Law professor Amy Wax, following her reprimand, one-year suspension, and financial punishment by the University of Pennsylvania, intends to stay at school as a “conservative presence on campus,” the embattled scholar tells the Sun exclusively. Her case has become a flashpoint for freedom of speech on college campuses.  

Ms. Wax’s insistence to the Sun that “allegations I abuse or discriminate against students are totally bogus and made up” comes after Penn issued the academic a “public letter of reprimand” that includes the suspension — to begin next year — at half-pay, the loss of her named chair, and the forfeiture of summer pay in perpetuity. She estimates that the punishments will amount to more than half a million dollars.

The scholar is accused of calling some non-Western countries “s—holes” and of declaring that “women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men.” She also invited a white nationalist, Jared Taylor, to address her class. Ms. Wax denies making some of these comments and insists that others were taken out of context. She has faced two years of disciplinary proceedings.

Ms. Wax’s lawyer, David Shapiro, wrote in the campus newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, that the case against his client amounts to “a handful of isolated, years’ old allegations (which are highly contested) about claimed interactions between Professor Wax and a few minority students.” She tells the Sun that her treatment amounts to “performance art” that brings into sharp relief that Penn’s administration “doesn’t want conservatives like me on campus.”     

The path toward punishment began when the law school’s then-dean, Theodore Ruger, authored a complaint accusing Ms. Wax of “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements.” Penn’s faculty senate recommended sanctions against her, a virtually unheard of occurrence. A review body, Penn’s Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, confirmed them.

Ms. Wax tells the Sun that Penn’s charges that she abused and discriminated against students are “fabricated and tacked on as a cover for penalizing me for standard-issue, conservative anti-‘woke’ opinions and factual observations that are not allowed on campus.” She describes a “severely hostile environment for me at the law school” but also says conservative “students regularly reach out” to her for support.

Ms. Wax elaborates that she is committed to expose students to “opinions and viewpoints they don’t want to hear.” She reckons that those students  expect to be “cosseted and wrapped in bunting and bubble wrap.” She worries that campuses like Penn are “raising a generation of students who can’t deal with disagreement.” She notes that she has 12 students in a seminar she is teaching on conservatism. 

Despite the punishment, which also requires Ms. Wax to aver in public appearances that she speaks for herself and not the university that employs her, she has outlasted one of her campus antagonists. Penn’s former president, Liz Magill, determined that Ms. Wax engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct” that didn’t “offer an equal opportunity to all students to learn from her.”

Ms. Magill herself eventually resigned after a halting and evasive appearance before Congress, where she refused to assert that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate campus policy. In the weeks before that denouement, Mr. Shapiro wrote in the Daily Pennsylvanian that his client was the “victim of a glaring double standard which can only be explained by Penn’s naked, left-leaning partisanship.”

The University of Pennsylvania spokesman writes to the Sun that its faculty determined that Ms. Wax “violated the University’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.”   

A campus free-speech group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, asserts in a statement emailed to the Sun that “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.”