Wax-ing Pathetic: UPenn Professor Suspended for Racist Remarks, Activism

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence. Amy Wax is out after years of racist demagoguery.

PHILADELPHIA, PA – The University of Pennsylvania published a public reprimand against racist professor Amy Wax announcing her suspension from teaching for a year and other sanctions. This comes less than two months before she is scheduled to speak at this year’s American Renaissance (AmRen) Conference, a White Supremacist event organized by Jared Taylor, the publisher of American Renaissance who Wax had invited to speak at the university last year and has done so again for her classes this December.

“The Board recommended sanctions including a one-year suspension from the University at half pay; the loss of your named chair; the loss of summer pay in perpetuity; the requirement that you note in public appearances that you speak for yourself alone and not as a University or Penn Carey Law School faculty member; and a public reprimand,” Provost John L. Jackson wrote in the reprimand to Wax, which cited a history of not just making derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status but also in doing so breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private. An example of this was a 2017 interview with Brown University professor Glenn Loury a prominent Black conservative who regularly places the blame on Black people for racism leveled against them, she claimed Black students practically never graduate at the top of their law school classes. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half,” Wax, who has often attributed this observation to genetics, said on his show. In 2018 citing this statement and claiming that it was false, Dean Ted Ruger barred Wax from teaching mandatory first-year law courses. The next year, Wax spoke at the Edmund Burke Foundation’s National Conservatism conference in Washington D.C. and declared while discussing a immigration policy that favored European nations over others that she agreed with Donald Trump’s description of non-European countries as “shithole countries,” argued for a “cultural distance” approach to immigration that “preserves the United States as a Western and First World nation,” and that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.

Wax particularly stoked anger on campus by inviting Jared Taylor, himself a eugenicist who believes in the inferiority of Black persons to Whites, to speak to her classes in 2021 and 2023. During last year’s invitation, Wax photographed those protesting the event as Taylor disparaged the students assembled against him. According to Philadelphia Magazine, Taylor was invited by Wax to speak to her class in December but due to her sanction it is not known if this will still take place. Wax meanwhile will be speaking during the AmRen conference Nov. 15-17 at Montgomery Bell Park Inn in Burns, TN. The conference, which was attended by organizers of the tragic Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville two weeks before that event and promoted there, has seen a decline in numbers in recent years even though they have featured more prominent figures such as former House Rep. Steve King, former columnist Michelle Malkin, Laura Loomer, a neo-fascist podcaster recently seen in the company of Donald Trump, and this year Anthony Cumia the onetime radio host best known for his “Opie and Anthony” program.

Upon hearing of the sanctions imposed on Wax, Taylor angrily ranted on his podcast, saying it sent a bad precedent. “What has happened to Professor Wax is absolutely disgusting and lamentable and who knows? Maybe she will sue!” Taylor also complained that none of the news articles he read on her case noted her upcoming AmRen conference address. Meanwhile, members of Penn’s Black Law Students Association, regarded the sanctions an “overdue step” but “far from sufficient.” The group called on the administration to fire Wax and ban Taylor from campus. It is indeed rare to punish a tenured faculty member, this being the first such occurrence under Faculty Senate processes in at least 20 years.

Wax is slated to participate on a panel this Saturday in McLean, Virgina at the fall meeting of the Philadelphia Society alongside Trump-appointed Judge David J. Porter of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Helen Andrews, editor at Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative, who once wrote a fluff piece about eugenicist Steve Sailer, and J. Joel Alicea a law professor at the Catholic University of America.