Penn Suspends Amy Wax, Law Professor Accused of Racist Remarks

The University of Pennsylvania will suspend Penn Carey Law Professor Amy Wax for conduct including making derogatory comments about groups by race, ethnicity, and gender.

The suspension, which is for one year at half pay, begins in the fall of 2025. Wax’s summer pay and named chair will also be revoked. Wax will be required to note she speaks on behalf of herself and not Penn in future engagements, the school’s outgoing president Elizabeth Magill decided last month. The decision was noted by law school’s current interim president and provost in a public letter of reprimand published on the school’s website Tuesday.

“Academic freedom is and should be very broad,” wrote Provost John L. Jackson, Jr. in Tuesday’s letter. “Teachers, however, must conduct themselves in a manner that conveys a willingness to assess all students fairly.”

Wax’s conduct “creates an unequal educational environment” in which she is not an “impartial judge” of academic performance, according to the decision.

Wax and her lawyer, David J. Shapiro, did not respond to requests for comment. Wax has previously threatened to sue the university for such sanctions.

Wax has invited White nationalist Jared Taylor to speak in her class on several occasions, most recently for session of “conservative and political legal thought” to be held in December, Penn’s student newspaper the Daily Pennsylvanian reported. In 2018, she was barred from teaching a first-year course after she said she had never seen a Black student at Penn Law graduate in the top quarter of the class.

Quinn Emanual Hired

Complaints against Wax have spanned the tenures of four Penn presidents.

Some 1,500 faculty, students, and alumni in 2022 requested then-law school dean Theodore Ruger carry out sanctions on Wax. The following year, Ruger addressed a 12-page formal complaint to the Faculty Senate Chair to review whether Wax’s actions constituted an infraction of proscribed university conduct. The school hired law firm Quinn Emanuel to interview campus members.

Ruger wrote that Wax’s statements have led students and faculty to reasonably believe they will be “subjected to discriminatory animus if they come into contact with her.”

Those statements include proclaiming America would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration,” and telling Tucker Carlson in 2022 that “Blacks” and other “non-Western” groups harbor “resentment, shame, and envy” against Western people for their “outsized achievements” and contributions, even though “on some level, their country is a shithole.”

The decision to suspend a tenured professor has surfaced comments about academic freedom and censorship.

“After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook,” wrote Alex Morey vice president of campus advocacy at FIRE, an academic freedom group backing Wax.

“But academic freedom is designed to protect controversial faculty from being punished for their speech or opinions,” Morey wrote. “In an era when political forces right and left are all too eager to sanitize campuses of voices and views they dislike, faculty nationwide must be able to rely on the time-tested principles of academic freedom.”

Wax appealed the complaint to Penn’s Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, but the committee found no defect in the administration’s procedure, thus allowing the University’s interim president Larry Jameson to implement a final decision.

In February, The American Bar Association passed a measure requiring law schools to adopt written “academic freedom” policies that protect speech, including for those who express controversial ideas. Under the new policy, law schools are able to restrict expression that violates the law, falsely defames specific individuals, or constitutes “a genuine threat or harassment.”