After years of indulging Professor Amy Wax as she traded scholarly research for right-wing trolling, the University of Pennsylvania finally considered a formal complaint — brought by then law school dean Ted Ruger — against Wax for “promotion of white supremacy.” She’d embarrassed the school for years, attending a white nationalism conference, insulting Black graduates by baselessly claiming they hadn’t graduated in the top half of the class, declaring that the country needed fewer Asians, and inviting the former editor of a recognized hate group publication to campus.
Wax draped herself in “academic freedom,” confusing the freedom afforded professors to pursue published academic work with citing Wikipedia and going on right-wing podcasts. At the end of the process, Wax received a sanction from the university, but kept her job and tenure. She took the school to court, and was promptly laughed out of said court.
At this point in her career, there’s not much Wax can add to a serious scholarly conversation. Thankfully for Wax, Federalist Society chapters are much more concerned with trolling than educational content, and thus the embattled professor received an invitation from FedSoc to speak at Cornell Law.
A lot of folks were not pleased:
Wax’s appearance at Cornell was condemned by the Native American Law Student Association in a letter to the law school’s student body, and law students individually.
“The purpose of her platform is not to engage in any search for truth, but rather to advocate openly for a return to explicit racialized caste systems,” a statement sent from NALSA to the law school student body on March 26 reads.
“There is a horizon where free inquiry ends,” Ola Eboda J.D. ’27 wrote in a letter sent to the student body before the event, arguing Wax’s appearance “sets out to desecrate the identities of people.” Eboda is the vice president of the Black Law Students Association but said he wrote the letter in a personal capacity.
In keeping with the sentiment that “her platform is not to engage in any search for truth,” Wax didn’t come to discuss the finer points of labor policy, but instead to deliver an extended rant that America’s higher education system has been captured by “woke ideology.” More from the Cornell Daily Sun:
During the hour-long March 25 event, attended by about 20 people and moderated by conservative Prof. William Jacobson, securities law, Wax argued that universities are self-perpetuating institutions obsessed with a “cult of diversity” rather than searching for truth and pursuing new knowledge.
William Jacobson and Amy Wax in the same room! That’s like DeNiro and Pacino doing Heat, except for white grievance farming.
Jacobson, threw a fit several years ago when fellow professors raised objections to Ivy League professors using their institutional cachet to perpetuate racist tropes — a charge he considered a direct attack on his Legal Insurrection blog since it… does that. Specifically, Jacobson had just written a headline employing the term “wilding,” a byproduct of the Central Park Five case — where five minority kids were wrongly convicted of a crime. A few years later he was up in arms about how he felt persecuted because other professors in other classes were teaching classes about race and bias as part of the ABA’s prior requirement that accredited schools offer the subject.
The Cornell Sun piece delves into another disturbing aspect of this event, with sources questioning why the FedSoc talk managed to skirt the procedural obstacles other student groups face. According to students cited in the article, the required prior notice for a student-funded event dropped at 2 a.m. the day of the talk. These students may be in Biglaw soon, but until then they’re not sitting at their desks at 2.
This isn’t the first time a student group invited Wax to rant. Yale did the same thing a couple years ago, and at the time we noted that these groups seem to be using events like this to push a sort of reverse Heckler’s Veto. As opposed to the actual Heckler’s Veto, which refers to authorities using the hypothetical possibility of a protest to silence a speaker, these groups invite toxic speakers and lean on the administration to silence hypothetical protests. And right on cue, Cornell dispatched police to the talk and had the dean of students warn everyone of repercussions for any disruption.
It’s not like any of these events end with someone throwing rocks. Generally speaking, students either make a public statement and then walk out or students show up and politely ask pointed questions that end up frustrating the speaker into a temper tantrum. Like when Fifth Circuit judge Stuart Kyle Duncan lost his mind and started calling Stanford Law students “appalling idiots” for running circles around him. The “free speech crisis” at law schools is a manufactured outrage designed to enforce one-way silence.
So what did Wax tell the students:
“We put a man on the moon — with an undiverse team,” Wax said.
They made a whole fucking movie about how that’s not true! It was based on a book marshaling careful research, so I can understand why it might flummox Wax.
Part of universities’ “capture” by “wokeness,” according to Wax, was due to increasing female representation in higher education.
Women “are much more concerned with creating a safe space, making people feel good, inclusion, you know, emotional well-being, those sorts of what I call the values of the nursery and the kindergarten,” Wax said. “Should we give them equal time? And I say, well, not in a university, because women’s priorities are not fit to purpose.”
Look, I can think of one woman whose priorities don’t seem fit to the purpose of a professional learning environment, but Wax isn’t going to like the answer.
Cornell Law Federalist Society Hosting of ‘Racist’ UPenn Professor Faces Backlash [Cornell Daily Sun]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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