An extraordinary scholar and polymath, Amy Wax, has been formally sanctioned by the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), although not fired, as many of her detractors attempted to do.
Professor Wax has earned degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Columbia, including an M.D. in neurology, in addition to her law degree. She has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court. I have been impressed with Wax’s extraordinary acuity while serving with her on the board of the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
Penn is stripping her of her title—Robert Mundhein Professor of Law—and cutting her pay, presumably ending a years-long battle. I suspected that Penn was deliberately prolonging the ordeal hoping that Wax, a septuagenarian cancer survivor, would simply retire.
What is her sin? Did she steal money? Have an improper relationship with a student? Issue heinous attacks on individual colleagues? No, her cardinal sin was that she expressed her opinions on issues of the day that were not in accord with those of Penn’s woke supremacy.
For example, she once stated in class that her black students, over the years, typically were weak academically and decidedly below average. That may have been an impolitic thing to say, but it was absolutely correct, given Penn’s use of racial criteria in admission standards.
Wax’s other commentary was often irritating to the Penn community.
For example, she suggested that she believed that Western civilization was superior to others prevailing in other parts of the world. To Wax, the rest of the world has been trying, with varying degrees of success, to emulate it.
It is rich that one of the persons leading the charge against Wax was Elizabeth Magill, herself a lawyer and former Penn president, who resigned under pressure for a seeming unwillingness during congressional testimony to explicitly condemn anti-Semitic, non-peaceful demonstrations on her campus by pro-Palestinian protesters. Magill infuriated a broader public in parroting the campus party line, leading to major donors pulling millions of dollars of support from the university.
University presidents have tended to accede to the demands of leftist faculty and students in order to maintain campus peace. But in doing so, they violate behavioral norms expected in American civil society, including a respect for the First Amendment. Groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, NAS, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni protested vehemently and frequently to Penn’s persecution of Wax, to no avail. One group that apparently became concerned was Penn’s governing board or some members of it.
Universities live in two worlds: the woke leftist academic world and the real world, on which they depend for financial sustenance. Typically, the real world largely leaves the Academic World alone, grudgingly providing it with financial support. But that is changing.
Acts like shouting down federal judges—think Stanford—and denying distinguished scholars the right to speak at many schools are going too far, and hateful anti-Semitic demonstrations go well beyond the limits of tolerance. It starts to hurt reputationally—Ivy League Penn ranks below non-Ivies schools such as Duke, Northwestern, and Cal Tech, as seen in the latest U.S. News rankings. I suspect Penn is losing both donors and top student applicants. Trying to enforce a campus leftist political ideology, acceptable in 1970 Soviet Russia, is completely inappropriate in contemporary America.
Penn is trying to have it both ways even now. It 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. This is an unprincipled response unworthy of a great educational institution. It is completely incompatible with the thinking of Penn’s founder, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote, “Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.”
It is time for some adult supervision of universities. And that supervision appropriately belongs in the hands of an efficient and meaningful governing board, a group of maybe nine to twelve trustees who share affection and dedication to the institution they serve. They need to subdue attempts to prevent universities from engaging freely in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, while promoting robust but civil discussion of the issues of the day.
Image of Penn Campus by Bryan Y.W. Shin on Wikimedia Commons
Thirty years ago, a left-leaning Provost summed up her opinion of the NAS with three words: “they shall die.”
Explaining her statement, she said that she didn’t really care about the conservative professors because in 20 years they would all be retired or dead. As long as the Tenured Radicals held the line on who was being hired and made sure that no young conservatives were hired, the existing conservatives would age out of academia, and they largely did.
The problem with Amy Wax is that she is only 71 years old, she well could be there for another decade, or longer. Phyllis Schlafly was active through her 80s, she was 90 when she spoke at CPAC in 2013. Hence the necessity of getting rid of people like her so as to preserve ideological purity.
What’s not being mentioned here, and why I personally feel that the concept of academic freedom is largely irrelevant, is that there are other Penn professors who said and did far more egregious things in support of Team Hamas. Supporting people who were literally creating Judenfrei zones on campus, in violation of not only US law but every principle that higher education is supposed to stand for.
And then they try to fire the Jewish professor….
I don’t know if that was part of this or not, but it really doesn’t matter because Joe Sixpack is going to see it that way. And the thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that rural America isn’t like it was a century ago. We have electricity and indoor plumbing now…
It is a fact that the Klu Klux Klan was big in the 1920s, often centered around small Protestant churches — and the Klan particularly hated Jews. About 1/5 of the adult males in the State of Maine were dues-paying members at one point, the 1924 Democratic Convention is often called the “Klanbake”, and other examples abound.
But what is not mentioned is that the Klan imploded when people realized what it really was and the true nature of the people who were running it. It was something that no one ever spoke about, never admitted having been involved in, and had no intention of ever being involved in anything along those lines again. The horrors of the Holocaust cemented this view, and then during the Cold War, Israel was a US ally when a lot of other countries weren’t.
Today, support for Israel is stronger in rural Protestant America than it is in many Jewish communities. That’s the perspective that folks in “flyover country” have for what is going on at places like Columbia, and that’s why members of Congress had the hearings they did.
And what people often fail to realize is that all of American academia lives on the Federal largess — along with property tax exemptions for what is often very valuable real estate. While well endowed institutions would survive a few years, I doubt that even Harvard could last a decade without Federal funds and having to pay property taxes to the City of Cambridge.
In a speech to the IAC, Trump stated that if elected he would call up the heads of the various campi and tell them to end the antisemitism or he’d cut off their Federal funding, and I think he might just do that.
Columbia may well come to regret what it did to Amy Wax.
Of course, university presidents go along with the leftists, because they know that if they don’t, the leftists will cause trouble, and then the presidents get no backing. From whom? Their boards, of course. So it is very naive to expect the boards to provide “adult supervision.” The presidents are basically doing what the boards want.
The presidents are in more of a no-win situation than you realize — they are dealing with “shared governance” and left-leaning faculty activists who will organize votes of “no confidence” and otherwise stir up trouble.
Thomas Sowell describes it as “The Day that Cornell Died” — starting with the guns being brought on campus in 1969, the radical Left has been permitted to use violence and intimidation with impunity. Everyone knows that there are two sets of rules in academia today — one that applies to the radical Left and another that applies to everyone else.
And for a good example of what happens when a president tries to do the right thing, look at UMass Amherst. Sadly, no one much cares about the anti-semitism out there, no one has for thirty years, but Massachusetts manufactures a lot of the parts for modern high tech weapons, and powerful interests got upset when the Leftist then demanded that UMass divest from Defense-related industries and cease doing DOD-related research.
And reality is that you don’t get something like 109 state troopers — in rural Western Massachusetts — without at least the implicit approval of the Governor. Maura Healey may lean Left, but she was already on record supporting the arrests of Hamas occupiers at Boston-area colleges.
So last spring, after multiple “final warnings”, UMass arrested 109 persons, including six professors — this in addition to the 57 who had been arrested the prior October for being in the Administration Building at 2 AM. And even though he is being supported by the Board of Trustees and everyone else, Chancellor Reyes is still likely to lose his job.
Name one other industry where employees who got arrested for trespassing on company property would still have a job the next morning. That, Jonathan, is the problem.
It goes without saying that the criminal charges against the 166 arrestees either have been or will be dropped, and an institution that expelled three girls for not wearing masks at an off-campus party will write meaningless letters to those who were arrested.
So what’s a college president (or in this case, chancellor) to do?
If you were Chancellor Reyes, what would YOU do, Johnathan?
Correction: It was more than 130 arrests, not 109.