Amy Wax Has Become a Right-Wing Troll. But Her Punishment Is Wrong.

On racism and academic freedom.

(Composite / Photos: C-SPAN / Getty Images)

THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA’S DECISION last week to punish tenured law professor Amy Wax with a one-year suspension and other sanctions for what her defenders call controversial opinions—and her detractors call racist hate speech—has been widely criticized as an egregious assault on intellectual freedom. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) calls the sanctions “chilling”; two other groups that represent academics across the political spectrum, the conservative-dominated Academic Freedom Alliance and the politically idiosyncratic Heterodox Academy, have joined in the condemnation. Meanwhile, some on the left cheer what they see as a bigot’s overdue comeuppance, and some on the right hail Wax as a brave truth-teller. Still others caution that while the university unacceptably targeted Wax for her opinions, some charges against her may involve actual misconduct toward students.

What ultimately emerges from an attempt to dig through the murky and complicated facts is an all-too-familiar story: that of a once-acclaimed conservative scholar on the path from heterodoxy to crackpottery and from outspoken to deliberately offensive. It is also one of those cases in which supporters of academic freedom must defend the right to express odious views without sugarcoating their odiousness.¹

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WAX, WHOSE 2009 BOOK Race, Wrongs, and Remedies argued that legal and social remedies for the effects of racial oppression had done all they could and the rest was up to black self-improvement, has had a thorny reputation at Penn going back many years.² In the post-2014 climate of heightened sensitivity to social justice issues, it was probably inevitable that Wax’s politics would cause a larger ideological conflagration at the school.

A major flareup came in August 2017, following the publication of an op-ed Wax co-wrote that lamented the post-1960s breakdown of America’s “bourgeois culture.” While acknowledging the reality of racial discrimination, sexism, and “pockets of anti-Semitism” in the 1950s, the article argued that progress didn’t require the dismantling of norms like hard work, marriage, patriotism, and civility. Many of its claims were certainly open to criticism, but the ensuing backlash from students and faculty was less criticism than public shaming: it included accusations of “promoting hate and bigotry” and even comparisons to the white supremacist rally that same month in Charlottesville, Virginia. The dean of Penn’s law school, Theodore Ruger, suggested Wax take a leave of absence and stop teaching a mandatory first-year class to tamp down the outrage; she refused.

The firestorm resumed a few months later when Wax’s critics discovered a YouTube video of her discussion of affirmative action with black conservative scholar, author, and podcaster Glenn Loury, to whom Wax claimed she had never “seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class and rarely, rarely in the top half.” Dean Ruger publicly castigated Wax, saying that her statements were both inaccurate and a breach of confidentiality, and in March 2018, she was removed from the required first-year course.

Wax reached new levels of notoriety with an incendiary speech at the inaugural National Conservatism conference in July 2019. Proposing that America should drastically curb “Third World” immigration because of cultural incompatibility, she unabashedly stated that this “means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Therefore, Wax argued, conservatives won’t be able to advocate for culture-based immigration restrictionism until they stop deferring to taboos against “racism, white supremacy, [and] xenophobia.” (Translation: let’s stop being so squeamish about racism.) She also praised Donald Trump’s infamous remark about taking in “people from shithole countries.”

Wax’s rapid ideological descent is remarkable: In the two years since her controversial op-ed, she had gone from praising the “bourgeois precepts” that “can be followed by people of all backgrounds” to crediting the alt-right for coining the phrase “the dogma of magic dirt”—a snarky jab at the idea that anyone who moves to the United States can fit in and assimilate. (Widespread criticism of Wax’s speech included commentary in The Bulwark.)

In April 2021, ten Penn Law alumni filed a complaint accusing Wax of “flagrant disregard of University standards [and] rules” and alleging misconduct by Wax in her teaching role; the complainants asked for revocation of tenure and termination.³ An outside investigator’s report on the allegations, completed in August 2021, concluded that while there was no evidence Wax had discriminated against any students, she had “made a number of comments in class and a few outside of class which could reasonably be viewed as derogatory and harmful.”

Wax refused to cooperate with the investigation, making it clear she regarded it as illegitimate. Then, that fall semester, she invited Jared Taylor, the white supremacist founder of American Renaissance, to speak at her seminar on “Conservative Political and Legal Thought” and to have lunch with the students.

She escalated her extracurricular rhetoric as well, this time targeting Asian-Americans. In a December 2021 podcast with Loury, Wax characterized Asian immigration to the United States as “problematic.” Asian immigrants may be successful, she admitted, but “does the spirit of liberty beat in their breast?” According to Wax, the answer is no: Educated Asians, she asserted, tend to “ape” the “woke” progressivism of white elites because of a deep-seated conformism. A critical response from conservative Asian-American activist George Lee led to a written exchange in which she expressed her sentiments even more bluntly: “The United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration,” partly because the majority of Asian-Americans vote Democratic. Her explanation of why they do so was an out-and-out racist screed:

We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

New complaints followed. In spring 2022, Penn Law formally initiated sanctions against Wax. In June 2023, after a three-day hearing, a panel of five faculty members concluded that she had “flagrantly violated University norms to treat all students with equitable due respect.” They recommended the sanctions that are now being imposed following the exhaustion of procedural appeals. In addition to a one-year suspension and permanent loss of summer pay, Wax, a onetime academic star with three excellence-in-teaching awards, will be stripped of her prestigious chair as the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law. She will also be required to state in her future public appearances that she does not represent the law school or the university.

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A KEY QUESTION IN EVALUATING the case against Wax is whether she engaged in bigoted behavior in her dealings with students—allegations that were first outlined in Dean Ruger’s June 2022 letter to the faculty senate and that have given pause to even some of Wax’s defenders. One supportive colleague at Penn, historian Jonathan Zimmerman, wrote that Wax is entitled to express unpopular, even offensive opinions, but not “to demean or abuse specific individuals in her professional orbit.”

Yet here, too, the facts are not easy to sort out. Lists of Wax’s alleged offenses that have circulated as factual findings are often tendentiously presented. The independent investigator brought in to evaluate the 2021 complaint against Wax found that the allegations, some more than a decade old, mostly relied on “inexact and occasionally impressionistic” recollections—such as a supposedly derogatory tone of voice when referring to black litigants or witnesses in class discussions of case law. A couple of former students made broad claims of racially disparaging or homophobic remarks but could not provide any specifics when pressed. A purported in-class rant about how minorities should “stop acting entitled to remedies,” “stop getting pregnant,” and “get better jobs” turned out to be a broad paraphrase of various comments Wax had made while discussing relevant class material. Some of the accusers, moreover, had held a sharply negative view of Wax before enrolling in her then-mandatory class, calling into question their credibility.

Testifying before the hearing board in 2023, Wax denied most of the comments attributed to her—including the most serious charge of allegedly telling a black law student that she had gotten into Yale for her undergrad thanks to affirmative action—and claimed others had been mischaracterized. But at least one report of inappropriate behavior with her own students is verified, and Wax herself has partially acknowledged it. At a social gathering of students from her first-year class for whom she served as faculty adviser, probably in 2017, several South Asian students who introduced themselves were followed by a student with an Anglo name. Wax purportedly remarked, “Finally, an American,” and, seeing the group’s discomfort, added, “It’s a good thing, trust me.” In her appeal, Wax insisted that she said, “Finally, an American name”—intending it as a self-deprecating joke about her tendency to mangle names that aren’t “American.” Even in her self-exculpatory version, the flavor of nativist prejudice remains.

However, there remains the question of proportionality. Wax’s confirmed infractions in classroom and classroom-adjacent settings are few and trivial. To justify the recommended sanctions, the hearing board not only credited accounts shown to be unreliable by the outside investigator, but devoted most of their indictment to “inequitably targeted disrespect” in Wax’s off-campus public statements.

The problem with this approach is that all those statements are protected by the principle of academic freedom to which Penn professes a commitment: faculty members’ ability to express and debate ideas and opinions “free from institutional censorship or discipline.” In classroom teaching, that freedom is somewhat curtailed by norms of professionalism and civility, which is why Wax supporter Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor, believes her repeated platforming of “racist crank” Jared Taylor may have crossed the line. But “extramural” expression by tenured professors is entitled to virtually absolute protections, no matter how controversial, offensive, and even repugnant that expression may be (not including constitutionally unprotected speech such as libel, threats, harassment or incitement to violence). In principle, that includes Columbia University Middle Eastern Studies professor Joseph Massad’s description of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel as an “astonishing” act of resistance—and Amy Wax’s remark to Tucker Carlson that black and Asian Americans involved in anti-racist advocacy are driven by an “unholy brew” of “resentment and shame and envy” toward Western achievement.

Wax’s supporters argue that in practice, the application of these protections is gratingly lopsided: the calls for sanctions against Massad at Columbia have gone nowhere, and at Penn, a communications lecturer whose anti-Israel cartoons have been denounced as “reprehensible” and antisemitic by school officials is still teaching. Others point to counterexamples of untenured faculty members, and in one case a tenured professor, being fired for anti-Zionist social media posts. Double standard or no, such cases point to a chilly climate for controversial expression. And, as Penn’s Jonathan Zimmerman argues, the hypocrisy goes both ways: Many of the conservatives outraged by Penn’s treatment of Wax also lambaste schools for allowing offensive anti-Israel speech.

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WHILE DEFENDING Amy Wax’s freedom of speech is righteous, it can be done without lionizing Wax herself as an anti-woke dissident or sanitizing her views. Yet plenty of people on the right—such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in a post extolling Wax as “a brave and brilliant professor who stood up to the totalitarian mob”—are doing just that.

In an article in the Free Press (“Penn Professor Amy Wax Punished for ‘Inconvenient Facts’”), Peter Savodnik implies that Wax’s principal offenses were the 2017 op-ed defending bourgeois values and the comments about black students’ class rankings; his account minimizes or omits later offensive actions and statements. And while Savodnik does mention that Wax “was quoted as saying America would be better off ‘with more whites and fewer non-whites,’” he apparently credits her response: “I never said that.” She did.

In the Daily Signal, “national conservative” pundit Josh Hammer similarly focused narrowly on Wax’s “bourgeois values” piece and the discussion of black students’ class performance. (The College Fix, a higher ed-focused right-wing site, at least mentioned the hosting of white supremacist Taylor.) The New Criterion, once a respectable conservative journal, described Wax as a professor “who does not hesitate to speak her conservative mind” on “controversial issues.” And so on.

Ironically, the elisions obscure the fundamental principle stressed by FIRE and other free-speech organizations: academic freedom should be defended even when it protects loathsome opinions. Whether professors who loudly spout such opinions should teach required classes is, of course, a separate question. Columbia University professor John McWhorter—himself a vocal dissenter from progressive orthodoxies on both race and speech—is strongly critical of Penn’s sanctions against Wax yet also believes that her statements “jeopardize the trust that must exist between students and their professors, as well as the institutions they attend.”

Lastly, while the Wax saga illustrates the perilous climate for speech on campus, it also illustrates the appalling deterioration of conservatism.

Wax was once a thoughtful intellectual whose work garnered praise across the political spectrum. Now, some of the people who bestowed that praise, such as McWhorter, describe her rhetoric as “egregious,” “repellent,” and often lacking not only compassion but coherence. Once a defender of classically liberal values—meritocracy, colorblindness, responsible liberty—she now champions far-right white identity politics. Seven years ago, she defended civility as an essential bourgeois norm and noted that it includes “avoiding coarse language in public.” Now, she not only defends Trump’s tirade against immigrants from “shithole countries” but publicly spouts such language herself, gleefully trashing supposedly ungrateful Indian-Americans as having come from one such “shithole.” She laments to the Free Press that students in her seminar on conservative thought haven’t been exposed to great minds like Edmund Burke or Friedrich Hayek—yet apparently believes it’s a good idea to supplement their work on the syllabus with contributions from an avowed white nationalist.

At some point, Wax clearly decided that a multiracial, multiethnic liberal democracy is a failed project and that the post-World War II “bourgeois norm” of rejecting collective racial or ethnic judgments should be jettisoned. (She’s vague on whether she believes in innate racial differences in cognitive ability and criminality; however, she calls herself a “race realist,” a label commonly used by people like Taylor who subscribe to such theories.) Many conservatives will no doubt point out that the progressive left has also waged war on colorblind liberalism; but that’s no reason to join in the attack at the other end of the horseshoe. Whatever the motives for Wax’s evolution, it is surely no accident that it has coincided with the rise of Trumpian populism. Post-2019 Wax is the conservative brain on Trumpism.

Wax’s battle may not be over: she is reportedly pondering a lawsuit, and FIRE legal defense counsel Zach Greenberg told me that the organization is prepared to back her. I hope she wins, because Penn Law’s decision to sanction her shouldn’t stand. But win or lose, there is no happy ending in this story. The real tragedy is not how Penn Law has treated Amy Wax; it’s what Amy Wax has become.

1. Disclosure: I have known Wax slightly, from conferences and other events as well as occasional correspondence, since about 2000. While she was always to my right, I found many of her articles and presentations (including remarks I mentioned in a 2004 column) interesting and thought-provoking.

2. Wax has also long had a penchant for provocation: In April 2010, when the Black Law Students Association invited her to participate in a critical discussion of her book, she asked to have as her copanelist then–National Review writer John Derbyshire, who unabashedly asserted that blacks as a group are innately less intelligent and more violence-prone than whites. Two years later, Derbyshire was dropped by National Review for publishing a blatantly racist piece in a racist magazine.

3. The last time Penn had fired a tenured professor, it was a guy who had bludgeoned his wife to death.