Vol. 1: The Professor and the University
Which is worse: A professor who feels threatened by Blacks and Asians, or a dean who feels threatened by free speech?
After a long career as a respected legal scholar, Penn law professor Amy Wax has lately commandeered nationwide attention with a series of inflammatory pronouncements about race and culture that strike many people, including me, as misguided, if not bigoted.
In a September 2017 podcast interview with Professor Glenn Loury of Brown University, Wax remarked, “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.”
At a conservative conference in July 2019, Wax suggested that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.”
In 2021, Wax wrote that “the United States is better off with fewer Asians” because, she claimed, Asians are ungrateful for the advantages of living in the U.S.
And last spring, on Fox News, Wax argued that Brahmin women doctors from India feel anger, envy, and shame toward Americans because they realize that their own native country is a “shithole.”
What is Wax’s purpose in making these comments? Why does Wax seem so fixated on the performance of Blacks and Asians to the exclusion of, say, my own demographic group: redhaired Hungarian Jews? Why does she seem so angry and resentful toward people she claims are angry and resentful?
Is Wax deliberately bombarding Penn law students with irrational adversity in order to toughen them up for survival in the real-world jungle? But how, then, will she inspire law students to make our Earthly jungle a more civilized place? What, ultimately, is the purpose of a law professor? For that matter, what is the purpose of a university? Wax deserves credit for provoking me to reflect about these larger issues, even if Wax herself doesn’t appear to have given them much thought.
So, what could be worse than a professor who, protected by tenure, publicly vents her loopy personal prejudices, secure in the knowledge that she can’t be fired? Funny you should ask.
After thousands of Penn law students signed a petition to have Wax suspended, and after 33 of her fellow Penn Law faculty members signed an open letter condemning her statements, Penn Law’s dean Theodore Ruger responded by stripping Wax of her duties teaching courses to first-year law students. At a student town hall meeting in 2018, he denounced her comments as “repugnant” and deplored her presence on Penn’s campus. In January 2022, Ruger initiated Penn’s sanctions process against Wax, ostensibly to evaluate whether her behavior is adversely affecting her teaching but more likely the first step toward removing her.
In effect, Ruger’s response to Wax can be summarized in two words: “Shut up.” But what should he have said?
I approach that question as a journalist who has dedicated much of his career to the cause of free speech. I have edited three Philadelphia publications that provided outlets for people with something to say but no other place to say it. In the process, I have defended seven libel suits (all successfully) and survived advertiser boycotts, death threats, and a protest demonstration in my office, not to mention a global online petition demanding my dismissal. This was a price I readily paid. Publishing other people’s opinions, no matter how outrageous, enabled me to expose their ideas to the light of day, where I and others could analyze and criticize them and perhaps even learn something that hadn’t previously occurred to us.
My publications sought to encourage respectful conversation between seemingly irreconcilable groups: men and women, say, or blacks and whites, or liberals and conservatives, or old and young, or Jews and Gentiles, or gays and straights, or city dwellers and suburbanites, or pro-lifers and pro-choicers. The list is endless, but the goal of listening to people with contrary views was the same: to expand our understanding and discover our common humanity. In such a process, “Shut up” is never an acceptable response.
So, what should Dean Ruger have said about Amy Wax? Maybe something like this:
“Like many others at Penn, I personally find Amy Wax’s racial notions reprehensible. But the free exchange of ideas, bad as well as good, is essential to society and especially to universities, which exist (at least in theory) to foster the advance of knowledge. This advance is necessarily a trial-and-error process, and academic tenure exists to encourage the process by allowing professors to speak their minds, rightly or wrongly, without fear of retaliation.
“Since we are all fallible humans, what Judge Learned Hand once said about judges applies also to professors— namely, they can be damned fools just like everybody else. But if we don’t encourage professors to speak their minds freely, how can we determine who among them are the damned fools?
“Besides, since I too am fallible, it’s always possible that I could be wrong and Professor Wax could be right. She’s not holding a gun to anybody’s head; on the contrary, she’s doing us a favor by revealing her thought processes and giving us the opportunity to respond to her.
“Yes, I know— this endless process of responding to people who strike us as fools can be exhausting. But it may be the most important activity of a free society, not to mention a university. So to Professor Wax, I say: I detest your ideas, but I thank you for providing me with this teachable moment.”