The case   of Professor Amy Wax of The University of Pennsylvania Law School offers us a clear example of the ways academic “centrists” betray the cause of academic freedom. Wax recently received major sanctions from her employer for expressing her ideas in speech and print over the past several years. Her case has been described as something of a testing ground for how institutions of higher education are likely to handle such situations going forward.

The distinction between denotation and connotation is known to all competent speakers of any language, even if they do not know the terms. A statement will always mean something in the literal sense—that is, according to the objective definitions of the words given—but it can also communicate another meaning. This second meaning is found in the emotional tenor of the statement, which is not encoded directly in the literal meaning but is nonetheless clearly discernible for all competent users of the language. In most speech and writing, the connotation is more important than the denotation, just as emotions are frequently more powerful than our abilities to adhere to dispassionate reason.

When people support academic freedom and give examples of expression with which they disagree, they can do it in various ways. One such way involves speaking in two registers. Their words explicitly communicate one thing (“We support free expression in higher education”), while another, stronger, and ultimately contradictory message is communicated alongside it (“I find this morally beyond the pale, and it is not clear to me how it could possibly contribute to the effort to produce more useful knowledge”).

The upshot of that second register is this: “So … maybe there really is no reason at all to allow it to be expressed, then, is there?” When these “supporters” of academic freedom additionally demonstrate an egregious failure at the foundational intellectual task of accurately citing and comprehending the expression at issue, they illustrate the grave difficulties academic freedom faces in the current degraded intellectual environment.

“A Racist Screed”

Let us have a look at some examples of this dual register “support” for academic freedom in Wax’s case.

Writing at The Bulwark, Cathy Young characterizes her position on Wax’s situation in these words: “It is … one of those cases in which supporters of academic freedom must defend the right to express odious views without sugarcoating their odiousness.”

She gives us numerous examples of what she finds “odious” in Wax’s statements. She begins with Wax’s statement, made to Glenn Loury on the latter’s podcast in 2017, that she had seen no black students in the upper quarter of the Penn Law class. Young makes no effort to demonstrate that Wax’s statement is motivated by any glee on her part over the observation or any ill will toward those students. Indeed, if one looks at the comment in context, Wax is telling us about the discouragement and failures experienced by black students who, because of affirmative action, have been placed in elite schools where other students outperform them. She cites the mismatch theory to argue that we would be serving them better by placing them in lower-ranking schools where their accomplishments more closely match those of their peers.

Notably, Young makes no effort to demonstrate the falsity of Wax’s claim, beyond alluding to former Penn Law Dean Ted Ruger’s claim that she was wrong. Ruger never produced any evidence to support his claim, nor did any other official at Penn Law. But what Wax said is problematic, Young asserts without evidence or explanation.

She then moves on to a talk Wax gave at the National Conservatism Conference in 2019. Here, Wax had presented the case for what she called “cultural distance nationalism.” This perspective focuses on the fact that someone’s “background culture can affect their ability to fit into a modern advanced society and to perform the roles needed to support and maintain it—civic, occupational, economic, technical, and the like.” The theoretical frame undergirding this idea is uncontroversial and embraced by many social scientists across disciplines. Culture is sticky, i.e., people do not shed it easily, and indeed they are frequently not very motivated even to try to shed it because of its deep roots in our characters. An immigration policy interested in trying to effectively fit immigrants into the receiving society might therefore do well to pay some attention to the fit between the culture of that receiving society and the culture of the immigrants. Immigrants more distant culturally might have more difficulty assimilating.

Young is scandalized that Wax “unabashedly states” that attending to cultural distance will mean more white immigration than non-white immigration to the United States. This is racism, she insinuates. But Wax makes it clear in the talk to which Young links that the racial component of the desirable immigrant population does not in itself that determine their desirability. It derives from the fact that Europe, the region of the world that is culturally closest to the culture of the United States, is very predominantly white in racial terms. But it is the cultural aspect of those immigrants that is privileged in cultural distance nationalism, not their race.

If there existed entirely non-white countries with cultures close to that of the United States, cultural distance nationalism would privilege immigrants from those countries. The fact that Young fails to see this basic point in the argument makes one wonder if she even bothered read Wax’s speech.

She then points to Wax’s claim that “conservatives won’t be able to advocate for culture-based immigration restrictionism until they stop deferring to taboos against “racism, white supremacy, [and] xenophobia.” Young helpfully gives us a “[t]ranslation” of the meaning of that point: “[L]et’s stop being so squeamish about racism.”

How accurate is the “translation”? Here is the statement Wax made:

“[T]oday we have an immigration policy driven by fear—the fear of being accused of racism, white supremacy, xenophobia—which has cowed and paralyzed opinion leaders, policymakers, politicians across the spectrum and impeded their ability to think clearly. That fear leads conservatives to avoid talking about cultural distance or questioning the happy fantasy of ‘magic dirt’ or discussing forthrightly the practical difficulties of importing large numbers of people from backwards states into successful ones. And as long as these taboos exist and respectable mainstream conservatives defer to them, it will be hard, maybe impossible, to change course.”

Competent readers of English will note that she said nothing there about approving of empirically demonstrable acts of racism, that is, racism that actually exists. Rather, she said conservatives, if they wish to forward their political interests, will need to stop being so concerned about being baselessly and falsely accused of racism for daring merely to talk about culture and its essential place in understanding the assimilation of immigrants that they refrain from engaging this topic at all. Baselessly and falsely accused of racism, for example, in the way that Cathy Young is here baselessly and falsely accusing Amy Wax of that sin.

Young adds another fiction concerning what she imagines Wax is saying in the cultural distance nationalism speech. She claims that Wax “praised” President Trump’s “shithole countries” remark. She did not. Wax mentioned the “outraged reaction to Trump’s profane and grating question, ‘Why are we having all these people from sh-thole countries come here?’” She then noted that, its profane and grating aspects notwithstanding, it is, in terms of cultural distance nationalism, “a serious question and not just a rhetorical one.” One need not “praise” a statement or question in order to see it as a “serious” one that might require a considered response in place of a peremptory self-righteous dismissal.

Wax’s challenge to the “dogma of the magic dirt” is also read by Young in this same careless and hyper-sensitive manner. Young calls it a “snarky jab at the idea that anyone who moves to the United States can fit in and assimilate.” But it is difficult to discern any snark in Wax’s remark. She indicated she was aiming at a peculiar “pie-in-the-sky version” of the claim that supporters of lax standards of immigration make, without any consideration of the cultural background of immigrants, to the effect that every immigrant, no matter what his cultural background, “will quickly come to think, live, and act just like us. They will celebrate, embrace, and support our ways. They will function effectively to maintain them.”

How can it be “snark” simply to ask whether or not this idea is true? Young is presumably assuming that it is. How does she know this? She does not give her readers any evidence to support her belief about its truth. Wax in fact points out that we do not have the wealth of data on this question that we might have gathered, if we were really interested in knowing the answer, and that this is precisely because people like Cathy Young have helped produce an environment in which many are frightened that, if they even note that we do not know the answer and consequently offer to empirically study the question, they will be condemned as monsters in just the way Young is condemning Wax here for asking the question.

Young charges Wax with writing “an out-and-out racist screed” in a response to George Lee on Asian immigration that was published in 2022 on Glenn Loury’s Substack account. She cites Wax at length here, but somehow still manages to fail to understand what Wax is saying.

In the cited text, Wax lists a few generalizations about Asian culture that she suggests might help us understand why Asian immigrants to the U.S. so heavily align on the political left. She speculated that some broad general characteristics of Asian culture, centering on a tilt toward collectivism and away from individualism, might help explain this feature of Asian immigrant political attitudes. Research has noted substantial differences in reasoning and behavior along the broad lines Wax notes between Westerners and Asians, and the popular press has reported on this research. We also know from research that Asians do indeed tend, compared to Europeans, to prefer to avoid standing out as individuals. The collectivism/individualism split along the Asia/Europe axis is well borne out in the literature.

These are observations about the regularities of culture. To make them into “a racist screed,” as Young does, requires one to see Asian cultural predilections as inferior to other cultural predilections. But Wax says nothing at all along these lines. She is simply speaking practically to the same question raised in the cultural distance nationalism speech: that of cultural fit between potential immigrants and the society into which they want to immigrate. She also adds here that, as a political conservative, fewer voters on the left is a good practical thing to pursue, and so for this reason she sees limited Asian immigration as a positive for conservative political fortunes. Only someone as obsessed as your average woke DEI university bureaucrat could find “a racist screed” in such dispassionate observations about cultural fit and political ideologies.

It is one thing to desire a polity that recognizes the individual as the main political entity , that honors and respects the rights of that individual, and that avoids policy that treats individuals as members of victimized or privileged groups. It is quite another to be so ignorant of reality that you imagine there are no possible group-based differences among populations, some of which might matter in terms of the kinds of behaviors you can expect from those different groups, and therefore no possibility of reasonably generalizing about those differences in the effort to come up with sane policies regarding immigration.

“Repellent”

Incredibly, given the shoddy character of Young’s attack on Wax, John McWhorter, in his effort at summarizing the nature of the expression for which Penn sanctioned Wax, does an even less competent job than Young of citing sources and exploring context before imputing meaning. He gives his readers at The New York Times almost nothing of importance to consider in understanding  Wax’s meaning. He provides only a few decontextualized quotations at the outset, then the bulk of his article is about experiences he had as a student. He does well to recall his student days, as McWhorter’s piece reads and holds together about as effectively as the typical undergraduate midterm essay.

He describes Wax’s views as “repellant” to “reasonable people.” They are “egregious” and present as an object for debate the proposition that “black people are white people’s inferiors.” Yet, we are supposed to believe, Wax’s views should not be met with punishment because “letting [students] encounter ideas that differ from their own is an important part of their education that prepares them to take their place in a democracy.”

McWhorter believes, then, that Wax is presenting ideas based in white supremacism, which he believes no reasonable person could hold. And, somehow, McWhorter also believes that presenting such ideas to students renders them more reasonable. He accuses Wax of incoherence, but it is difficult to imagine a less coherent position than his.

Here are the small number of examples of Wax’s statements McWhorter presents as self-evident demonstrations of just how “repellent” her views are.

The first is given also by Young, which I discuss above. It is the one about cultural distance nationalism preferring the immigration of whites. Again, the logic of the case is cultural, not racial. Given two possible immigrants, one from a culture similar to ours, and one from another culture much more distant, we should typically favor the importation of the one from a culture like our own because culture matters in terms of the values those individuals bring with them and in terms of the likely ability of the immigrant to successfully assimilate. Simply because the cultural region of the world that is most like our own is Europe, and because Europe is so heavily populated by whites, this will by definition mean “more whites.”

McWhorter, like Young, omits these details and context. Perhaps he is unaware of them, or perhaps he knows his readers are not likely to be interested in such levels of nuance and complication. Either way, it is a glaring failure in the interpretive task of understanding something one is attempting to evaluate.

The next Wax quotation McWhorter gives us is this: “Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men.” This too he plops without any discussion before his Times readers, fully aware that their progressive prejudices—that there can be no meaningful differences between groups, whether we are talking about racial groups, sexes, or any other example—will require them to react to it as he does, which is with exasperated outrage.

This excerpt is from an interview for The New Yorker from 2019 in which Wax noted that women are generally speaking:

“less interested in the single-minded pursuit of abstract intellectual goals than men. They want more balance in their life. They want more time with family, friends, and people. They’re less interested in working hard on abstract ideas. You can put together a database that shows that. The person who has the literature is a man named David Lubinski, and he shows that intelligence isn’t what’s driving it. It is interest, orientation, what people want to spend their time doing.”

McWhorter might be interested to learn that Lubinski has indeed documented what Wax claimed here empirically.

(And it perhaps bears noting, just to show that the knack of McWhorter and Young for failing utterly to understand claims made by Wax is not theirs alone, that the New Yorker interviewer, Isaac Chotiner, responds critically to Wax’s remarks about the differences in the sexes here by claiming that he consulted Lubinski and learned that what Wax claims is not in his research … and then proceeds to describe what is in Lubinski’s research in exactly the terms Wax used in the interview. This is a stupefying example of how blind people are made by ideology that must be seen to be believed.)

The general idea of sex differences in psychological profiles, behavioral predispositions, preferences, and interests is thoroughly documented in the research literature, and much of that research shows that these differences have a component that eludes explanation through differential socialization of the sexes. University of Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen wrote a compelling book on the topic of the systematic differences in male and female brains, The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism , which outraged feminist academics, but which has in the 20 years since its publication not been intellectually debunked.

Perhaps McWhorter refuses the very possibility of sex differences in our species. Perhaps he believes that Wax has thought as little about this topic as would seem to be the case for McWhorter himself. If only he had troubled himself to look into her claim, he might have avoided his misreading and learned something about the human sex difference.

McWhorter’s third Wax quote is this: “Black people from the United States and people from non-Western countries feel shame about the ‘outsized achievements and contributions’ of Western people.” This is from an interview Wax did with Tucker Carlson in 2022. Determining its accuracy or inaccuracy is an empirical matter. McWhorter certainly does not know it to be false in the absence of having done the survey research to find out precisely what blacks in the United States think about the matter. It is not at all on its face outrageous to suggest, e.g., that American blacks might have feelings and thoughts about the U.S. and the West that differ from those of American whites. Indeed, there exist plenty of survey data to show just this. Large majorities of American blacks believe that American institutions are designed to keep them down, for example, and despite the evidence of the trillions of dollars spent as part of the massive federal policy revolution since the 1960s to try to undo racial disparities. Blacks also feel love of country in the U.S. at rates far below those of whites.

What is the right term to use to describe a population which, in significant numbers, believes that the country in which they live—despite demonstrably committing massive resources to their well-being to undo historical patterns of stratification—is in fact utterly out to get them? The left would likely prefer “legitimate criticism” or “disappointment”; Wax uses “resentment,” “shame,” and “envy.” Given that one cannot know precisely what attitudes and beliefs are in the heads of every black American when expressing a sense of blacks’ position in American society, the choice of terms is necessarily subjective. To a fair degree, deciding which terms make the most descriptive sense will have to do with one’s understanding of the causes of the phenomenon in question, and that, too, is disputed and unknown. One thing is clear: To imagine, as McWhorter does, that it is simply impossible to see the black reaction to the post-’60s efforts to boost their position in society as anything other than deserved indicates a lack of reasonable historical perspective.

The last Wax quote we get from McWhorter is this: “There are not too many Black people in prison but too few.” This is from a claim made by Glenn Loury about a 2011 panel he was on with her. We do not have ready access to the specifics, but it is certainly not hard to imagine how such a claim could be justified. Blacks commit violent crime at hugely disproportionate rates. A very large majority of serious crimes in the U.S. do not end in the arrest and conviction of a perpetrator, that is, the police and court systems fail to apprehend and punish most offenders. Given high black participation in serious crimes, any effort to more effectively apprehend and prosecute perpetrators of serious crimes would inevitably result in many more blacks in prison. And anyone whose attitude about crime was based in the goal of trying to apprehend more rather than fewer of the perpetrators of crime would agree with the statement Loury attributes to Wax.

McWhorter comments on Wax’s 2017 “bourgeois culture” article in the Philadelphia Inquirer without bothering to cite her. Wax’s defense of the cultural system that built the country is “simply mean,” he writes, because that culture is gone and “never coming back.” McWhorter does not tell his readers where he obtained his magical ability to tell what cultural change is or is not possible in the future. He does, however, inform his readers that he did not read the Wax article, or in any event that he did not understand it. He makes the outrageously false claim that one of the features of “bourgeois culture” that Wax supports there has to do with “[b]lack people [being] classified as a subordinate class.”

McWhorter speaks also to Wax’s statement about the performance of black students at Penn Law School. He believes that the single most problematic aspect of this comment is that it might fuel still more outrage among the already outraged activist minority students, leading them to believe, against all the evidence, that places like Penn Law School are still as inveterately racist as Jim Crow schools in the 1920s deep South.

Huh?

McWhorter must know that the official response at Penn to Wax’s claim was not to acknowledge its truth but to directly deny it, although, again, without providing any evidence to prove that she is wrong. Yet the upshot of McWhorter’s reasoning for finding Wax’s statement beyond the pale here is the danger that the woke student populace’s response to it will be to become further entrenched in their completely ideological and incorrect view of racial disparities. In other words, Wax is at fault here for saying something that woke student ideologues are likely to read according to their irrational woke worldview. What can a professor say or write that does not run afoul of that standard?

Unsupportive Support for Academic Freedom

One comes away from statements like those of Young and McWhorter with a choice between two options.

The first is that these critics are unable or cannot be bothered to figure out what a statement means in context and prefer their ideological a prioris as the sole interpretive mechanism. That they are sloppy thinkers and writers is abundantly evident here. Young at least has the excuse that she is, according to her Wikipedia page, a “journalist,” and recent history tells us how little we can expect in the way of careful and objective reasoning from this species. McWhorter, however, is a professor at an Ivy League institution. That he thinks and writes as he does, with that professional pedigree, is weighty evidence in support of the thesis that those institutions are in a decayed state.

But let us be more generous than that with McWhorter and Young. If incompetence is not the explanation, then we are left with a still more devastating indictment of their failings. In this reading, they know what Wax meant by what she said, and they are maliciously and intentionally misrepresenting the gist of her statements, in conformity with the ideologically motivated intentions of her woke attackers on the Penn faculty and elsewhere.

Young and McWhorter position themselves as reasonable, centrist, and interested more fundamentally in the facts than in ideological games. They can posture all they like about how they are on the side of academic freedom and opposed to moralizing totalitarianism but their non-engagement with Wax’s arguments tells the true story.

The upshot of publishing articles like McWhorter’s and Young’s is that the moralistic bludgeon wielded by the woke academic elites to punish speech contrary to their ideology will only become larger and more powerful. The inability of such “centrists” even to entertain arguments on contested issues about which they have inchoate, untheorized, and emotionally hyper-charged beliefs makes them incapable of defending real freedom of inquiry in institutions of higher education.

Any serious commitment to academic freedom requires champions who have the ability to refuse moral condemnation of those who coherently argue for positions with which they disagree. It requires champions who vigorously—not grudgingly, apologetically, and with constant unargued qualifications—support the right of genuine scholars to make such arguments. Rather than finger-wagging at those with whom one disagrees and calling them names, as McWhorter and Young do, genuine supporters of academic freedom distinguish themselves from the woke ideologues by engaging in real debate. Half-hearted support for academic freedom as advanced by McWhorter and Young is barely distinguishable from the efforts of the woke ideologues from whom they purport to want to separate themselves, and it contributes to the ongoing moral totalitarianism of American intellectual discourse.