Penn Professor Amy Wax Punished for ‘Inconvenient Facts’

The beginning of the end of law professor Amy Wax’s career came on August 9, 2017. That’s when Wax and another law professor, Larry Alexander, published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer declaring that “all cultures are not equal.” 

“It was the most innocuous thing you can imagine,” Wax told me over the phone on Tuesday. 

The thesis of the 827-word piece was that some people—“working-class whites” with “antisocial habits”; “inner-city blacks” with their “anti-‘acting white’ rap culture”; and Hispanic immigrants who resist assimilation—are at a profound disadvantage in the game of life. This, they argued, is why we should all embrace a 1950s-style “bourgeois culture” that smooths over differences, paving the way for greater national cohesiveness. 

“These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans,” Wax and Alexander wrote.

The article ignited a neutron bomb at the University of Pennsylvania, where Wax had been a tenured faculty member since 2001, having previously taught at the University of Virginia and worked in the Solicitor General’s office, arguing fifteen cases before the Supreme Court. The graduate students union called it “hateful and regressive.” An education professor at Penn sarcastically tweeted that the 1950s “was a better time because white people were nicer to each other and people of color stayed in their place.” Helen Gym, a Philadelphia City councilwoman and Penn alum, called the article “miserable.”

As far as Wax was concerned, all this amounted to rank hypocrisy among her bourgeois colleagues. “All my colleagues follow all those rules, so why are they attacking them?” she told me. “You know—getting married, staying married, working hard, getting an education. To paraphrase Charles Murray, they ‘live the fifties and talk the sixties.’ ”

In 2022, Penn law school dean Theodore Ruger called on the Faculty Senate to consider “major sanctions” against Wax for the views that she expressed in her article and repeated in speeches and media appearances over the years. 

Finally, on Monday, the Faculty Senate, in an unprecedented move, sanctioned Wax for “flagrant unprofessional conduct”—suspending her for one year with half-pay, the loss of her title of Robert Mundheim Professor of Law, the loss of summer pay, and the understanding that she will not represent the university while speaking publicly. 

When I asked Wax for her reaction to the sanctions, she laughed. “What do you think my reaction to it is? I think that our country and our university system are deteriorating in a very serious way. It’s becoming Third World.”