Ugly expression
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 167
ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE DEP'T.
Amy Wax Used Her Words
ON MONDAY, THE Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the University of Pennsylvania plans to suspend law professor Amy Wax for a year at half pay, and to impose "a public reprimand issued by university leadership, the loss of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement to note in her public appearances that she is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law school or Penn," because of what Penn called "years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom."
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—a libertarian organization that ranked the University of Virginia as the No. 1 university for free expression this year, right before the University of Virginia banned its student tour-guide organization because the guides talked about Thomas Jefferson's slaveholding—responded by condemning Penn and casting Wax as a martyr to the cause of free thought:
After years of promising it would find a way to punish professor Amy Wax for her controversial views on race and gender, Penn delivered today—despite zero evidence Wax ever discriminated against her students.
Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn's willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor. After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook.
As usual, the discourse about discourse was the slipperiest discourse of all, with dueling premises dressed up as dueling principles. Was Wax punished for her "conduct," or punished for her "views"? Was Penn protecting academic norms or suppressing academic freedom?
But behind the abstractions was the all-too-specific Wax, an almost indescribably nasty and witless bigot, who long ago dedicated her life to insulting and antagonizing as many people and groups of people as possible. Her record is so extensive, it's challenging to put it all together. The New York Times, for instance, wrote:
Among allegations against her were that she had described some non-Western countries as “shitholes” and had said that “women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men.” She has said that Black people from the United States and people from non-Western countries feel shame for the “outsized achievements and contributions” of Western people, and has derided as unrealistic television ads depicting “Black men married to white women in an upper-class picket-fence house.”
Wax also, the Times noted, "invited a white nationalist, Jared Taylor, to class." Bad as that litany sounded, though, it was also all plausibly an expression of ideas—ugly ideas, poorly substantiated ideas, racist ideas, ideas that had no identifiable connection to legal scholarship or the curricular requirements for a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, but ideas nevertheless, presented by a tenured professor. If Amy Wax could be punished for making her class sit through a speech by a racist agitator, who else might be punished for exposing their students to unpopular or controversial messages?
The Inquirer story reported that by sanctioning Wax, the university might be opening itself to criticism for its failure to punish faculty for participating in pro-Palestinian activities:
The U.S. congressional committee that investigated Penn’s handling of antisemitism complaints, a lawsuit filed by two Jewish students at Penn, and Wax’s lawyer all have pointed to the proceedings against Wax as evidence that Penn is willing to attempt to take action against some professors for some speech.
But every slippery slope is lubricated with generalities. The rest of Wax's record provides some traction. A report from the law school dean on Wax, from 2022, included examples of Wax telling individual students "that Black students don’t perform as well as white students because they are less well prepared, and that they are less well prepared because of affirmative action," and (in an email) that "[i]f blacks really and sincerely wanted to be equal, they would make a lot of changes in their own conduct and communities" and, when asked if she agreed with statements about inherent Black inferiority, that "you can have two plants that grow under the same conditions, and one will just grow higher than the other."
Someone who still wanted to advocate for Wax might point out that even these were statements about concepts and policies, not attacks on individual students. In an interview with the New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner in 2019—after she'd theorized at the National Conservatism Conference that "we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance"—Wax pushed back repeatedly against the use of the word "racism" at all, and insisted "We’re not talking about individuals here. We’re talking about a distribution, right?"
She continued:
Once again, you’d have to define racism. You’re basically saying any generalization about a group, whether true or false—and we know it doesn’t apply to everybody in the group, because that’s just a straw man—is racist. I mean, we could do “sexist,” right?
We could.
So, women, on average, are more agreeable than men. Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men. Now, I can actually back up all those statements with social-science research.
Unfortunately for Wax, she apparently didn't have the self-control to confine herself to averages. Among the other complaints in the dean's report was one about Wax telling a Black law student that the student "had only become a double Ivy 'because of affirmative action.'"
Here was a beacon in the fog of denial. When FAIR claimed there was "zero evidence Wax ever discriminated against her students," it was arguing that this professor who talked compulsively about the inferiority of Black people and women, who made sweeping racist declarations in public, and who then directly told this student she regarded her as unqualified because of her race, might not have acted on that entire cascade of expressed beliefs at the student's expense. Maybe she was just talking. Maybe, in the estimation of the free speech advocates, words don't mean anything.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 24, 2024
★★★ The glow of a still-lit streetlight and the coloring sky left one silver car lambent in the row of parked vehicles out on the avenue. That was the last effect the daylight had to offer, as the morning settled into plain gray over a damp chill. On the slope down toward the Park, the late-morning breeze gathered into a biting wind. It was cold to be out in short sleeves, but a jacket would have been a few degrees wrong in the other direction. The fallen leaves had grown visibly deeper in two days. Tufts of grass were eating into the edges of the baseball infields, and soccer goals stood in the outfields. The afternoon clouds had grown more clearly individually defined, but the seams between them were pressed so tightly together, they may as well have been a solid sheet.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from 250 Meatless Menus And Recipes To Meet The Requirements Of People Under The Varying Conditions Of Age, Climate And Work, by Eugene Christian and Mollie Griswold Christian, published in 1910, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
CHEESE AND NUT SANDWICHES
Use equal parts of American cheese and grated protoid nuts, moisten with heavy sweet cream or olive oil, season with a little salt, and place between unfired wafers or whole-wheat (De Luxe) crackers, spread with dairy or "Beech-Nut" peanut butter.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the crushing heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
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This collection of top-shelf pieces from The Awl, edited by Carrie Frye and published and produced by Flaming Hydra in consultation with The Awl’s original editors and contributors, will also include ALL NEW commentary and original essays from contributors and readers.
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