Amy Wax’s curriculum vitae is as impressive as it is long.  

She graduated from Yale summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. A prestigious Marshall Scholarship punched her ticket to Oxford, where she obtained a Master of Philosophy in philosophy, physiology, and psychology. Then she dual-enrolled in Harvard Medical School and Harvard Law School, taking a Doctor of Medicine cum laude from the former and later completing her legal education at Columbia, where she won awards. Accolades for excellence awaited her at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she began teaching in 2001. 

Wax is that rare thing in academia today: a bona fide intellectual. So it was sad, but not surprising, to see Penn severely sanction her for doing what intellectuals do—engaging topics outside the rigid orthodoxy stifling the halls of higher learning. 

Penn has accused Wax of an infraction of the university’s behavioral standards for “unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.”  

Her “unprofessional conduct” consisted of frankly discussing the taboos of race, crime, and immigration, which made students, staff, and faculty upset. That is all. Words that some found discomfiting are the extent of Wax’s transgression. For this she has been stripped of her named chair and suspended for one year at half pay, among other punishments. 

The inquiry into Wax’s wrongthink began in 2022, following an appearance on The Glenn Show, hosted by Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown University who became the first black scholar to obtain tenure teaching economics at Harvard. 

In their December 2021 talk, Wax pointed out that immigration tends to benefit the Democratic Party and its progressive agenda. Wax already had a bullseye on her back, but that discussion provided her enemies with fresh ammunition for their attacks. Four weeks after it was published, Penn Law Dean Ted Ruger announced a formal investigation was underway. 

In 2023, former Penn president Liz Magill upheld the sanctions after a hearing board initially handed them down. Wax appealed, triggering a review by Penn’s Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, which ruled against her.  

Loury came to Wax’s defense earlier this year, mocking Penn for wanting to penalize her for “making true but unsettling statements of fact.” 

“For thinking that the crime problem in American cities is largely a black problem,” Loury said. “For thinking that cognitive ability, on average, is different between racial groups. That is scandalous because those things are true.” 

“We can go on and talk about what that means, why that is, what are the qualifications, what’s the evidence . . . but you can’t destroy people for making truthful statements at a university,” Loury added. 

He is right, of course.  

A university should not destroy a scholar for making statements of fact, no matter how unsettling some may find it—though nothing Wax has said should be unsettling at all. 

Immigration does have social, cultural, and political consequences. Certain groups commit more crimes than others. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have lowered standards, expectations, and outcomes, which is why a growing number of companies are abandoning them. Microsoft recently fired its entire DEI team.

Wax simply wants America to return to saner times, when it was possible to have discussions about the obvious. The problem is that universities no longer really serve as bastions of higher education but have instead become halls of “higher superstition,” to borrow from the title of a 1994 book by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt that warned about the academic left’s takeover of academia.  

Wax is an apostate, one who is brilliant and convincing enough to make others question the pieties of our time. And that is why she must be punished.