Amy Wax
When you’re in a hole, keep digging.
Penn Law’s Amy Wax spent years spouting unfounded racist stuff and claiming it’s “academic freedom” to cite Wikipedia for evidence of racial differences in intelligence. But since the school wouldn’t challenge her tenure over that, she began slurring the achievements of Black students and saying the U.S. was better off with fewer Asian-Americans. That finally got the school to look into maybe moving on without this ulcer on its academic reputation.
Well, that and her inviting a white supremacist to chat with her class.
AS ONE DOES!
So why not keep this ball rolling, huh? Wax just gave an interview to Richard Hanania about her ongoing troubles and this time she’s ready to pin it on the ladies out there!
Schools are getting “woke” and it’s because women in the academy have brought the “values of the nursery and the kindergarten” into universities because only a few women — like her! — have the raw Dagny Taggart energy required to play in the properly male university sandbox. Or something.
And these values are out to “blackmail” the establishment:
Why are we not willing to take charge and do our job and say to them, no, you cannot engage in emotional blackmail? Emotional blackmail is degrading and debasing, and it’s decadent. And you’re trying to destroy what we’ve built over hundreds of years. We’re not going to let you.
Hm. What have “WE” built over hundreds of years? It is a little interesting how readily Wax and her supporters jump on the Enlightenment as some sort of creationist moment as if it didn’t face these precise criticisms from aristocrats and religious leaders peeved at the effort to destroy what THEY’D built over hundreds of years. But that’s neither here nor there.
The point is, all these women running the academy are hurting the young women attending school because men are opting out of this “nursery” mentality and…
Well, I mean, that is already happening, and it’s got a gender inflection to it, in that most schools now, except for the very, very elite who have the pick of the litter, they are predominantly female. Of course, I’m about to write a piece that shows that this is a disaster, not only for the university, but for family formation, because women really like to marry up and there are fewer and fewer men to marry. So that’s not a good thing.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of good grades must be in want of a husband.
Alas, it’s this new “feminized” academy that’s got it in for her because it just won’t respect her academic freedom:
And I’m actually a tenured professor. So I’m supposed to have protection for my views and opinions and positions. That’s the whole tradition of academic freedom. So this represents a very bold move on their part. There have been a lot of attempts to cancel professors recently. This is one of the pure attempts to cancel someone, namely me, just for speech.
No. That’s not at all how tenure is designed to work. Richard Sander at UCLA Law is the author of the whole “mismatch” theory that affirmative action is harming minority students by sending them to schools they otherwise wouldn’t get into. Say what you will, but his scholarship is about urban policy and he did a lot of research to advance this theory that ultimately weighs upon his field of expertise. Other researchers have shown his work to be mostly bunk, but that’s the sort of work tenure is designed to protect. Sander has the academic freedom to engage in controversial research in his subject without getting into trouble.
Amy Wax just goes on podcasts and rants about how much better things were when the US had fewer Asian-Americans based on her deep research of thinking Asian-Americans tend to vote for Democrats and she thinks that’s bad. She has a right to say these things. However, the cloak of academic freedom doesn’t mean “old professors can shout racist stuff.”
But she’s ready to advance this bankrupt argument to the bitter end. And on that note she still needs money! Remember, Amy Wax started a GoFundMe to raise funds for her tenure, but since GoFundMe has fees and occasionally locks her account because it doesn’t love getting tied to nationalist causes, she has a new avenue for would-be benefactors.
No, they’ve reactivated it. It’s still good, but there’s now a new fund called AmyWaxDefense.org. It’s actually tax-deductible, which a friend of mine has helped set up in DC.
I’m not a tax attorney but… are private defense funds tax deductible charities? That doesn’t sound right and I’d be very curious as to how that works. If they are, I feel like there are some powerful litigation finance firms that might be missing a trick!
In any event, she provided an update on the status of her fight:
I’m about to file a big memo asking for things like, and I’ve discussed this with you, a forensic examination of the grades of students from different racial groups. Because one of the things that they keep indicting me about over and over again is that I spoke falsely about the performance of minority students under affirmative action, which is kind of a joke because there are a number of datasets that show that in other schools what I said is true and valid. And everybody I’ve spoken to who teaches in an elite law school has experienced the same thing that I’ve experienced, although they won’t speak up about it.
To be clear, Wax is in trouble inter alia for going on a webcast and saying her Black students never got good grades in her classes. Which raised the question: was she completely making this up or is she violating blind grading requirements? This admission suggests the former since she says she didn’t lie about it because… I dunno, there are some datasets from other schools and she’s talked to “some people” who agree with her.
Very academic. Very freedom.
What else does she say? Well she derides Harvard and Yale for defending affirmative action and really scoffs at the idea that diversity might also help white students by exposing them to different perspectives.
Which is interesting because Wax also spends some time deriding wealthy liberals who profess to care about diversity and then live in all-white enclaves. A very valid criticism, though one that shores up the Ivy League argument that there’s a benefit to forcing their legacy riddled student body — which is for whites what people like Wax imagine affirmative action to be for everyone else — to interact with folks from diverse backgrounds. She takes it the opposite direction and wants to democratize segregation by letting poor white people do it too.
Which is kind of the whole thing with Wax. There are these occasional flashes where she identifies something that is actually interesting and then immediately takes all the wrong lessons from her epiphany. It’s like there’s some fundamental ordering principle in her head that keeps her from making these connections.
Well, I’m all for freedom of association. I’m a big freedom of association fan just as you are. And I would deregulate all the laws that force people together who don’t want to be together, as you might.
Ah. Getting so very close to just saying it out loud.
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.
