Amy Wax, law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is claiming that the institution does not adhere to free speech standards and has placed a target on her due to the fact she holds conservative beliefs. This is not surprising at all. In the realm of “higher education,” being a conservative professor will definitely not make you popular. Colleges and universities are no longer about education and helping a young person develop and think for themselves. They have become indoctrination centers just like public schools. In fact, the two entities work in tandem with each other to churn out loyal statists.
via The Daily Caller:
Wax, who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation, has made several controversial statements outside of the classroom, and the university has claimed that her speech created “a hostile campus environment.” Former UPenn President Liz Magill signed off on sanctions against Wax, which Wax said was an attempt to sanction her for extramural speech, which is speech outside the classroom, and said that the school is “flagrantly in violation of the principles of academic freedom.”
“Penn has zero interest in developing and adhering to principles of a consistent position on free expression, zero interest. They can protect the people they basically agree with or favor, like the pro-Palestinians, anti-Israeli, antisemitic, and they can punish people like me. They have never articulated a consistent position,” Wax told the DCNF.
“Everybody says after October 7, universities are on the run, they’re going to change the way they do things or after the affirmative action case, they’re going to change the way they do things. I don’t see any evidence of that. I hear people doubling down on their conviction that everything they’re doing is right and good,” Wax added.
A review conducted back in 2018 revealed that the professoriate is actually ten to one Democrat to Republican in modern colleges. Wax said this dominance is why she’s being targeted over her conservative speech, while leftists are being left totally alone.
As recently as 2015, UPenn awarded Wax with the school’s top teaching prize, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, according to a UPenn news article. “Cancel culture really started accelerating around, I think, around 2015, 2016,” Wax told the DCNF.
The Penn Law Council of Student Representatives held a student body meeting with then-UPenn Law School Dean Theodore Ruger in September 2019 to discuss “issues regarding Professor Amy Wax,” according to an email obtained by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech legal organization.
“The objections to me had nothing really to do with the quality of my teaching. It had to do with my openly expressing views and opinions and discussing facts that were forbidden and deviated from this very narrow catechism,” Wax said during her conversation with the DCNF.
The professor has made some rather controversial statements in the past, including one that said the U.S. should allow fewer Asians to immigrate into the country due what she called an “indifference to liberty.” She also pointed out that different racial “groups have different levels of ability.” She finished that off by saying that unequal outcomes are not because of racism.
“People are afraid now to express a lot of this stuff in public because they will be censured or even lose their job or their livelihood,” Wax said to the DCNF. “There is a myth, a fairy tale in the universities that all people are equal in their latent ability, whatever that means, and their achievement, and that is just completely contrary to fact.”
Wax said allegations that she made students uncomfortable in the classroom were unfounded and that Ruger targeted her for extramural speech. She pointed out that the recently leaked memo of the faculty senate didn’t list any speech in the classroom.
The memo stated that Wax should be reprimanded publicly from leadership at the university, a punishment that would go along with the loss of her named chair and a requirement to note when she speaks publicly she does not represent the views of the university. But they didn’t stop there. They also recommended a year suspension at half-pay and a loss of summer pay in perpetuity. Seems a bit harsh, right?
Magill, who signed off on the recommendation to sanction Wax in the leaked memo, argued at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing that the university had been lenient on antisemitic speech due to the school’s adherence to free speech principles. Magill also defended the Palestine Writes Festival at the school, which involved one speaker who likened Zionism to Nazism and one who said “most Jews” are “evil.”
Free speech is the foundation of any free society. Without it, there is no way to course correct errors that are being made in governance. That’s why the left is trying to kill it.
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