by Greg Piper
Six years after the University of Pennsylvania sanctioned a tenured law professor for allegedly lying about the academic performance of black students but never itself providing the supposedly correct figures, the Ivy League school seems to be daring another one to quit or sue.
Penn formally announced Tuesday it will suspend Amy Wax (pictured above) for the 2025-2026 academic year, claiming it’s not for her outspoken conservative views but rather “years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.”
The university upheld sanctions previously recommended by a Faculty Senate hearing board and affirmed as procedurally correct by an academic freedom committee. Wax will lose half her pay for 2025-2026, all of her summer pay “in perpetuity” and her named chair in the law school.
Also as recommended, Provost John Jackson issued a public reprimand against Wax, who must disclose in future public appearances that she’s not speaking for the law school or Penn.
He characterized Wax’s speech on contested issues as “your conduct,” which failed to convey “a willingness to assess all students fairly … leaving many students understandably concerned that you cannot and would not be an impartial judge of their academic performance.”
She is prohibited from “flagrantly unprofessional and targeted disparagement of any individual or group in the University community” as long as she remains faculty, Jackson wrote, implying she could still be fired.
The punishment seems likely to end up in court, given that Wax floated a defamation lawsuit when then-Dean Ted Ruger claimed she invented academic statistics by telling Brown economist Glenn Loury’s podcast she didn’t recall ever seeing “a black student graduate in the top quarter” of the law class and “rarely in the top half” in two decades at Penn.
She said she had discussed suing Penn with Paul Levy, an influential Penn trustee who resigned in protest of the initial sanction against Wax in 2018: barring her from teaching required first-year classes, as a student petition had demanded in part.
Speaking about academic performance by race is the third rail for faculty.
Georgetown Law fired a veteran professor, Sandra Sellers, for lamenting the “lower” performance of “a lot” of her black students each semester, in a Zoom call with a colleague she thought was private.
Wax first put a target on her back with students in 2017 by publicly praising “bourgeois values” in an op-ed. Local lawmakers showed up at Penn’s door in 2022 when Ruger said Wax’s views were protected by tenure, prompting his reversal by the end of their press conference.
In another interview with Wax this spring as her appeal was pending, Loury, who is black, said her flagged comments mirrored his own “demonstrable statements of fact or legitimate statements of opinion” on race, cognitive ability and social ills.
Penn’s basis for Wax’s punishment echoes that of another private university, Wisconsin’s Marquette, against the late John McAdams, suspending the conservative political scientist without pay indefinitely for more than two years for publicly criticizing a colleague who forbade a student from openly disagreeing with same-sex marriage in her class.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that Marquette violated its contract with McAdams by infringing on his academic freedom and that the faculty hearing committee that judged him was “infected” with “unacceptable bias” against McAdams, ordering his reinstatement “with unimpaired rank, tenure, compensation, and benefits,” as well as back pay.
Ohio University emeritus economist Richard Vedder, who served with Wax on the National Association of Scholars’ board, said he “suspected that Penn was deliberately prolonging the ordeal hoping that Wax, a septuagenarian cancer survivor, would simply retire.”
In an essay for the Independent Institute, where he’s a senior fellow, Vedder wrote that Penn is “punishing Wax to appease leftist faculty and students, but it is not firing her, hoping that will appease believers in academic freedom and the First Amendment.”
If that was Penn’s hope, it doesn’t appear to be working.
Free speech and academic freedom groups and advocates denounced the punishment and highlighted Penn’s perceived double standards, as did House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., in a letter in January contrasting “Penn’s failure to address antisemitism” with its crusade against Wax and “sanctioning speech it disfavored.”
As an organizer for the campus Palestine Writes Literature Festival a month before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel, Arabic literature professor Huda Fakhreddine invited a speaker from a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Fakhreddine celebrated the massacre by Hamas, The Washington Free Beacon reported.
Wax’s lawyer David Shapiro called out what he considered a “glaring double standard,” in an op-ed for The Daily Pennsylvanian at the time.
“If you are a Jew-hating and Israel-bashing propagandist, you can say anything and invite anyone you want to campus and you are protected by the school’s commitment to academic freedom,” he wrote in November 2023.
The university didn’t sanction lecturer Dwayne Booth “for his cartoons depicting ‘Zionists’ as Nazis who drink the blood of Palestinians,” Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium wrote, but rather invited Booth back to teach this fall after the media outlet publicized his cartoons.
Penn has offered “zero evidence Wax ever discriminated against her students” but pledged for years “it would find a way” to punish Wax for her speech, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Vice President Alex Morey said in a written statement.
“Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn’s willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor,” she said. Universities “need only follow Penn’s playbook.”
University spokesperson Ron Ozio provided a written statement and materials related to Wax’s discipline when Just the News asked about its allegedly disparate treatment of different viewpoints.
“Last year, a five-member faculty Hearing Board determined that Professor Amy Wax violated the University’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students,” he wrote. “These findings are now final, following a determination by the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility that the proper process was followed.”
Ruger ignored four years of requests for Penn’s own figures on black student performance, which could have been revealed in litigation and opened Penn Law’s admissions practices to scrutiny, to compare with Wax’s recollection.
He abruptly dropped the claim in his 2022 request to the Faculty Senate to “consider major sanctions” against Wax for her “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements,” which also included her view that America would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”
Wax has said she favors immigration from “first world” and Western countries for cultural reasons and objects to Asian immigration because of their “mystifying” support for the “pernicious” Democratic Party.
Jackson’s public reprimand implicitly acknowledges Wax did not make false claims. Her faulted conduct includes “breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after” Ruger told her it was a violation it says, referring to her podcast interview and subsequent remarks.
“I have no doubt” Wax will sue and “she will in the end prevail” in court, Princeton political scientist Robert George, who is promoting his new book with odd-couple colleague and independent presidential candidate Cornel West, wrote on X. He hopes “the magnitude” of her predicted legal victory will “deter this sort of behavior by other institutions.”
“Lawsuit chance here is higher than the chance a Penn professor isn’t conservative,” deadpanned former Trump administration Department of Education official Adam Kissel, also formerly of FIRE.
Wax is known for her hostility to the media. She denigrated this reporter in 2022 when asked how she read Ruger’s letter that seemed to acknowledge she didn’t invent academic statistics.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Wax responded to a phone call, “Please don’t call me.” Her lawyer Shapiro declined to comment to The New York Times.
Read the source documents:
SCAFR Report.5.29.23.pdf
2023.08.11_Decision of the President_Professor Wax (2) (1).pdf
Wax public reprimand.pdf
Almanac statement.pdf
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Greg Piper is an investigative reporter at Just the News.
Photo “professor Amy Wax” by Penn Law.
