Berkeley Law (photo by David Lat).
She did it, you guys.
UPenn Law’s Amy Wax has successfully demonstrated yet again that trading in academic credentials for easily debunked innuendo can pay off if you’re willing to put your faith in the lowest common denominator and the feckless cowardice of university officials.
As a truly spooky Halloween event, Berkeley Law’s Public Law and Policy Program (co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Pacific Research Institute) will have UPenn professor Amy Wax give a spiel at an event that’s NOW titled “A Conversation with Amy Wax and Mickey Kaus,” marking a rare opportunity for superficial hot-take artist Kaus to be the reasonable one in the room.
But that’s not what the event was always called. No, this ostensibly academic endeavor was at one point billed as “Nationalism, Identity, and Immigration: Considerations for the Academy and the Nation.” Wax now gets to slap the name of another prestigious academic institution onto her bio — an honor befitting a woman who recently graduated from just making stuff up to misconstruing Wikipedia pages.
More distastefully — if possible — this event is being run as a fundraiser with a $60/head admission charge. This means people are actually expected to spend good money to listen to Wax discuss immigration policy when they could easily just ask Cooter to spit out a missive through his meth-depleted teeth.
With Wax and Kaus on the same stage, I can save everyone some time and preview the festivities:
Wax: America is better off without people who aren’t from Northern European stock. That’s not a racist statement, I’m just saying those people are dirty and dumb.
Kaus: As a proud liberal… I totally agree with all of that and it’s a shame that the Dumbocrats don’t understand that. Which is something I can say because I’m totally a liberal.
*Repeat ad nauseam*
This isn’t much of a surprise from a group that’s previously hosted Heather Mac Donald, author of The Diversity Delusion, a book that unabashedly argues that the academy is better off when it’s populated by exclusively by white men. Berkeley’s just sitting by as its name serves as an aegis for gussied-up, whitewashed white supremacy. It’s long past time to reserve the term “white supremacy” for violent overt racists. Any ideology positing that white people or culture are supreme — and remember Amy Wax doesn’t “shrink from the word, ‘superior’” — is quite literally white supremacy and deserves to not fly under the radar just because it’s gussied itself up for the cameras. Wax is getting cited by Stormfront. At a certain point, what your work justifies matters.
And no doubt the response of the school’s defenders will again be that the academy thrives on different and controversial viewpoints and that they respect the views of these affiliated groups even if they don’t agree. Which is a fine answer in theory, but also one that Wax and her cronies have thoroughly hacked for their own gain. The academy is about allowing controversial professors to post their empirical research and expose themselves to the slings and arrows of their colleagues’ research to build upon human knowledge. It’s not about letting people pop off about MS-13 conspiracy theories. Drawing that line is uncomfortable for academics. They want to say, “Who are we to say when something isn’t academic freedom?”
It’s a cop-out that everyone knows is coming and it’s a cop-out that Amy Wax has built her career upon.
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.