Legal Investigation Uncovers Racist/Sexist Comments from Penn Professor
According to multiple news sources, an investigation by law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan has uncovered nearly a dozen previously undisclosed instances in which students said University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax made racist, sexist or homophobic comments in class, according to a letter from law dean Theodore Ruger.
Ruger asked the university’s faculty senate to review Wax’s conduct and impose a “major sanction” against her, which could result in her suspension or firing. The recommendation follows two separate investigations of Wax initiated by the law school and years of complaints from students and alumni about Wax’s public statements demeaning minority law students, immigrants and other racial groups, Ruger said in the June 23 letter.
“Wax’s conduct inflicts harm on [students and faculty] and the institution, and undermines the University’s core values,” Ruger told the faculty senate. The letter was posted online last week by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression(FIRE), a free-speech group that has argued that Wax’s statements are protected by academic freedom.
Ruger announced in January that he would seek sanctions against Wax following her latest inflammatory public statements on race and immigration, which appeared on the website for Brown University social sciences professor Glenn Loury’s podcast.
“As long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration,” Wax wrote.
In a January YouTube interview with a Canadian professor, Wax called herself a “casualty in the culture wars.”
“What I see being said and done with respect to me is truly alarming,” Wax said. “It is a total repudiation of the very concept of academic freedom.”
The law school previously engaged former Northwestern law dean Daniel Rodriguez to investigate charges levied against Wax by a group of law school alumni. This year it retained Quinn Emanuel to interview students, alumni and faculty who had come forward to support the school’s complaint against Wax, Ruger’s letter said.
According to the 12-page letter, students told investigators that Wax said Black students do not perform as well as white students because affirmative action left them less prepared, and said in class that Mexican men are more likely to assault women. Wax also invited a white supremacist to deliver a mandatory lecture to her class, the letter said.
So does a professor have the academic freedom to say anything in class? Or is Wax as she says, a casualty in culture wars?
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