Amy Wax, the controversial Pennsylvania University professor suspended last fall following a series of intemperate remarks, particularly concerning race, has filed a lawsuit alleging she was unfairly judged because she is white.
The university’s speech policy, which Wax was found to have violated repeatedly, “breaks numerous laws, including Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting racial discrimination by federal fund recipients and employers, the 53-page complaint alleges.
“White speakers are far more likely to be disciplined for ‘harmful’ speech while minority speakers are rarely, if ever, subject to disciplinary procedures for the same,” according to the suit.
(Screenshot/YouTube/ Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard)
Wax had appealed a 2023 decision by an academic review board to sanction her for “a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status,” as well as “making discriminatory and disparaging statements targeted at specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify” both in and outside of her classroom.
During her appeal, Wax continued to push, if not trash, the envelope. In November 2023, she invited white nationalist Jared Taylor, editor of a publication the Southern Poverty Law Center says “promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites,” to speak to her class on “Conservative and Political Legal Thought.”
She has faced previous accusations of racism for statements such as, the U.S. would be “better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Wax, who has argued 15 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, has also claimed that Black students never graduate at the top of the Penn Carey Law class and that “non-Western groups” are resentful toward “Western people.”
Her appeal was eventually overruled, and she was served with a one-year suspension at half pay, the removal of her named chair, and a requirement for Wax to note in public appearances that she is not speaking as a representative Penn Carey Law.
In her lawsuit, Wax describes the proceedings that led to her temporary ouster as “kangaroo-court-like” and called the sanctions “grossly deficient and a wild departure from established norms governing academic discipline.”
She accuses the university’s speech codes of discriminating not only on the content of speech “but also the racial identity of the speaker.”
In a 12-page review of Wax’s case, former Penn law school dean Theodore Ruger wrote that the former assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General “cross[ed] the line of what is acceptable in a university environment where principles of nondiscrimination apply.”
It had been 20 years since Penn last sanctioned a tenured professor.
Wax alleges she is victim of a “double standard,” referencing cases where professors on the opposite end of the political spectrum faced no penalty for their incendiary remarks.
They include Annenberg School for Communication lecturer and cartoonist Dwayne Booth, who published a series of controversial cartoons about Israel, President Joe Biden’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war and Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu that the lawsuit describes as “literal Blood Libel.”
Also mentioned: English and Cinema and Media Studies professor Julia Alekseyeva, who posted supportive comments on social media about 2020 Penn Engineering graduate Luigi Mangione after he was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
