The University of Pennsylvania School of Law has finally handed down a decision in the case of Professor Amy Wax that many have been expecting for months. Its decision to sanction Wax for making “discriminatory and disparaging statements” ensures the reputation of Penn, and of higher education generally, will continue to plummet in the view of all reasonable Americans.

Rational people cannot feel sufficient contempt for this decision or the people who made it. Two years ago, I wrote about the utter vacuousness of the charges the school was considering against Wax. It is worth briefly recalling some of the precise claims advanced by Wax’s attackers, since the mainstream media can be counted on to avoid mentioning that information in its gleeful reporting about her sanctioning.

Penn presented student complaints that are so risible one suspects they had to have been invented. One of Wax’s black students alleged that Wax remarked that the girl had been able to attend two Ivy League institutions because she benefited from affirmative action. How are we to know that the student didn’t benefit from affirmative action? Does the left now consider that an insult? After all, it is the left that screeches constantly about how affirmative action must be maintained because without it the numbers of black students in elite institutions would plummet. Do they now disavow that position? And indeed, why would the student feel hurt by the existence of a program that is claimed to aid people like her, or by the mere acknowledgement that it is providing such aid?

Accepting without question that real Penn Law students are so emotionally and intellectually weak as to be psychologically harmed by such statements is about as strong an indictment of the mental capabilities of the current Penn Law crop as can be imagined.

Wax is also pilloried for having invited the race realist Jared Taylor to attend one of her class sessions. Penn charged that this is evidence that she validates and supports his ideas. But the university produced no evidence that she expressed any support for Taylor’s ideas. The course to which he was invited was an elective course on the varieties of conservative thought. Try to imagine a university penalizing a professor for bringing a Stalinist thinker to class in a course on Marxist philosophy and you get a sense of the absurdity. What Penn is admitting in this charge is that professors at their institution—at least those with any leanings at all contrary to the official ideology of the institution—cannot be allowed even to objectively and dispassionately present to students ideas other than those the totalitarians who run the joint have determined to be ideologically correct.

Penn also charged that Wax had made untrue and hurtful comments in the public domain on racial differences in achievement. She has noted, for example, that group differences in IQ exist along racial lines, and that there’s also a lot of evidence that suggest innate differences between the sexes, both in psychological dispositions and personality traits. These two claims are widely accepted among scholars who work in the relevant fields. But the DEI police at Penn are apparently unaware of or unhappy about this, and their ignorant authority is what matters.

Penn claimed that Wax’s behavior “breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.” But how did she do this, precisely, given that no evidence to support the claim was ever presented by Penn or any other party? Throughout the affair, Penn has claimed black students have a reasonable suspicion that they will be treated unfairly in Wax’s classes. But they have never produced even one claim that she has ever graded a student unfairly based on that student’s race or ethnicity, which one imagines would not be hard to find, given the scurrilous portrait of Wax Penn has disseminated in the course of this long process.

Penn claims that Wax’s statement about the desirability, from a political conservative’s viewpoint, of reducing Asian immigration because of the demonstrable fact that Asians vote very heavily for Democrats, is de facto evidence of her inability to grade an Asian student as dispassionately as any other student. It does not take much mental wherewithal to notice that it is perfectly possible to believe Wax’s statement and to simultaneously adhere to the professor’s professional obligation and calling to treat all students fairly.

Penn clearly has not thought hard about their logic might extend to other cases. Left-leaning professors (the overwhelming majority of professors, in other words) almost certainly desire fewer conservative voters and more leftist voters, as this is the way one wins elections. So, by the same logic they applied to Wax’s statement, we can reasonably assume that leftist professors are often guilty of bias toward conservative students. (And, indeed, there is objective empirical evidence to support that suspicion). Should we consider sanctions against them whenever they voice their support for leftist ideas?

Rest assured, reader, that there is no danger of that ever happening, so long as crude far-left ideologues like those who run Penn Law School continue to dominate the academic scene.

Again, this result was not unanticipated by those of us who are aware of precisely how stupid and ideologically warped the people who run academic institutions today typically are. Every American with an interest in free expression  should pray that this will be a wakeup call. May Professor Wax fight this ridiculous judgment legally, and may she win.

The rest of us must reckon fully with just how broken American universities are and prepare ourselves for the daunting work needed to chase out the deranged woke ideologues who currently control them.