A controversial law professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose alleged “racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic” comments repeatedly landed her in hot water was publicly reprimanded and suspended for a year—with only half-pay—after years of fighting.
Amy Wax, a tenured professor at Penn’s Carey School of Law, was sanctioned for her controversial comments on race after a lengthy review process that took over two years.
Wax has now become the first tenured professor at the Ivy League university to face sanctions in about 20 years, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
A spokesperson for Penn told the Daily Beast in a statement that Wax “engaged in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.” They said the disciplinary decision against her was now final.
The sanctions against Wax include a one-year suspension with half-pay, set to begin during the 2025-2026 academic year. Wax will also lose her named chair position.
When Wax speaks at public events, she will also be required to “speak for yourself alone and not as a University or Penn Carey Law School faculty member.”
“Academic freedom is and should be very broad,” Penn Provost John L. Jackson wrote in the public reprimand issued against Wax and published in the Penn Almanac on Tuesday. “Teachers, however, must conduct themselves in a manner that conveys a willingness to assess all students fairly.”
According to the provost, Wax’s comments left “many students understandably concerned that you cannot and would not be an impartial judge of their academic performance.”
Wax’s comments about race began to draw criticism after she co-authored an op-ed published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2017. In a later interview that same year, Wax said “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half.”
Theodore Ruger, the former dean of Penn Law School, removed her from teaching any required courses in 2018, Inside Higher Ed reported, after making comments “on the academic performance and grade distributions of the Black students in her required first-year courses.”
In a letter obtained by student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian, Ruger also accused Wax of telling a Black student she had only become a double Ivy League student due to affirmative action.
In classrooms, he claimed Wax said “Mexican men are more likely to assault women and remarking such a stereotype was accurate in the same way as ‘Germans are punctual,’ and that “gay couples are not fit to raise children.”
A complaint was filed against Wax by a group of Penn Law School alumni in 2021. The law school hired Northwestern Law School Dean Daniel Rodriguez to investigate Wax’s conduct.
According to Penn’s record of the investigation, Rodriguez interviewed 26 alumni. Wax herself refused to participate in the investigation.
In his final report, Rodriguez found that “Professor Wax has made a number of comments in class and a few outside of class which could reasonably be viewed as derogatory and harmful,” but also ultimately found that there was no evidence of discrimination against any individual student.
In a December 2021 podcast with Brown University economist Glenn Loury, Wax called Asian immigration to the United States “problematic” due to the “danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country.”
Later, she complained that most Asian-Americans vote for the Democratic Party, and said “as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”
More students and alumni issued complaints against Wax in 2022, shortly after her comments about Asian immigrants. Then-Dean Ruger started a faculty review process against her, writing that she exhibited a “a callous and flagrant disregard” for the student body by making “incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements.”
A board of five tenured faculty members reviewed the charges against Wax. In May 2023, the board unanimously found Wax committed a “major infraction of the University’s behavioral standards.”
Specifically, they cited the law professor for “a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status,” as well as “making discriminatory and disparaging statements targeted at specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify” both in and outside of her classroom.
It also found that she violated the university’s policy for keeping student grades private by “publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race,” and continuing to do so after receiving a warning from the dean.
Sanctions against Wax were approved by then-Penn President Liz Magill, but Wax appealed the decision to the school’s Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility. The committee’s decision, also published on Tuesday in the Penn Almanac, found that “no significant defect in procedure,” allowing the sanctions to finally go into effect.
During the appeal process, Wax remained defiant. In November 2023, she invited Jared Taylor, a writer described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as white supremacist, to speak at her class “Conservative and Political Legal Thought.” Taylor is the editor of American Renaissance, a publication the SPLC says “promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites.”
About 80 Penn law students showed up to the lecture to protest Taylor’s appearance, student paper The Daily Pennsylvanian reported.
Wax did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
“After years of promising it would find a way to punish professor Amy Wax for her controversial views on race and gender, Penn delivered today — despite zero evidence Wax ever discriminated against her students,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech watchdog group, said in a response to Tuesday’s announcement.
