University of Pennsylvania: Don’t Fire Amy Wax, Debate Her Views

Controversial University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax has jumped into hot water again.

In 2017, Wax’s colleagues at Penn’s Law School attacked her as “racist” for writing a Philadelphia Inquirer commentary promoting bourgeois values like hard work, self-discipline, politeness, and getting married before having children.

As Frederick Hess notes in Forbes, no matter their race, most Americans agree with these views. Yet in politically correct academia, you can lose your job for saying such things.

Naturally, Wax faced a woke mob out for vengeance. Thirty-three of her law school colleagues condemned her statements; 4,000 others signed a petition to terminate her employment.

Say what you will about Wax, the lady has courage. In a December 2021 podcast with Brown University professor Glenn Loury, Wax claimed that the U.S. has too many Asians, warning about the “danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country.” Responding to a critic, Wax raised concerns about the large percentage of Asian and South Asian Americans voting for Democrats. Her conservative host, Loury, described Wax’s statements as “outrageous.”

To his credit, Penn Law School dean Theodore Ruger defended Wax’s free speech rights while also denouncing her views as “xenophobic and white supremacist.” Despite her having won a teaching award, Penn long ago banned Wax from teaching required courses, fearing her presence would emotionally trigger the Ivy League school’s sensitive future attorneys, many of whom have repeatedly demanded her firing.

Now Wax is at it again. In April, on the Tucker Carlson show, Wax opined that “non-Western peoples,” including Americans of African, Asian, and South Asian descent, resent the superior achievements of Western societies. The pugnacious Wax even insulted the “massive” and “hideous” university bureaucracy investigating her, saying, “I’m not terribly worried about it.”

Amy Wax is our fellow American. Like her, we agree that hard work and personal responsibility made America great. We also agree that the rule of law and limited government that is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution allows Americans to flourish.

We emphatically disagree about demographic diversity. Survey research and our own personal experiences show that across demographic groups, Americans share common values. Though British political thought did the most to shape American government, American values belong to no single race, religion, or continent of origin.

Wax should remember that in living memory, many feared that Jewish immigrants like her parents would undermine the nation. Luckily, in America, xenophobia usually lost out – or else Wax herself would not be here. As President George Washington wrote in welcoming our nation’s first synagogue, America is a free, diverse country where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Fear is the key concept here. The way universities work, it is far easier for leftists to fire rightists than the other way around. Analyzing largescale surveys, political scientist Eric Kaufmann finds that “over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views” compared to fewer than one in ten liberals.

We predict that in the coming months, on one pretext or another, Penn’s “massive” bureaucracy will fire Professor Wax, not for poor performance but for stating beliefs that millions of Americans share but fear to say. That’s exactly how non-Western countries like Russia and China treat dissenters. Ironically, firing Wax will make her a martyr, increasing support for her ideas.

The First Amendment offers a better way. We challenge Professor Wax to debate whether demographic diversity makes America stronger or weaker.

Let’s beat bad ideas with persuasion – not coercion. That may not be the University of Pennsylvania way, but it is the American way.