tenured professor at Penn to face sanctions in about 20 years. But she will keep her job following a one-year suspension at half-pay.
In a statement, the Ivy League university said Wax “engaged in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.”
The matter is considered closed and is not eligible for further appeal, university officials stated.
Wax first drew attention for a 2017 op-ed published in the Philadelphia Inquirer bemoaning the loss of America’s “bourgeois culture.” That same year, she told a New Yorker reporter, “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.”
Ruger removed her from teaching any required courses in 2018 because she commented on the “on the academic performance and grade distributions” of Black students in her classes.
But Wax was just getting started. As previously reported by Atlanta Black Star, a coalition of Penn students called for her dismissal after Wax said that the country would be “better off with fewer Asians” and that “Blacks” and Asians are resentful of “Western peoples’ outsized achievements.”
Later, in a sitdown with Tucker Carlson, she again disparaged Asians and called India a “s—hole.”
In a January 2022 interview with Canadian YouTuber Gad Saad, Wax claimed she was a “casualty in the culture wars.”
“What I see being said and done with respect to me is truly alarming,” she said. “It is a total repudiation of the very concept of academic freedom.”
Wax has also claimed she’s being singled out because she is Jewish, a charge supported by some key figures on the right.
“Penn has demonstrated a clear double standard by tolerating antisemitic … harassment, and intimidation, but suppressing and penalizing other expression it deemed problematic,” said Republican congresswoman Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, wrote in January.
Wax, whose suspension does not begin until after the current academic year, will be eligible to return to Penn following the 2025-26 academic year.
