For years now, Amy Wax, the University of Pennsylvania law professor, attracted attention for her statements about race and gender. You may have heard some of them:
“Our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”
“Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men.”
Black people from the United States and people from non-Western countries feel shame about the “outsized achievements and contributions” of Western people.
There are not too many Black people in prison but too few.
For me, watching Wax go farther and farther down this path has become almost a spectator sport, though a glum one.
In response to complaints from students and faculty members, in 2018 the University of Pennsylvania said she would no longer teach required first-year classes. Last week it increased the penalty, suspending her for a year, removing her from her endowed position and ending her summer pay permanently.
Wax’s contributions to public discourse have been stunningly numb to compassion, courtesy and sometimes even to coherence, often recalling those of a certain former president. But though her statements (some of which she has attempted to distance herself from) are egregious and then some, so is her punishment.
I say this even though, as a professor at a comparable elite university, I know firsthand how her statements jeopardize the trust that must exist between students and their professors, as well as the institutions they attend. She has blithely stated, for example, that she has almost never seen a Black student perform in the top quarter of her classes. That seems almost an ideal way to inflame a pernicious view of higher education that is widely held among Black and Latino students — the view that despite all the diversity counselors, Black dormitories, Black and Ethnic Studies departments, etc., universities are fundamentally racist spaces.
