Professor Amy Wax rails against Penn Law's 'woke catechism'

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A tenured law professor who was disciplined after saying she had never seen a Black student do well at her Ivy League law school spoke out about the “grotesque” hearing board that ruled against her and about what she called the school’s “woke catechism” underlying the negative consequences she faced after the unsubstantiated statements.

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Amy Wax has spent much of the last five years embroiled in controversy over statements for which she has been unapologetic.

“I’m totally screwed and Penn is just sailing along regardless of all their rhetoric about the First Amendment and free expression, they don’t mean a thing,” Wax said in an interview about the school’s decision to discipline her. “The fact that they’re continuing to pursue me shows that none of that stuff can be taken seriously.”

Wax came under fire in 2018 after she told Brown University Professor Glenn Loury in an interview that Black students would be better off without affirmative actions admissions programs, because they generally perform at levels lower than other Penn Law students.

“Here’s a very inconvenient fact Glenn,” Wax said in the interview. “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.”

Loury, who is Black, pushed back against Wax’s comments, asking, “So you’re telling me that students of color who have served on law review are pretty much in the bottom half of their law classes at Penn?” Typically, law schools only invite students performing at the highest levels on to law review.

Wax ultimately admitted to Loury that she did not have evidence to back up her claim and said she had done neither a survey nor a systematic study on the grades of Black students. Further, law school exams for first year courses like the ones Wax taught are graded anonymously using student identification numbers.

Students reacted to Wax’s comments by circulating a petition to the school’s dean calling the professor’s statements “false and slanderous,” and noting that Wax’s statements appeared to indicate a breach of the school’s anonymous grading policy.

“We are particularly sensitive to the cavalierly offensive remarks given that professors do not have access to name or race-based grades,” read the petition, which demanded that the school publicly dispel the comments and limit Wax’s interaction with students.

Not long thereafter, Wax made headlines again for saying that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford should have stayed quiet about what she called “stale” allegations that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her.

“I think basic dignity and fairness dictates that, you know, it’s too late, Ms. Ford, even if there would have been consequences to bitching about it at the time, so there’s that,” Wax told Loury in another interview.

In June 2022, Theodore Ruger, then a dean at Penn Law, wrote a detailed 12-page letter to Vivian Gadsen, chair of the school’s faculty senate, asking her to convene a hearing about Wax’s conduct.

Ruger said students and staff were repeatedly subjected to “Wax’s intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements,” and that her “flagrant disdain and disregard of University policies and procedures” required action by the school.

That hearing was held in May of the following year and the board unanimously found Wax to be at fault. It recommended that Wax face sanctions to include a public reprimand, a yearlong suspension at half pay, loss of her named chair, and loss of summer pay in perpetuity. The board also recommended that Wax’s office and classes no longer be held in the school’s main buildings, that she not receive any committee assignments or advising roles, and that she be required to complete professional development training, and that when possible, another instructor is always assigned to co-teach with her.

In August, 2023, then-Penn Law President Liz Magill issued a decision that reportedly imposed the recommended sanctions. Magill resigned from Penn Law in December 2023 amid controversy over statements she made about antisemitism before Congress.

Wax has continued to speak out about her treatment by Penn Law. In an interview in January 2024, she said her comments to Loury should have been protected speech as part of a long-standing academic tradition of schools considering “extramural speech” of professors to be untouchable.

Wax appealed the decision against her in what she said was meant to be a confidential process. However, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the sanctions in late February.

Wax spoke to Law.com in an interview published Friday.

“It’s all psychologized,” Wax said. “What the woke catechism, the woke set of precepts, has done is that they’ve taken subjective reactions and made them reign supreme, which is completely contrary to every First Amendment principle that ever existed.”

Wax denied that her behavior showed “inequitably targeted disrespect,” and said any standard applied to her behavior had been “completely made up” and not found in the faculty handbook or any other authoritative source.

She railed against the hearing board, which she called “grotesque,” and said the report it issued was “a shambles” that failed to address the allegations against her.

Further, Wax said, it is the hearing board itself that had violated standards by what she called, “pro-Palestinian and the Antisemitic statements.”

Wax said that the school has exhibited “radio silence” in response to her pending appeal, and offered, “Maybe this is another dumpster fire, so they’re putting this off as long as possible.”

Whatever the ultimate outcome of Wax’s appeal, at least six United States Supreme Court justices agreed with her that the time had come for race-based affirmative action policies in university admissions. The Court handed down a 6-3 ruling in June 2023 that eradicated race-based affirmative actions admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina on the grounds that such programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the Court’s two Black justices, slammed the decision as being “without any basis in law, history, logic, or justice.”

Jackson argued in her dissent that Black families still face race-based disparities in income and health that are “the predictable result of opportunity disparities,” and not “a deficiency of Black Americans’ desire or ability to, in Frederick Douglass’s words, ‘stand on [their] own legs.””