JOSH HAMMER: The Amy Wax Inflection Point For ‘Elite’ Higher Education

Higher education has been a cesspool of anti-Americanism, censorious leftism and cultural radicalism for longer than I have been alive.

The moral rot is, and always has been, particularly acute at Ivy League or otherwise putatively “elite” institutions. The pro-Hamas “protests” that have rocked university campuses since Oct. 7 are indicative of the fact that the jihadi anarchy on display at Harvard Yard hasn’t been replicated at red-state public schools such as Alabama or Ole Miss.

But every so often, something happens at an “elite” university that manages to shock our already jaded consciences. For instance, there was the triumvirate of “elite” university presidents who testified before Congress last December that the permissibility of campus calls for the genocide of the Jewish people “depends on the context.” There was also Judge Kyle Duncan’s March 2023 struggle session at Stanford Law School, where a baying left-wing mob — egged on by then-“DEI” Dean Tirien Steinbach — prevented the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals jurist from delivering his remarks.

But perhaps the single biggest disgrace to rock academia in recent years has been the University of Pennsylvania‘s yearslong crusade against its own tenured law professor, Amy Wax.

In 2017, Wax co-authored an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer that lamented the decline of traditional bourgeois values across American society and suggested this decline is blameworthy for many of America’s present social maladies. Almost immediately, 4,000 people signed a petition calling for Wax’s ouster; 33 of her Penn Law colleagues also condemned her instantaneously. Wax, a vocal critic of mass migration and skeptic of multiculturalism, admirably refused to be silenced. She ruffled more feathers when she observed that, in her two decades of teaching experience, Black students rarely finished in the top half of graduating law school classes.

Statistics, it seems, are racist.

For two and a half years, a period spanning successive Penn Law deanships, Wax has been subject to a probe into her alleged wrongthink and misdeeds. The investigation has depleted valuable funds that Penn Law could have used to foster free speech or — how’s this for an idea?— actually train students to practice law. The probe has been exorbitantly expensive, forcing Wax to retain counsel; thankfully, a GoFundMe legal defense fund for the embattled professor has raised nearly $200,000 since its July 2022 launch. The witch hunt, as Aaron Sibarium observed for the Washington Free Beacon, has also “made Penn a pariah among academic freedom advocates.”

The judgment finally came this week: Penn Law suspended Wax for a year, reduced her pay for that year by 50%, permanently stripped her of her endowed chair and summer pay, and publicly reprimanded her. Interestingly, as Sibarium scooped, Penn Law had previously offered Wax a settlement that would have lessened her penalty on the condition that she not “disparage the University,” not sue Penn and not publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence she had presented during the yearslong probe. Translation: Shut your mouth and this problem will go away quickly.

Chairman Mao would have nodded right along.

Penn Law, in the most recent version of the oft-cited U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, is tied for fourth place. High-achieving law school applicants (rightly or wrongly) seek to enroll there, and high-end law firms (rightly or wrongly) seek to recruit from there. When such an institution allocates immense time and resources to punish and humiliate one of its own faculty members, the goal is clear: to send a message.

In this particular case, the message could not be clearer: You must bend the knee. Wokeism, unlike the liberalism of old, brooks no dissent. Free inquiry must yield to the stifling intellectual conformity that leftists delude themselves into thinking is “progress.” On the substance of Wax’s comments, to merely speak of race-based outcomes and speculate as to the underlying social phenomena that might have affected those outcomes is verboten. Anyone who does not toe the line, condemn America as a bastion of “systemic racism,” and endorse everything from reparations to race-conscious admissions practices is, in turn, deemed a racist him/herself.

To call this spectacle “Orwellian” would risk understatement.

The Amy Wax struggle session ought to be an inflection point in our higher education wars. College students should stop applying to Penn Law. Employers — from law firms to individual judges — should stop hiring from there as well. And Congress should pass a new law placing a hard condition on the disbursement of higher education funding: No private university that punishes a tenured professor for engaging in First Amendment-protected speech will receive a single penny in public funding.

Wax is vowing to fight on. Perhaps she will sue Penn Law. Perhaps she will prevail in that suit. But as is so often the case, the process is the real punishment. And the indignity is the whole point.

To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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