Penn Law’s Amy Wax went to a conference and declared that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites” because, she feels, nonwhites are loud and create garbage. It was just the latest from a law professor who’s spent the last several years spouting increasingly loony racist commentary in an effort to get noticed. After her latest lunkheaded ramblings, Penn students took the lead that the administration has consistently abdicated and organized a petition denouncing Wax’s antics. With the outpouring of opposition to Wax, Penn was finally moved to take action.
And that firm action was to let Amy Wax go on a scheduled paid vacation. Bold!
A statement from Dean Ted Ruger said, “At best, the reported remarks espouse a bigoted theory of white cultural and ethnic supremacy; at worst, they are racist.” How is that “at best”? What, exactly, is the distinction between “a bigoted theory of white cultural and ethnic supremacy” and racism? Even if we were to adopt Wax’s own hypertechnical theory that it’s not racist if it’s not biologically based, it’s all white supremacy. Dean Ruger’s literally saying “at best X, at worst also X.”
On the one hand, Ruger deserves credit for saying anything at all. On the other hand, this language is exactly the kind of mealy-mouthed malarkey that leads media outlets to write tortured copy like “some may find these comments potentially racially tinged” when reporting on a guy goose-stepping down a public street while screaming the n-word. There’s no “at best” or “at worst” here, she went to a white nationalism conference[1] and espoused her standard litany of white supremacist stuff. Qualifiers aren’t needed.
But beyond the statement, the school appears to be doing… pretty much nothing.
Still, Wax won’t be teaching during the upcoming year, according to law school spokesman Steve Barnes. She will be taking a planned sabbatical instead. Barnes declined to comment on whether Wax will still teach once her sabbatical is over.
Of course not! So Wax gets to take a break while the heat dies down and then strolls right back to her job. As we’ve noted many times before in these pages, Wax’s continued employment is a perversion of the whole concept of tenure. Tenure protects academic freedom, but it’s not academic freedom to pop off without a shred of substantiation about every racist talking point that enters her peripheral vision. Wax isn’t using her employment protection to pursue controversial research — and don’t expect her sabbatical to produce some groundbreaking datasets either — she’s using it to be a flapping head on the right-wing media circuit, and that’s not anything the academy needs to protect.
But here we are. Wax has gotten mildly chastised and a vacation. Sadly, that’s the most many of us expected out of this.
[1] Some people have argued that her comments can’t possibly be characterized as white nationalism because she’s Jewish. There are well-known strains of white nationalism that are virulently anti-Semitic, but the universe of white nationalist thought is much broader than just these strains. When one says that the nation-state should be whiter and less nonwhite… that’s definitionally white nationalism.
Penn Law Condemns Amy Wax’s Comments as Racist and Says She’s Taking a Sabbatical [Law.com]W@w#
Statement from Penn Law Dean Ted Ruger on recently reported comments by Professor Amy Wax [UPenn]
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