Amy Wax

Wax has made controversial comments that have attracted national attention.[12] In an August 2017 piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer titled "Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture", she wrote with Larry Alexander, the Warren Distinguished Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, that the decline of "bourgeois values" (such as hard work, self-discipline, marriage, and respect for authority) since the 1950s had contributed to social ills as male labor force participation rates are down to Great Depression-era levels, opioid abuse is epidemic, half of all children are born to single mothers, and many college students lack basic skills, asserting that "all cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy."[11][13] She told The Daily Pennsylvanian that "everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans" because of their "superior" mores. In the same interview Wax strongly emphasized that she did not believe in the superiority of one race over another, but was describing the situation in various countries and cultures.[14]

In a September 2017 podcast interview with Professor Glenn Loury, Wax said: "Take Penn Law School, or some top 10 law school... Here's a very inconvenient fact ... 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 ... I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half in my required first year course," and said that Penn Law has a racial diversity mandate for its law review.[15][16] University of Pennsylvania Law School Dean Theodore Ruger responded, "Black students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn Law, and the Law Review does not have a diversity mandate. Rather, its editors are selected based on a competitive process."[17]

In July 2019, at the Edmund Burke Foundation's inaugural National Conservatism conference, Wax said, "Perhaps the most important reason that the cultural case for immigration remains underexplored has to do with that bête noire, race. Let us be candid: Europe and the First World, to which the United States belongs, remains mostly white for now. And the Third World, although more mixed, contains a lot more non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites."[18] She went on to explain that her ideas were about culture, and not about race, but the racial compositions of the societies in question led to most academics avoiding the topic entirely.[19]

A petition in August 2017 seeking to fire Wax gathered about 4,000 signatures.[20] That same month, 33 of her fellow Penn Law faculty members signed an open letter condemning statements Wax made in her Philadelphia Inquirer piece and Daily Pennsylvanian interview.[21] The Penn Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild condemned her comments.[22] Graduate Employees Together – University of Pennsylvania, a group of unionizing graduate students, said: "We are outraged that a representative of our community upholds, and published, these hateful and regressive views."[23] Asa Khalif, a leader of Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania, demanded that Wax be fired.[24] Khalif said he had notified the university that if Wax were not fired within a week he would begin disrupting university classes and other activities with a series of protests.[25]

As a result of these controversies, in March 2018, Ruger stripped Wax of her duties teaching curriculum courses to first-year students.[26][27]

In a March 2018 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled "The University of Denial; Aggressive suppression of the truth is a central feature of American higher education", Wax wrote:

The mindset that values openness understands that the truth can be inconvenient and uncomfortable.... Hoarding and hiding information relevant to such differences... violates basic principles of fair play... Universities, like other institutions, scheme relentlessly to keep such facts from view.[28]

Author and political analyst Mona Charen said that the op-ed on bourgeois values "contained not a particle of racism" and that "if the Left cannot distinguish reasoned academic arguments from vile racist insinuations, it will strengthen the very extremists it fears."[29] Political commentator Heather Mac Donald wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in which she criticized the "hysterical response" to Wax's piece.[30] University of Pennsylvania Law School Overseer Paul Levy resigned to protest what he termed Wax's "shameful treatment".[31] Levy wrote in his letter of resignation: "Preventing Wax from teaching first-year students doesn't right academic or social wrongs. Rather, you are suppressing what is crucial to the liberal educational project: open, robust and critical debate over differing views of important social issues."[32]

The New Criterion wrote: "Dean Ruger may wish to consult a study published in the Stanford Law Review in 2004 which showed that in the most elite law schools ... only 8 percent of first-year black students were in the top half of their class."[24] Robert VerBruggen, deputy managing editor of the National Review, cited papers he said supported Wax's claims and wrote, "If Penn Law is different, or if things have changed in recent years, let's see some numbers."[33]

Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches education and history at Penn, wrote: "I think a lot of what Amy Wax says is wrong. But ... I also think it's my duty to defend her right to say it, and to plead for a more honest and fair debate about it... we should want everyone to hear what she says, so that they can come to their own educated conclusions."[34]