The only thing I have to take issue with today is Mona's piece. Are we really, really, taking the position that 'yeah, a professor proclaiming that some of their students are subhumans, but that shouldn't cost them their job?' That's the arguement? It's not even me trying to make her look worse than she is, Mona CITES a bunch of her raci…
The only thing I have to take issue with today is Mona's piece. Are we really, really, taking the position that 'yeah, a professor proclaiming that some of their students are subhumans, but that shouldn't cost them their job?' That's the arguement? It's not even me trying to make her look worse than she is, Mona CITES a bunch of her racist comments!
"If Wax is fired for repellent sentiments alone, the protections of tenure will be badly weakened."
Ah, yes. Sentiments alone! Sentiments like:
“Non-Western people feel a ... tremendous amount of resentment and shame.” “On average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites.” “America will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”
Those are real quotes! Those are things she has said! We're not talking about micro-agressions are something, we're talking about beliefs that you would expect to find at a klan rally. At what point does a university have to go 'yeah, your beliefs are not consistent with our values and you're no longer worthy of employment here?'
Again, these are not mild beliefs! These are not quotes pulled from two decades ago, she's said these things in the past few years!
If you said these things stocking shelves at Target, you would be fired on the spot. I do not understand this impulse that says we can't get rid of people like her just because she's a professor of law. How exactly, by the way, is she expected to do her job fairly and treat students she teaches properly, when she believes that a great many of them are less than human and physically incapable of learning from her?
You wouldn't accept these viewpoints from anyone else, and there's no 'refuting' her speech here. Her job is to teach people and treat them fairly, not espouse about how they are unworthy of being part of the country she was born into.
I take your side on this. Normally I'd leave university professors alone, even if they say dumbass things time to time. But this professor makes a point of spouting racist and sexist garbage so repellent that a Kleagle would tip his pointy hood in homage. Tenure is designed to protect academic freedom, and her multi-ist performance art has nothing to do with academics or freedom. Fire her, she can go work at DeSantis's new MAGA U.
And if blue-state institutions start to purge people like Wax, what will become of socialists, communists, and progressives on the faculty at red-state institutions?
Pretty much what’s happening at New College in FL now. It’s inconceivable that you can teach those whom you hold in contempt. Besides, socialists and communists and progressives are just trying to get those with whom they disagree to change their minds. Pretty tough to change that which your “betters” disparage when it’s your race or ethnicity.
"Besides, socialists and communists and progressives are just trying to get those with whom they disagree to change their minds."
You do remember that violent mass revolution was pioneered by socialists and communists, right? That is what "anti-communists" see when they see someone they consider a socialist or communist, not a polite "persuader." We don't want to use their values as arbiter, even though they see themselves as representing the universal principle of "human liberty." As for progressives, I think you may be able to imagine why on some university campuses, conservative students were afraid to let their views be known. I taught for many years, and in my later years, because I was always careful to suppress my own liberal views in class, it was not uncommon for conservative students to come to my office, hoping they could find someone to open up to. They were disappointed when I told them I was very liberal, but it educated me about classroom climates that I otherwise wouldn't have had access to.
The function of tenure depends on its remaining absolutely neutral. You and I seem to share general values, but if you mistake our values for universal ones that are simply correct while those of our opponents are simply wrong, you'll have a system of ideological isolation in academics, state by state. If you get what you wish for, the long term impact will put an end to academic freedom, except that people will choose to attend or teach at institutions where everyone is in basic agreement.
Thanks for making my point. You felt it important to suppress your natural urge to express your viewpoint but held it at bay. I suspect you tried to make your classroom a space where divergent opinions could be offered and tried in the crucible of socratic dialogue. If only Wax were as circumspect and respectful.
By the way conflating the bomb throwers of the failed communist revolution with those who teach political theory is a bit disingenuous. It's the reason that "communism" -- anything that's not what right wing "conservatives" want -- is the go-to bogey man for the right. As for progressive dominance on campuses: from my observation the difference on campuses between trigger warnings and petulant malicious behavior is the difference between asking someone not to call you an asshole versus feeling quite free to degrade someone, to call someone an asshole, or worse, for whatever reason one chooses, but mostly because he/she wants to, and feels entitled to do so because "that's just my opinion, man." Unless you're Professor Wax , of course, and can do it because you're better.
Another correct point you could have drawn, Grumpy, was that conservative students came to me in error because most of my colleagues did not suppress their natural urges, and those colleagues, in my humanities wing, were always on the Left. I'm not aware, however, of *any* colleague who felt free to degrade their students on thebasis of ideology. (I know of some cases that clearly involved emergent personality disorders; one of those did result in detenuring, a very sad affair.)
I didn't say anything about those who taught political theory. I was speaking of faculty who were personally communists. I have not actually read of any instance where Professor Wax has made her views on race the subject of her teaching. Maybe she has; I don't know. The calls for her dismissal have, so far as I know, all been based on her activities outside the classroom. If Wax has systematically mistreated students, then those behaviors should be the basis of a job action, not her publicly expressed views.
A fair and reasonable conclusion on Wax, though it’s hard to separate the message from the messenger in this case. Just because one doesn’t shout the pejorative inside the classroom but waits til outside the classroom door doesn’t soften the blow.
If a socialist, communist, or progressive spouted the racist and sexist things that Wax did, they would fully deserve the same treatment: find work elsewhere. "Women are dumber than men, whites are better than blacks, Asians suck for a bunch of reasons, America should stay white," none of that is an expression of a political system (socialists and communists) or ultra-liberal political solutions to problems (progressives). Those people I would protect from termination with tenure. When any of them start condemning blacks, browns, Asians, and women as Lessers solely from skin color and gender, that should strip them of their protection.
You are expressing your beliefs and values. I happen to share them but in no way do I want them to become a litmus test of what is acceptable to believe or to value, especially if the road to that consensus is systematic suppression.
Racism and sexism of this rankness SHOULD be a litmus test. Why would you think otherwise? The professor called blacks inferior to whites, women dumber than men, Asians a whole bunch of names, and that only white Westerners should be allowed into the United States. That is so appalling that it overrides tenure protection.
It's a confusing world where we condemn the speech of insurrectionists but defer to "academic" freedom in excusing the authors of most of the abhorrent notions of those insurrectionists. John Eastman, a law professor, provided the ingredients for the insurrectionist stew that bubbled in Trump's brain. For his part in the coup plot, the CA Bar has unveiled disciplinary charges against Eastman -- not to prevent his speech but to make him accept responsibility for it. The ideas and most of the vitriol spouted by the rubes didn't originate there. We are quick to point the finger at the mob that will do what mobs have always done throughout history, but demure when the leaders of the mob are "academics"? Tenure is designed to protect the Copernicuns and perhaps the flat earthers alike but not those who would destroy the universe to prove it doesn't exist, as authoritarians are wont to do in order to quash liberal democracies.
Well said, Grumpy. Tenure is designed and needed to protect academic freedom in teaching and research. What this professor is spouting--black are inferior to whites, women are dumber than men, America should attract and retain only white people, Asians suck--is neither teaching, research, nor arguments she's making tied to the law she teaches. They're vile racist and sexist statements designed solely to seek attention and stir the pot, and I believe the university has ever right to discipline her up to and including termination for it.
As a South Asian immigrant and a specific target of Wax’s disdain, I have to say I agree with Mona 100% on this issue!
If free speech has any value at all (and I believe it does), it means that we must support the right of free speech of people we violently disagree with. We are free to criticize them and boycott them and not associate with them and call for like minded people to boycott them as well. But we should not support a government policy that will allow their views to be censored (unless their speech presents a “clear and immediate danger”).
Academic Freedom is NOT the same thing as Freedom of Speech. If academic freedom and tenure have any value (and I believe they do), it means we should support the right of tenured professors to keep their jobs regardless of controversial or heretical views. This doesn’t mean other professors can’t speak out against them or that students can’t write op-Ed’s condemning their views and urging other students to avoid taking their classes or urging private publishers to avoid publishing their work or urging people like Glen Loury to avoid platforming them.
The difference between democracy and every other form of government is that democracy must rely on persuasion to change minds - not force. And while force may work to silence or suppress hateful views in the short term, it inevitably leads to a backlash borne of bitterness and resentment in the long term. If anyone has doubts, take a look around and see the proof for yourself.
As to the question of how to refute such repugnant views? How to convince someone like Amy Wax and people who share her views that I, as a South Asian do in fact have “the spirit of liberty beating in my heart”? I would answer that I fully support her liberty to think and speak and act and teach as she pleases and suffer the consequences. *I* and my children, who I have raised to revere the greatest ideals of America are the living, breathing refutation of every vile argument she makes.
Literally no one is stepping on Wax’s ability to speak. Why is this a free speech issue just for Wax’s speech? What about UPenn’s right to free association? Why is it that only some people’s free speech rights matter while those of others don’t.
As much as I appreciate your sentiment, I disagree with you completely. This is a law professor basically saying that there are certain "classes" of citizens who do not deserve the fruits of liberty because of some perceived inadequacy on her part. Just as it would be impossible for a physics professor to profess physics while denying belief in gravity, it's hard to see how a law professor can profess to teach about the American system of laws which professes in its pledge of allegiance, "with liberty and justice for all."
Also most college level physics professors actually do reject the concept of gravity as “a force by objects of large mass that acts on other objects” because we now generally agree that it’s better explained as a curvature of space-time. Should professors who teach that gravity is a force be fired for their incorrect views?
That’s a disagreement on the mechanics not the reality. What if the argument was only white men can understand gravity. Wasn’t so long ago that was the imputed case. This is not about being wrong — Lord knows, we are all guilty of that — it’s a matter of insisting you are right against all the evidence that disproves the notion that All whites are better than All Blacks or All whites are more patriotic and more deserving of liberty than All Asians because Asians are incapable of appreciating liberty and Blacks are unable to better themselves. Hardly the same as arguing the curvature of time space and force of objects on other objects. Professing differing theories — even those that might be seen as crackpot today — is one thing. Professing an unbending prejudice contrary to fact and experience is another.
You chose the metaphor, Grumpy. Ms. Haidery merely illustrated the limits of using it simplistically.
Once again, you are projecting onto Professor Wax your own extrapolations of her statements. She has, so far as I know, said none of the things you attribute to her. If you have to make your argument by exaggeration it's a signal that there's a weakness in those arguments.
More substantively, Wax has picked up ideas made popular by political scientist Charles Murray, the surviving co-author of "The Bell Curve," who is a complex and interesting man with some awful ideas. His research on underlying racial differences is flawed, but unfortunately the most prominent people who have debunked it have also relied on flawed research. Murray's ideas have been exploited by leaders of the "intellectual alt-right," white nationalists of various stripes, and the ideas are influential in a wide range of rightwing contexts, including some academic ones. If you want to go all Torquemada and attempt to expel those who adopt Murray's views from academics as heretics against our contemporary consensus, those views will become more attractive, as banned ideas always are, and those on the Left will be viewed with as much affection as Torquemada.
Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart: The State of White America (to demonstrate that the elite are more likely to drive foreign cars than domestic ones, Murray notes the makes of automobiles in a couple of mall parking lots. Now that's scholarship at it's finest)? Murray, who wound up at that bastion of American thought known as the American Enterprise Institute after academia would have nothing to do with him because his ideas weren't only outlandish and unproven but no more than manifestations of his mental unbalance? That Charles Murray? That's the peg you want to hang your hat on? That's the peg Wax wants to hang her hat on? Maybe she should follow Murray to the AEI where she can spout her racist nonsense without damaging any budding young scholars. Speaking of Torquemada -- big hero of the new integralists, right? Just ask Wax. I'm sure she'll know.
I'm not sure what peg you saw me hanging my hat on, Grumpy. I do wear a hat, but I was speaking of Professor Wax and the possible origins of her views. I don't know if she wears hats.
My understading is that Murray never sought an academic position, which as a student of Lucien Pye at MIT (a huge credential) he surely could have secured with ease. He has always worked with research think tanks: first the politically neutral AIR, which produces enormous amounts of essential, nonpartisan work, and later rightwing ones like AEI, which makes sense because his personal views moved to the right. (You do realize that half the country aligns towards the AEI side of the political spectrum, right? Trying to dismiss someone as academically ineligible because he is associated with AEI seems an argument with intrinsically limited appeal, like a rightist trying to discredit an academic because they are associated with Brookings.) I have never seen Murray as "mentally unbalanced." I think you are projecting your view of his ideas as crazy into a fact-free diagnosis.
I think we've made our views clear. Feel free to add: I'll read what you write, but I'm at the end of the line here.
Thanks for your time. Hat-wearing is a lost art. I hope your hat is not some baseball cap turned backward to expose that tiny rectangle of scalp and hair — or forelock, if one is so lucky — that a hat was intended to cover.
Grumpy, law professors held those attitudes widely for most of the country's history, and people in the Jim Crow South, presumably including law professors and other academics, happily ignored the implications you draw from it, because they were confident they knew whom "all" referred to. (How many signers of the Declaration actually believed that "all men are created equal?" Any? They knew what they meant by "all.")
Some physics professors hired in the 1890 lived out long careers denying that relativity and quantum theory were valid. It's also perfectly possible to teach physics while believing that gravity is actually an unproven theory. (After all, it is!)
In any event, I don't believe Wax has ever said anything like what you attribute to her--the "not deserving the fruits of liberty" stuff. What she has said is bad enough without making up new things. It's perfectly possible for her to accept, with sincerity, that everyone should be treated equally under the law, while believing that some classes of people are "better" than others.
Oh, I see, she only means to set us back 150-200 years. No one is suggesting she can't stew around in the fetid swamp of her own mind, but "professing" to teach the law while denying the basic fruits, which you inevitably do when you say some are "better" than others, is okay? Yeah, not seeing it.
No one is saying “it’s Ok” - just like no one is saying professors teaching controversial material at Claremont or Liberty University or Hillsdale are “OK” but the whole point of freedom is that you have the freedom to be wrong.
Is teaching a job requirement for professors at UPenn law? If it's not, there is merit to Mona's argument that the benefits of the tenure system as a whole outweigh the costs of firing one specific individual for her beliefs. But if it is, it's hard to see how her stated beliefs are compatible with teaching (e.g., interacting with and fairly and objectively evaluating a wide variety of students, including those she views as inferior based on their appearance). On that basis -- inability to do the job for which she was hired -- she should be fired.
". . . it's hard to see how her stated beliefs are compatible with teaching (e.g., interacting with and fairly and objectively evaluating a wide variety of students, including those she views as inferior based on their appearance)."
It may be hard to see, but people are complex. Sometimes they bend over backwards to show that they are not what they think you are. Professor Wax is not the first to face such questions, and the answer doesn't lie in whether we can imagine one outcome or another. It's a matter of evidence.
I have no doubt that in a case like Wax's, the Dean of the Penn Law School has full data on her grading patterns, student evaluations, and information gleaned from student and faculty reports. That's part of a dean's job. If there is evidence of bias in grading or other treatment of students,the dean has a number of options, short of starting due process mechanisms for tenure revocation (which are quasi-judicial, based on hearings and evidence--it would be a legal violation not to follow handbook procedures and Penn would lose a lawsuit). Among these would be assigning other faculty to audit her courses and do all grading; restricting Wax's appointment to research and administraive duties and adjusting her salary; suspending Wax for cause and setting non-negotiable terms of remediation. If there is, indeed, a pattern of mistreating students then that would be a basis for dismissal, not Wax's views.
But based on my own experience in cases of these kinds, Wax probably doesn't approach individual people of color with the biases we assume she must have when making generalizations about race. And, being a lawyer, Wax is probably very careful to make sure that whatever she may feel, her instructional behavior does not make her vulnerable to any kind of disciplinary action. If it doesn't, what we imagine about her psychology is irrelevant, and certainly not the basis of a job action.
Of course it is untenable for a person whose role includes evaluating student performance to harbor and espouse the bigoted viewpoint that she can prejudge students’s intellectual ability based on skin color.
This is the first really valid, reasonable, and job-related argument I've seen here for disciplining an academic for her comments.
As you note, it would certainly be appropriate -- and in fact required -- for management to question the fitness of a schoolteacher, policeman, prosecutor, or judge who repeatedly and voluntarily made statements indicating he or she believes certain races and genders are inherently inferior to others. An academic whose responsibilities entail judging students' performance falls into this category. When being evaluated for tenure, such declarations are also material, particularly in social sciences and humanities. Arguably once having received tenure, the bar should be much higher. Probably absent actual criminal misconduct, a tenured academic might not be properly discharged, but the duties and responsibilities appropriate to her position should be restricted to areas where her manifest prejudices are to the extent possible a negligible factor. Of course, if the essential duties of the position (such as grading students, sitting on committees that pass on granting degrees, peer reviewing journal submissions, and so forth) require objectivity which the tenured person's behavior calls into question, discharge for cause might also be appropriate.
In this case we seem to have a person purposefully making a spectacle of herself, motivated perhaps by some perverted effort akin in her mind to civil disobedience. There are people who seek out martyrdom for profit. Often they aren't really very stellar at their jobs, and their career paths don't yield the glittering prizes and peer admiration they believe is their due. Not being able to command respect for being brilliant, they seek sympathy for being victims.
Mr. Butcher, I think you are on target in distinguishing between probationary tenure-line faculty and tenured faculty. The discussion here relates to tenured faculty.
These sorts of issues do, in fact, come up. Sometimes tenured faculty make appalling generalized statements about women, men, white people, people of color, and so forth. The question immediately turns to objectivity in discharging their academic responsibilities, especially as teachers for members of whatever group they have disparaged.
The way administrations often approach this is by assessing both the words spoken or written (or retweeted!), the faculty member's track record in terms of grading and mentoring students, student perceptions of the faculty member (both those who actually know the person and those who may have majors requiring future contact with them), and the faculty member's own self-defense. Sanctions can required public apologies, suspension from certain duties for a period, loss of grading responsibilities in courses taught, and curtailments specific to individual positions. (Students generally choose their degree committees, and peer review is an extra-institutional function--you don't even have to be an academic to do it.)
I don't know about your last paragraph. Cases I've been involved with have never really fit that profile. I think it's more common that faculty who are quite successful in their professional fields get too full of self-esteem, and normal constraints of speech break down.
Another thing to reflect on is that a century ago, judgments about the inferiority of women and people of color might well have been a majority view among the then-almost all white male academic community. It would have been those pushing equalitarian views that would be most vulnerable to "cancellation" by trustee boards and the presidents they hired. That's the context in which the concepts of academic freedom and tenure were born. It would be a sad outcome if now that the majority view has become a widely shunned minority, the triumphant majority decided to weaken tenure.
Academic freedom and tenure guarantee the right to hold and express the sorts of views Professor Wax expresses without being fired. People tend to support academic freedom until it gets hard to defend it because of the offensiveness of the way some people use it. But once you start saying academic freedom does not cover "grossly offensive" views you've given up its protections.
Academic freedom doesn't cover actions, just speech, which is why the last removal of tenure at Penn was on the grounds of murder and why sexual harassment is a not uncommon ground for firing tenured faculty. Academic misconduct, which includes things like plagiarism, research fraud, or simply failing to meet with classes, are all grounds for removing tenure protections. But not views held or expressed, whether they are deemed to be relevant to a faculty member's research field or not. Someone as appaling as Professor Wax is not a danger in any sense. Her extreme statements will convert no one who is not already in that camp, and Penn law students are perfectly capable of avoiding her or learning by engaging with her in a classroom context. (And Penn probably should--and probably does--make sure that Wax's course schedule is managed so that students can always take an equivalent from someone else in a different semester.)
The near-absolute nature of these protections is essential to providing the security of an academic career that makes researchers and teachers take chances with new ideas and methods, and that allows colleges and universities to recruit talented people who could make far more money in other professions. The cost is enabling jackasses--and they are as common among academics as in the general population. It's worth it, although institutions may have to take remediating steps, such as assigning a jackass smaller and less critical courses to teach because most students are put off, or assigning another faculty member or a grad student to handle course grading because certain students may justifiably have concerns about grading objectivity. All of these costs can be partially made good by adjusting the problem professor's salary for cause.
Academic freedom and tenure are so valuable that there are always powerful forces trying to eliminate them. Traditionally, those come from the Right, which has over time made serious inroads in weakening those institutions, both to punish schools whose faculty lean left (keep your eye on Florida) and to save money. Let's not add the Center and Left.
Yes. That's the principle for every tenure faculty member. The idea is to severely limit the grounds that trustee boards and the presidents they hire can employ to get rid of faculty they don't like. (The concept of academic freedom grew out of just such behavior about 125 years ago at Stanford.) It is fascinating, indeed, and the strength of tenure in the US has made the country a magnet for talented faculty coming from other countries, where they have to worry that speaking their minds will cost them their livelihood. There are costs, but the benefits far outweigh them.
That matters absolutely not at all, Rob. Imagine what tenure would be worth if anything you publicly said could become grounds for some board of trustees declaring you unfit. During the Red Scare era, tenure protected professors accused of being communist, including those who actually were, despite the fact that their party affiliation and personal ideologies may have had nothing to do with their jobs.
I imagine it would be that the right of free association of private individuals and institutions is given equal weight to the right of free speech of an individual. Repeatedly, it seems we are completely comfortable with honoring the right of speech and academic freedom of only certain people.
-- DeSantis also said Tuesday he wants to give university presidents and trustees the power to review tenured faculty members “at any time,” citing concerns about “unproductive” faculty, and to give presidents more control over the hiring process at their institutions.
We'll see where this goes, Mr. Bantz. The "post-tenure performance review" has in the past been an initial step in encroachments on tenure.
I think you are confused. I agree with your premise, but let us not pretend that the poor behavior of the demonstrators is the same as what the govt. in Florida is trying to do. If you refer to me by name you can call me Dr. Bantz.😊
You lost me Dr. Bantz. This string concerns the Wax case. I wonder whether you're confusing something I said on a recent string about Kyle Duncan at Stanford (?). (Still, if you did it would be a warning signal to me that I've started the week binging on Substack and need to knock it off . . .)
Certainly makes one wonder how her lectures on the 14th Amendment sound. There’s a danger brewing in the need to defend all speech as acceptable. No, we shouldn’t jail those whose speech offends us, but we can certainly refuse to continue allowing them to enjoy a privileged platform from which to spout their corrosive nonsense. One of the inalienable rights is my right to turn my back when your speech becomes offensive, even if just to protect my nose from being punched.
Wax is not a constitutional law expert. Her area of specialization is social welfare law and policy, and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and labor markets (got that from Wikipedia). Penn's law school is big and prestigious; it's highly unlikely Wax lectures on the 14th Amendment.
Well, thank goodness for small favors, yet as a Neurologist and a lawyer (got that from Wikipedia), she should know better -- I mean, does she suggest that the neurological system is different for Blacks and Asians and therefore only whites should enjoy the benefits of neurological treatments? And just because it's unlikely for her to lecture on the 14th amendment, per se, it doesn't mean it's impossible for her to distort the implications of the amendment. Given her proclivities, she might even disagree with the passage of the amendment since all "originalists" hold some disfavor toward any amendment beyond the 10th. In some ways, it's even worse that she holds up her prejudiced ideas on the social applications of the law.
You're making up things, Grumpy. I don't see a point in arguing hypothetical positions that I expect Wax has never taken just because you infer them on the basis of a limited sample.
Law school students aren't first graders, and at a school like Penn I'm sure Wax is challenged constantly.
I wish that were enough. IF we could sell it back to ourselves --we might be able to turn back from the disaster we're rushing toward. I'm afraid our entertaining-ourselves-to-death culture has sold us on the idea that if we're not posturing in someone's face all the time we're missing out on a orgasm or something. Then of course if they aren't in our face in return we feel ignored, which is the same as being disrespected, so we need to get back in their face... and each confrontation is performed on a platform helpfully provided by entrepreneurs of anger and bitterness who rake in huge pecuniary rewards for facilitating our bad conduct.
Turning your back civilly is a pretty courteous thing to do.
I love the racism of people like this woman. They define racism as high-BMI Southern sheriffs laughing cruelly as they set attack dogs to maul little black boys and girls; anything short of that, anything where the racial animus is general but not a 1-on-1 personal assault on specific individuals, is just nobly braving tendentions malice up to call spades, spades. So to speak.
This reminds me of the Charlies point about the lack of tolerance for the circuit judge at Stanford yesterday.
I went to Notre Dame's Commencement (a friend was graduating) in 2009 and Obama was the speaker. Because of his pro-choice standpoint, there were numerous protests and his speech (a commencement speech!) was interrupted numerous times and the hecklers were escorted out (Obama was super classy about it). I believe Charlie interviewed some midwestern bishops about it, and no surprise, they were on the side of the hecklers/protesters because inviting Obama was just so egregious and so out of alignment with the University's values that it simply could not stand. Their take was that there were some values so fundamental that a stand is necessary, even if it flies in the face of decorum.
I'm willing to accept this general principle (if not it's specific application) at face value. There are some values so fundamental, so critical to an institution's ability to function in a way that aligns with it's mission, that people who oppose those values should be excluded and their views should not be given a platform. The right has been making that argument FOR YEARS. They really don't like it when the left makes that argument.
But here's the thing: there's debate about the legal framework in regards to being pro/anti-choice. We can all feel strongly about it, but we can also all agree that such discussion is actually relevant to the legal profession. That having radical views as a legal professor is not some outlier in the job.
But the views she is expressing have nothing to do with her job! We're not discussing some obscure legal theory, we're not talking about any kind of legal opinion, or any sort of law dispute. She's not expressing a viewpoint that has anything to do with her job.
What she's expressing is overt bigotry, which goes against her ability to teach everyone fairly. I might disagree with anti-choice arguements on the merits, but I could see why they might be relevant to a law professors discussions.
I cannot see how anyone thinks that her views are at all acceptable when she's expected to teach people of all races and nationalities. That's not a free speech question, in my view. She's entitled to her viewpoints. But these are not views that should be covered by academic freedom, because there's nothing academic about them.
I absolutely agree with your stance that her opinion's compromise Wax's ability to do her job on a fundamental level. She should go. Not a Free-Speech issue. A do your job issue.
But I still think the comparison between that and the Obama commencement debacle is apt, because the protesters (the pro-life movement in general) doesn't see the issue of abortion as a legal/policy issue (if they did they'd look at the epidemiology and say "oh wow, abortions per capita decreased under Obama, he's doing something right!). The see "fighting abortion" as so fundamental a function of the Catholic church and it's affiliated universities and institutions that the battle should be fought on all fronts all the time, be it appointing a Catholic wannabe rapist like Kavanaugh to the supreme court or heckling Obama during a commencement speech. (I do not agree). I don't think this is dissimilar to progressive, anti-racist concept of fight racism everywhere on every front.
What Mona omits to mention is the asymmetry of the argument, "refrain from doing x, lest x be done to you when the worm turns."
Anyone who imagines that tenure will amount to even so much as a thimblefull of evaporated spit after DeSantis (or Trump or any of the rest) finish their project of transforming the republic into a combination one-party version of the post-reconstruction American South and modern Hungarian illiberal "democracy"-- they are fooling themselves.
The future of tenure, and academic freedom generally, is written in the declarations of Florida's New College President and Board of Trustees.
There must be a limit somewhere. Mona has about three fifths of it right -- if academic freedom doesn't extend quite a bit farther than decency and courtesy, it only extends to those we agree with. And we can pretty much expect that the limits will not be set by the best people. But I'm afraid that this value has pretty much dried up and blown away on both sides of the spectrum. The difference is that when we withdraw protection from academic freedom, and each side turns to inflicting pain and retribution upon its foes, the Left's outrages amount to pillorying people on Facebook and squeezing a few professors out of certain departments, where the Right's ambitions extend to having armed brownshirts running school board meetings and closing down libraries.
I for one don't like how lots of places are trying to roll back tenure. Places like Texas and Florida, for example. I think tenure is important, and I think that by and large, lots of people deserve academic freedom.
And I would be with Mona on this, were the views being expressed in any way associated with any kind of academic arguement. But they're not. She's not saying anything that's at all relevant to any kind of legal question. This isn't like having a radical opinion on abortion or something, where even if you have a strong belief there's legal questions that can be argued. She's just spewing bigotry!
Furthermore, said bigotry goes against her ability to do her job correctly. A professor should be expected to teach every student equally; they should be expected to teach many different races and nationalities. The very hope of academic study is that regardless of one's origins, that if you can do the work you can be heard.
But her views are not academic in nature, she's not expressing any opinion about the law. She's just saying that black people aren't equal to white people. And that goes against her very ability to teach people fairly. Why should any person of color believe that they will be treated fairly as a student of hers?
Which academic freedom? The freedom for white people to be racist a$$holes and pass it for as a First Amendment issue. For some Americans it’s a founding principle.
Like, I don't think I made this clear enough in my comment, but I think there needs to be a divide about how and when someone is speaking when it comes to 'speech.'
If this were a case where she was speaking as a professor of law, if she was talking about something academically, if she was talking about something in regards to her profession, or expressing some opinion outside the norm that people disliked, I could understand this sort of view where you don't want to fire them for that speech.
Like, if she was saying that Brown V. Board was wrongly decided, I would disagree with her, and think she was a terrible person, but I could understand why you could theoretically back a law professor having controversial law opinions.
But she's not expressing opinions that have anything to do with her profession. She's not expressing anything that has anything to do with law. Are we now to believe that if you have tenure that you can just do anything and that you shouldn't ever be fired for it? If she came out in a klan hood, are we just supposed to go 'well, free speech!'
We're talking about publicly expressing beliefs that cut against the very idea of education. How can a professor be expected to treat every student equally when she publicly and repeatedly claims that she does not believe some of her students are genetically capable of learning the law?
Again, none of this is based around her academic beliefs. She's not expressing anything related to her job. How these viewpoints fit into academic freedom, I don't know, because there's nothing academic about them. Again, if you expressed these views at any other job, you would probably be fired on the spot for them. Why she should keep her job, a job where she's in charge of teaching people, after continuing to express these views, I don't know.
Beyond that, Mona's viewpoint that we should 'refute' her speech is moronic. How exactly do we 'refute' someone's beliefs? How exactly do we do this so that those who are taught under her get a fair shake? How do we refute her beliefs so that we can know, for certain, that she's treating every student equally?
I don't believe we can. I don't believe this is merely a difference of opinion; we're talking about whether or not we view individuals as being equals regardless of their skin color or national origin. I don't believe you can just refute her speech and expect her to be like 'man, I was wrong, I guess I have to treat black people as equals now.'
This isn't a case where we're arguing some kind of academic theory, we're talking about real people who she is saying are incapable of being the equals of people who look like her. That's not something you can just refute with more speech!
It occurs to me that this judge is just trying to explore a new career path. Lots of people get to a certain level of success in their lives and look around and wonder, is this all there is? What new field of endeavor could I try? For some of us, it's taking up guitar lessons. For others -- mid-life career jurists, for instance -- it's seeing how far they can get by being obnoxious and making a public spectacle of themselves.
To the misfortune of all, in our America today, there are rich rewards for notoriety. Fame and power, but also fortune -- fortune in many cases beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. We all have talents; success can be won by aligning our talents with the opportunities life puts in our way. In her case, she seems to be trying out her gifts for exploiting bigotry and intolerance. It's a crowded field with many contestants, but it's very much in the American tradition to give one's dreams a try.
Tenured professor here. I am not sure what it would take to get me or any other tenured professor fired for cause. Sleeping with students doesn't. Academic fraud doesn't. Incompetent research doesn't. Exploiting your graduate students by preventing them from publishing their research doesn't. Maybe not showing up for class?
Wax's views are reprehensible but I can give a pretty long list of COVID disinformationist professors at institutions that are every bit as prestigious as UPenn. All still have their jobs. Unfortunately it seems like we have to put up with these folks in order to protect the rest of us from the DeSantis's of the world, who would keep the Wax's and fire the rest of us.
Alas, I respectfully suggest the statement "if you expressed these views at any other job, you would probably be fired on the spot" is incorrect. True it might be in certain workplaces, but by no means everywhere.
You are on the mark though when you ask how to "refute" such speech. One might as well try to "refute" Putin's invasion of Ukraine, or persuade a drought to abate, or debate with a dog by barking.
What Mona misses is that this person's pronouncements are "speech" only in a very tortured sense. By "freedom of speech" in the first amendment sense, we generally mean speech intended as expression. Expression is of course an action but there is also action which is not really speech, even if it takes the outward form of expression. An action per se can be lauded, supported, opposed, condemned, or prevented, but it can't be rebutted or refuted. The bully who comes up to you in the bar, gets in your face, tells you you are ugly, and insists you try to do something about it, is not engaged in "speech".
The "speech" in question is more like "shut up, he explained" than proposing or even directly claiming x is inferior to y. To be sure, we may confidently infer that the judge does in fact believe x inferior to y, but what is really going on is nothing like an attempt to advance that view. Rather, it's just an effort to start a fistfight by making people she wants to destroy lose their temper and strike the first blow. She's like the self-righteous bigot on the streetcorner haranguing passersby with the admonition they are headed for hellfire if they don't come to Jesus. Putatively they are trying to save souls. Actually they are merely scratching their own personal itches in public.
What perhaps Mona should suggest is, not attempt to "refute" or "rebut". We might better just try to show what is really being attempted. Which of course is being tendentious for its own sake, to provoke ill-judged behavior by people she wants to malign.
I don't care so much about refutation but I have listened to some of her talks. Some are about legitimate questions, and Joseph Henrich dealt with the uniqueness of the West in his recent book about Western, Educated, Industrial societies. Max Weber also dealt with the difference with Protestant Western societies.
Even the question of who the nation should let immigrate in a fair one. Unless one believes that we must treat all nations equally.
Still she ends up as a bitter person. I think she is her own worst enemy. I don't see why we should help her become a new right wing victim.
Never understood Weber. The Southern US was a Protestant Western Society and its prosperity was based not on any work ethic but on the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans, whose owners had a life of luxury!
But why should she be able to play the bully while hiding behind tenure? How many of our institutions and norms of practice must be turned over to rightwing racists under the guise of 'free speech' before we say enough is enough.
I don't know that she is a bully (except for her power over her students). I don't really see that the universities have turned themselves over to bullies.
To me she comes off as a frustrated and angry person. And to be frank, it can be frustrating when others don't agree. So a conservative in a mostly liberal society (her university).
I see her turned into a right wing saint. But who knows.
I don’t understand how UPenn firing her is helping her to become a new right wing victim. Her legal arguments and interpretations are not why she would be fired. Her explicitly racist ideas about who belongs in her institution are why she should be fired.
I disagree that someone should be fired for expressing their views unless their contract sets forth that they cannot express certain views publicly in any forum at any time.
There is an old saw "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." We have become way too oversensitized to "offense" and "taking offense." Every thing you ever utter will "offend" SOMEone it they are looking to be offended.
Firing someone for their ideas and opinions leads to Book Burning and Book Banning and other forms of censorship.
It also leads to more silos, more tribalism, more polarization.
Peacefully protest abhorrent ideas. March. Sit in. Write letters. But engage in a way that has at least a possibility of change coming rather than ensuring any change will be bloody.
Both sides are now working to muzzle the opposition. Both are wrong.
So, she is afforded free speech protections, but the university isn’t? In fact, we are going to compel speech from the university by making them retain her?
If the path to success is being victimized, there are various ways to get there. Possibly she miscalculated, and only hoped to be made a pariah in her ivory tower, so she could sally back and forth from there to Fox to attract the attention and rewards of cancellation. Actually losing one's job is taking it a bit far. Perhaps she was just a would-be mendicant who used a knife to produce some pity-inducing scarification and accidentally cut off her arm.
There is a way to deal with her. You take away her teaching duties. You take away her staff. You take away her office and give her a closet with a desk and a phone, nothing else. You don't sign her grant applications. You strictly interpret outside income activities and refuse to sign off on consulting, honoraria, or anything else.
I think UC Berkeley did something like this with Peter Duesberg. A bunch of institutions should do this with their COVID disinformationists.
Frankly, she's not the right demographic for "right wing martyr". They are not interested in adding an aging, female, Ivy-League law professor to their litany of saints. Maybe if she were 30 years younger and blonde, had shot someone like Kyle Rittenhouse, or had been on a reality TV show. But she seems much to boring for the right to care about.
I find racism a too easy label. And when I listened to her, I found more of a gadfly. Someone who challenges the nation of racism. Still if she is fired... well it won't make my life change at all.
“I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”
A particularly offensive and ignorant statement given that Philadelphia has had a strong stable Black middle class for centuries. W. E. B. DuBois even wrote a famous book about it. She doesn't even know the history of the city where she works!
I know a Puerto Rican man in Paterson NJ who was changing a tire in his neighborhood when he was robbed by a black guy. Is he a racist for wanting to move to Clifton or Totowa?
And I know of several black women who are single mothers - several kids before 21 and a few fathers. They climbed out of a hole (work as clerks where I worked). Can we not worry about that?
I volunteer in Paterson. We see lots of motivated kids (HS age) some are interns where I volunteer. Very few have been African American in the 9 years I have been volunteering.
Mr. McKenna, if your tire-changing man wants to move because he is looking for a lower crime area that makes perfect sense. If he wants to move because his assailant had black skin he ought to think about what he'd do if his assailant had had white skin.
There are many reasons why black people may more frequently break the law or become single mothers. Poverty, urban economic segregation, alienation and cynicism due to longstanding social prejudice (which has, indeed, gutted optimistic motivation), unequal incarceration standards, and so forth. But dark complexion is not one of them.
When you observe and wonder, I hope you bear in mind that the effects you see are not due to any simple, essential cause: skin pigment. Professor Wax's stream of comments all reduce to: good things come from white skinned people; people with different skin color don't create good things and what they're good at creating are bad things.
“I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”
"I am amused when our culture doesn't show all White men the way they really are: a bunch of overweight redneck fentanyl addicts who drive pickup trucks with confederate decals and AR-15's in the gunrack".
Cheese with your crackers, anyone?
Racism is not just KKK murderers burning crosses and blowing up black churches. It's more extensive and more subtle and doesn't even require personal malice toward anyone in particular.
She is allowed to say whatever she wants. When she makes sweeping statements about an entire race of people, she should expect people to pushback against her racism and the university is not curbing her academic freedom by firing her. At this point, we have exhausted this debate. I’m going to stop responding lest I say something uncivil. Your anecdotes however, aren’t data, I would ask you to refrain from using them in an argument.
Actually argument is not what I am after. In fact it is impossible without doing a full paper on a subject. And I don't want to. But you seem satisfied that racism is the label to use against her. I do not.
Racist is a chainsaw. I prefer to see her as a frustrated person and a gadfly.
Opinions are not appropriate in a learning environment, unless it is to discuss the whole subject - opinion, observation, experience, drawing conclusions and testing them out.
Her sharing her observations and conclusions she has drawn is spreading the bias that has developed in herself. This is what makes it racist.
If I say that every peach pie I have ever smelled or tasted is gross, I am spreading bias. But when the listener approaches their next peach pie and chooses not to try it, the pie's feeling will not be hurt nor will it have missed an opportunity to provide better for its children.
It’s exactly how I feel. This isn’t a difference of interpretation of statutes. This is a person making wildly racist comments unrelated to her work and a private institution just needs to abide?! Turns out the argument is that we should be comfortable compelling speech from certain actors just because. The entire “cancel culture” debate rests on the idea that certain people are afforded “consequence-free speech” while others aren’t.
The only thing I have to take issue with today is Mona's piece. Are we really, really, taking the position that 'yeah, a professor proclaiming that some of their students are subhumans, but that shouldn't cost them their job?' That's the arguement? It's not even me trying to make her look worse than she is, Mona CITES a bunch of her racist comments!
"If Wax is fired for repellent sentiments alone, the protections of tenure will be badly weakened."
Ah, yes. Sentiments alone! Sentiments like:
“Non-Western people feel a ... tremendous amount of resentment and shame.” “On average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites.” “America will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”
Those are real quotes! Those are things she has said! We're not talking about micro-agressions are something, we're talking about beliefs that you would expect to find at a klan rally. At what point does a university have to go 'yeah, your beliefs are not consistent with our values and you're no longer worthy of employment here?'
Again, these are not mild beliefs! These are not quotes pulled from two decades ago, she's said these things in the past few years!
If you said these things stocking shelves at Target, you would be fired on the spot. I do not understand this impulse that says we can't get rid of people like her just because she's a professor of law. How exactly, by the way, is she expected to do her job fairly and treat students she teaches properly, when she believes that a great many of them are less than human and physically incapable of learning from her?
You wouldn't accept these viewpoints from anyone else, and there's no 'refuting' her speech here. Her job is to teach people and treat them fairly, not espouse about how they are unworthy of being part of the country she was born into.
I take your side on this. Normally I'd leave university professors alone, even if they say dumbass things time to time. But this professor makes a point of spouting racist and sexist garbage so repellent that a Kleagle would tip his pointy hood in homage. Tenure is designed to protect academic freedom, and her multi-ist performance art has nothing to do with academics or freedom. Fire her, she can go work at DeSantis's new MAGA U.
And if blue-state institutions start to purge people like Wax, what will become of socialists, communists, and progressives on the faculty at red-state institutions?
Pretty much what’s happening at New College in FL now. It’s inconceivable that you can teach those whom you hold in contempt. Besides, socialists and communists and progressives are just trying to get those with whom they disagree to change their minds. Pretty tough to change that which your “betters” disparage when it’s your race or ethnicity.
"Besides, socialists and communists and progressives are just trying to get those with whom they disagree to change their minds."
You do remember that violent mass revolution was pioneered by socialists and communists, right? That is what "anti-communists" see when they see someone they consider a socialist or communist, not a polite "persuader." We don't want to use their values as arbiter, even though they see themselves as representing the universal principle of "human liberty." As for progressives, I think you may be able to imagine why on some university campuses, conservative students were afraid to let their views be known. I taught for many years, and in my later years, because I was always careful to suppress my own liberal views in class, it was not uncommon for conservative students to come to my office, hoping they could find someone to open up to. They were disappointed when I told them I was very liberal, but it educated me about classroom climates that I otherwise wouldn't have had access to.
The function of tenure depends on its remaining absolutely neutral. You and I seem to share general values, but if you mistake our values for universal ones that are simply correct while those of our opponents are simply wrong, you'll have a system of ideological isolation in academics, state by state. If you get what you wish for, the long term impact will put an end to academic freedom, except that people will choose to attend or teach at institutions where everyone is in basic agreement.
Thanks for making my point. You felt it important to suppress your natural urge to express your viewpoint but held it at bay. I suspect you tried to make your classroom a space where divergent opinions could be offered and tried in the crucible of socratic dialogue. If only Wax were as circumspect and respectful.
By the way conflating the bomb throwers of the failed communist revolution with those who teach political theory is a bit disingenuous. It's the reason that "communism" -- anything that's not what right wing "conservatives" want -- is the go-to bogey man for the right. As for progressive dominance on campuses: from my observation the difference on campuses between trigger warnings and petulant malicious behavior is the difference between asking someone not to call you an asshole versus feeling quite free to degrade someone, to call someone an asshole, or worse, for whatever reason one chooses, but mostly because he/she wants to, and feels entitled to do so because "that's just my opinion, man." Unless you're Professor Wax , of course, and can do it because you're better.
Another correct point you could have drawn, Grumpy, was that conservative students came to me in error because most of my colleagues did not suppress their natural urges, and those colleagues, in my humanities wing, were always on the Left. I'm not aware, however, of *any* colleague who felt free to degrade their students on thebasis of ideology. (I know of some cases that clearly involved emergent personality disorders; one of those did result in detenuring, a very sad affair.)
I didn't say anything about those who taught political theory. I was speaking of faculty who were personally communists. I have not actually read of any instance where Professor Wax has made her views on race the subject of her teaching. Maybe she has; I don't know. The calls for her dismissal have, so far as I know, all been based on her activities outside the classroom. If Wax has systematically mistreated students, then those behaviors should be the basis of a job action, not her publicly expressed views.
A fair and reasonable conclusion on Wax, though it’s hard to separate the message from the messenger in this case. Just because one doesn’t shout the pejorative inside the classroom but waits til outside the classroom door doesn’t soften the blow.
If a socialist, communist, or progressive spouted the racist and sexist things that Wax did, they would fully deserve the same treatment: find work elsewhere. "Women are dumber than men, whites are better than blacks, Asians suck for a bunch of reasons, America should stay white," none of that is an expression of a political system (socialists and communists) or ultra-liberal political solutions to problems (progressives). Those people I would protect from termination with tenure. When any of them start condemning blacks, browns, Asians, and women as Lessers solely from skin color and gender, that should strip them of their protection.
You are expressing your beliefs and values. I happen to share them but in no way do I want them to become a litmus test of what is acceptable to believe or to value, especially if the road to that consensus is systematic suppression.
Racism and sexism of this rankness SHOULD be a litmus test. Why would you think otherwise? The professor called blacks inferior to whites, women dumber than men, Asians a whole bunch of names, and that only white Westerners should be allowed into the United States. That is so appalling that it overrides tenure protection.
It's a confusing world where we condemn the speech of insurrectionists but defer to "academic" freedom in excusing the authors of most of the abhorrent notions of those insurrectionists. John Eastman, a law professor, provided the ingredients for the insurrectionist stew that bubbled in Trump's brain. For his part in the coup plot, the CA Bar has unveiled disciplinary charges against Eastman -- not to prevent his speech but to make him accept responsibility for it. The ideas and most of the vitriol spouted by the rubes didn't originate there. We are quick to point the finger at the mob that will do what mobs have always done throughout history, but demure when the leaders of the mob are "academics"? Tenure is designed to protect the Copernicuns and perhaps the flat earthers alike but not those who would destroy the universe to prove it doesn't exist, as authoritarians are wont to do in order to quash liberal democracies.
Well said, Grumpy. Tenure is designed and needed to protect academic freedom in teaching and research. What this professor is spouting--black are inferior to whites, women are dumber than men, America should attract and retain only white people, Asians suck--is neither teaching, research, nor arguments she's making tied to the law she teaches. They're vile racist and sexist statements designed solely to seek attention and stir the pot, and I believe the university has ever right to discipline her up to and including termination for it.
As a South Asian immigrant and a specific target of Wax’s disdain, I have to say I agree with Mona 100% on this issue!
If free speech has any value at all (and I believe it does), it means that we must support the right of free speech of people we violently disagree with. We are free to criticize them and boycott them and not associate with them and call for like minded people to boycott them as well. But we should not support a government policy that will allow their views to be censored (unless their speech presents a “clear and immediate danger”).
Academic Freedom is NOT the same thing as Freedom of Speech. If academic freedom and tenure have any value (and I believe they do), it means we should support the right of tenured professors to keep their jobs regardless of controversial or heretical views. This doesn’t mean other professors can’t speak out against them or that students can’t write op-Ed’s condemning their views and urging other students to avoid taking their classes or urging private publishers to avoid publishing their work or urging people like Glen Loury to avoid platforming them.
The difference between democracy and every other form of government is that democracy must rely on persuasion to change minds - not force. And while force may work to silence or suppress hateful views in the short term, it inevitably leads to a backlash borne of bitterness and resentment in the long term. If anyone has doubts, take a look around and see the proof for yourself.
As to the question of how to refute such repugnant views? How to convince someone like Amy Wax and people who share her views that I, as a South Asian do in fact have “the spirit of liberty beating in my heart”? I would answer that I fully support her liberty to think and speak and act and teach as she pleases and suffer the consequences. *I* and my children, who I have raised to revere the greatest ideals of America are the living, breathing refutation of every vile argument she makes.
Literally no one is stepping on Wax’s ability to speak. Why is this a free speech issue just for Wax’s speech? What about UPenn’s right to free association? Why is it that only some people’s free speech rights matter while those of others don’t.
It’s not a “free speech” issue - it’s an “academic freedom” issue. There’s an important distinction between the two.
And yet none of her racist comments have anything to do with her academic work. The university is well within its rights to fire her.
As much as I appreciate your sentiment, I disagree with you completely. This is a law professor basically saying that there are certain "classes" of citizens who do not deserve the fruits of liberty because of some perceived inadequacy on her part. Just as it would be impossible for a physics professor to profess physics while denying belief in gravity, it's hard to see how a law professor can profess to teach about the American system of laws which professes in its pledge of allegiance, "with liberty and justice for all."
Also most college level physics professors actually do reject the concept of gravity as “a force by objects of large mass that acts on other objects” because we now generally agree that it’s better explained as a curvature of space-time. Should professors who teach that gravity is a force be fired for their incorrect views?
That’s a disagreement on the mechanics not the reality. What if the argument was only white men can understand gravity. Wasn’t so long ago that was the imputed case. This is not about being wrong — Lord knows, we are all guilty of that — it’s a matter of insisting you are right against all the evidence that disproves the notion that All whites are better than All Blacks or All whites are more patriotic and more deserving of liberty than All Asians because Asians are incapable of appreciating liberty and Blacks are unable to better themselves. Hardly the same as arguing the curvature of time space and force of objects on other objects. Professing differing theories — even those that might be seen as crackpot today — is one thing. Professing an unbending prejudice contrary to fact and experience is another.
You chose the metaphor, Grumpy. Ms. Haidery merely illustrated the limits of using it simplistically.
Once again, you are projecting onto Professor Wax your own extrapolations of her statements. She has, so far as I know, said none of the things you attribute to her. If you have to make your argument by exaggeration it's a signal that there's a weakness in those arguments.
More substantively, Wax has picked up ideas made popular by political scientist Charles Murray, the surviving co-author of "The Bell Curve," who is a complex and interesting man with some awful ideas. His research on underlying racial differences is flawed, but unfortunately the most prominent people who have debunked it have also relied on flawed research. Murray's ideas have been exploited by leaders of the "intellectual alt-right," white nationalists of various stripes, and the ideas are influential in a wide range of rightwing contexts, including some academic ones. If you want to go all Torquemada and attempt to expel those who adopt Murray's views from academics as heretics against our contemporary consensus, those views will become more attractive, as banned ideas always are, and those on the Left will be viewed with as much affection as Torquemada.
Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart: The State of White America (to demonstrate that the elite are more likely to drive foreign cars than domestic ones, Murray notes the makes of automobiles in a couple of mall parking lots. Now that's scholarship at it's finest)? Murray, who wound up at that bastion of American thought known as the American Enterprise Institute after academia would have nothing to do with him because his ideas weren't only outlandish and unproven but no more than manifestations of his mental unbalance? That Charles Murray? That's the peg you want to hang your hat on? That's the peg Wax wants to hang her hat on? Maybe she should follow Murray to the AEI where she can spout her racist nonsense without damaging any budding young scholars. Speaking of Torquemada -- big hero of the new integralists, right? Just ask Wax. I'm sure she'll know.
I'm not sure what peg you saw me hanging my hat on, Grumpy. I do wear a hat, but I was speaking of Professor Wax and the possible origins of her views. I don't know if she wears hats.
My understading is that Murray never sought an academic position, which as a student of Lucien Pye at MIT (a huge credential) he surely could have secured with ease. He has always worked with research think tanks: first the politically neutral AIR, which produces enormous amounts of essential, nonpartisan work, and later rightwing ones like AEI, which makes sense because his personal views moved to the right. (You do realize that half the country aligns towards the AEI side of the political spectrum, right? Trying to dismiss someone as academically ineligible because he is associated with AEI seems an argument with intrinsically limited appeal, like a rightist trying to discredit an academic because they are associated with Brookings.) I have never seen Murray as "mentally unbalanced." I think you are projecting your view of his ideas as crazy into a fact-free diagnosis.
I think we've made our views clear. Feel free to add: I'll read what you write, but I'm at the end of the line here.
Thanks for your time. Hat-wearing is a lost art. I hope your hat is not some baseball cap turned backward to expose that tiny rectangle of scalp and hair — or forelock, if one is so lucky — that a hat was intended to cover.
I can assure you that my hat in no way exposes any rectangles of hair. I only wish there were some to expose.
Grumpy, law professors held those attitudes widely for most of the country's history, and people in the Jim Crow South, presumably including law professors and other academics, happily ignored the implications you draw from it, because they were confident they knew whom "all" referred to. (How many signers of the Declaration actually believed that "all men are created equal?" Any? They knew what they meant by "all.")
Some physics professors hired in the 1890 lived out long careers denying that relativity and quantum theory were valid. It's also perfectly possible to teach physics while believing that gravity is actually an unproven theory. (After all, it is!)
In any event, I don't believe Wax has ever said anything like what you attribute to her--the "not deserving the fruits of liberty" stuff. What she has said is bad enough without making up new things. It's perfectly possible for her to accept, with sincerity, that everyone should be treated equally under the law, while believing that some classes of people are "better" than others.
Oh, I see, she only means to set us back 150-200 years. No one is suggesting she can't stew around in the fetid swamp of her own mind, but "professing" to teach the law while denying the basic fruits, which you inevitably do when you say some are "better" than others, is okay? Yeah, not seeing it.
No one is saying “it’s Ok” - just like no one is saying professors teaching controversial material at Claremont or Liberty University or Hillsdale are “OK” but the whole point of freedom is that you have the freedom to be wrong.
Except those professors are still teaching! The controversial issues are still in the realm of academic work.
Is teaching a job requirement for professors at UPenn law? If it's not, there is merit to Mona's argument that the benefits of the tenure system as a whole outweigh the costs of firing one specific individual for her beliefs. But if it is, it's hard to see how her stated beliefs are compatible with teaching (e.g., interacting with and fairly and objectively evaluating a wide variety of students, including those she views as inferior based on their appearance). On that basis -- inability to do the job for which she was hired -- she should be fired.
". . . it's hard to see how her stated beliefs are compatible with teaching (e.g., interacting with and fairly and objectively evaluating a wide variety of students, including those she views as inferior based on their appearance)."
It may be hard to see, but people are complex. Sometimes they bend over backwards to show that they are not what they think you are. Professor Wax is not the first to face such questions, and the answer doesn't lie in whether we can imagine one outcome or another. It's a matter of evidence.
I have no doubt that in a case like Wax's, the Dean of the Penn Law School has full data on her grading patterns, student evaluations, and information gleaned from student and faculty reports. That's part of a dean's job. If there is evidence of bias in grading or other treatment of students,the dean has a number of options, short of starting due process mechanisms for tenure revocation (which are quasi-judicial, based on hearings and evidence--it would be a legal violation not to follow handbook procedures and Penn would lose a lawsuit). Among these would be assigning other faculty to audit her courses and do all grading; restricting Wax's appointment to research and administraive duties and adjusting her salary; suspending Wax for cause and setting non-negotiable terms of remediation. If there is, indeed, a pattern of mistreating students then that would be a basis for dismissal, not Wax's views.
But based on my own experience in cases of these kinds, Wax probably doesn't approach individual people of color with the biases we assume she must have when making generalizations about race. And, being a lawyer, Wax is probably very careful to make sure that whatever she may feel, her instructional behavior does not make her vulnerable to any kind of disciplinary action. If it doesn't, what we imagine about her psychology is irrelevant, and certainly not the basis of a job action.
This is a far better argument than any I've read in favor of her tenure.
Of course it is untenable for a person whose role includes evaluating student performance to harbor and espouse the bigoted viewpoint that she can prejudge students’s intellectual ability based on skin color.
This is the first really valid, reasonable, and job-related argument I've seen here for disciplining an academic for her comments.
As you note, it would certainly be appropriate -- and in fact required -- for management to question the fitness of a schoolteacher, policeman, prosecutor, or judge who repeatedly and voluntarily made statements indicating he or she believes certain races and genders are inherently inferior to others. An academic whose responsibilities entail judging students' performance falls into this category. When being evaluated for tenure, such declarations are also material, particularly in social sciences and humanities. Arguably once having received tenure, the bar should be much higher. Probably absent actual criminal misconduct, a tenured academic might not be properly discharged, but the duties and responsibilities appropriate to her position should be restricted to areas where her manifest prejudices are to the extent possible a negligible factor. Of course, if the essential duties of the position (such as grading students, sitting on committees that pass on granting degrees, peer reviewing journal submissions, and so forth) require objectivity which the tenured person's behavior calls into question, discharge for cause might also be appropriate.
In this case we seem to have a person purposefully making a spectacle of herself, motivated perhaps by some perverted effort akin in her mind to civil disobedience. There are people who seek out martyrdom for profit. Often they aren't really very stellar at their jobs, and their career paths don't yield the glittering prizes and peer admiration they believe is their due. Not being able to command respect for being brilliant, they seek sympathy for being victims.
Mr. Butcher, I think you are on target in distinguishing between probationary tenure-line faculty and tenured faculty. The discussion here relates to tenured faculty.
These sorts of issues do, in fact, come up. Sometimes tenured faculty make appalling generalized statements about women, men, white people, people of color, and so forth. The question immediately turns to objectivity in discharging their academic responsibilities, especially as teachers for members of whatever group they have disparaged.
The way administrations often approach this is by assessing both the words spoken or written (or retweeted!), the faculty member's track record in terms of grading and mentoring students, student perceptions of the faculty member (both those who actually know the person and those who may have majors requiring future contact with them), and the faculty member's own self-defense. Sanctions can required public apologies, suspension from certain duties for a period, loss of grading responsibilities in courses taught, and curtailments specific to individual positions. (Students generally choose their degree committees, and peer review is an extra-institutional function--you don't even have to be an academic to do it.)
I don't know about your last paragraph. Cases I've been involved with have never really fit that profile. I think it's more common that faculty who are quite successful in their professional fields get too full of self-esteem, and normal constraints of speech break down.
Another thing to reflect on is that a century ago, judgments about the inferiority of women and people of color might well have been a majority view among the then-almost all white male academic community. It would have been those pushing equalitarian views that would be most vulnerable to "cancellation" by trustee boards and the presidents they hired. That's the context in which the concepts of academic freedom and tenure were born. It would be a sad outcome if now that the majority view has become a widely shunned minority, the triumphant majority decided to weaken tenure.
Academic freedom and tenure guarantee the right to hold and express the sorts of views Professor Wax expresses without being fired. People tend to support academic freedom until it gets hard to defend it because of the offensiveness of the way some people use it. But once you start saying academic freedom does not cover "grossly offensive" views you've given up its protections.
Academic freedom doesn't cover actions, just speech, which is why the last removal of tenure at Penn was on the grounds of murder and why sexual harassment is a not uncommon ground for firing tenured faculty. Academic misconduct, which includes things like plagiarism, research fraud, or simply failing to meet with classes, are all grounds for removing tenure protections. But not views held or expressed, whether they are deemed to be relevant to a faculty member's research field or not. Someone as appaling as Professor Wax is not a danger in any sense. Her extreme statements will convert no one who is not already in that camp, and Penn law students are perfectly capable of avoiding her or learning by engaging with her in a classroom context. (And Penn probably should--and probably does--make sure that Wax's course schedule is managed so that students can always take an equivalent from someone else in a different semester.)
The near-absolute nature of these protections is essential to providing the security of an academic career that makes researchers and teachers take chances with new ideas and methods, and that allows colleges and universities to recruit talented people who could make far more money in other professions. The cost is enabling jackasses--and they are as common among academics as in the general population. It's worth it, although institutions may have to take remediating steps, such as assigning a jackass smaller and less critical courses to teach because most students are put off, or assigning another faculty member or a grad student to handle course grading because certain students may justifiably have concerns about grading objectivity. All of these costs can be partially made good by adjusting the problem professor's salary for cause.
Academic freedom and tenure are so valuable that there are always powerful forces trying to eliminate them. Traditionally, those come from the Right, which has over time made serious inroads in weakening those institutions, both to punish schools whose faculty lean left (keep your eye on Florida) and to save money. Let's not add the Center and Left.
Academic freedom allow her to say offensive things that have nothing to do with her job? Fascinating.
Yes. That's the principle for every tenure faculty member. The idea is to severely limit the grounds that trustee boards and the presidents they hire can employ to get rid of faculty they don't like. (The concept of academic freedom grew out of just such behavior about 125 years ago at Stanford.) It is fascinating, indeed, and the strength of tenure in the US has made the country a magnet for talented faculty coming from other countries, where they have to worry that speaking their minds will cost them their livelihood. There are costs, but the benefits far outweigh them.
Yeah, except the speech in question has nothing to do with her job.
That matters absolutely not at all, Rob. Imagine what tenure would be worth if anything you publicly said could become grounds for some board of trustees declaring you unfit. During the Red Scare era, tenure protected professors accused of being communist, including those who actually were, despite the fact that their party affiliation and personal ideologies may have had nothing to do with their jobs.
I imagine it would be that the right of free association of private individuals and institutions is given equal weight to the right of free speech of an individual. Repeatedly, it seems we are completely comfortable with honoring the right of speech and academic freedom of only certain people.
This is nothing like Florida. False equivalency even if you make some good points.
From the Orlando Sentinel, Jan. 31:
-- DeSantis also said Tuesday he wants to give university presidents and trustees the power to review tenured faculty members “at any time,” citing concerns about “unproductive” faculty, and to give presidents more control over the hiring process at their institutions.
We'll see where this goes, Mr. Bantz. The "post-tenure performance review" has in the past been an initial step in encroachments on tenure.
I think you are confused. I agree with your premise, but let us not pretend that the poor behavior of the demonstrators is the same as what the govt. in Florida is trying to do. If you refer to me by name you can call me Dr. Bantz.😊
You lost me Dr. Bantz. This string concerns the Wax case. I wonder whether you're confusing something I said on a recent string about Kyle Duncan at Stanford (?). (Still, if you did it would be a warning signal to me that I've started the week binging on Substack and need to knock it off . . .)
Certainly makes one wonder how her lectures on the 14th Amendment sound. There’s a danger brewing in the need to defend all speech as acceptable. No, we shouldn’t jail those whose speech offends us, but we can certainly refuse to continue allowing them to enjoy a privileged platform from which to spout their corrosive nonsense. One of the inalienable rights is my right to turn my back when your speech becomes offensive, even if just to protect my nose from being punched.
Wax is not a constitutional law expert. Her area of specialization is social welfare law and policy, and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and labor markets (got that from Wikipedia). Penn's law school is big and prestigious; it's highly unlikely Wax lectures on the 14th Amendment.
Well, thank goodness for small favors, yet as a Neurologist and a lawyer (got that from Wikipedia), she should know better -- I mean, does she suggest that the neurological system is different for Blacks and Asians and therefore only whites should enjoy the benefits of neurological treatments? And just because it's unlikely for her to lecture on the 14th amendment, per se, it doesn't mean it's impossible for her to distort the implications of the amendment. Given her proclivities, she might even disagree with the passage of the amendment since all "originalists" hold some disfavor toward any amendment beyond the 10th. In some ways, it's even worse that she holds up her prejudiced ideas on the social applications of the law.
You're making up things, Grumpy. I don't see a point in arguing hypothetical positions that I expect Wax has never taken just because you infer them on the basis of a limited sample.
Law school students aren't first graders, and at a school like Penn I'm sure Wax is challenged constantly.
I wish that were enough. IF we could sell it back to ourselves --we might be able to turn back from the disaster we're rushing toward. I'm afraid our entertaining-ourselves-to-death culture has sold us on the idea that if we're not posturing in someone's face all the time we're missing out on a orgasm or something. Then of course if they aren't in our face in return we feel ignored, which is the same as being disrespected, so we need to get back in their face... and each confrontation is performed on a platform helpfully provided by entrepreneurs of anger and bitterness who rake in huge pecuniary rewards for facilitating our bad conduct.
Turning your back civilly is a pretty courteous thing to do.
I love the racism of people like this woman. They define racism as high-BMI Southern sheriffs laughing cruelly as they set attack dogs to maul little black boys and girls; anything short of that, anything where the racial animus is general but not a 1-on-1 personal assault on specific individuals, is just nobly braving tendentions malice up to call spades, spades. So to speak.
She’s a piece of work,for sure!
Mona shows her true stripes again! I never read her anymore!
This reminds me of the Charlies point about the lack of tolerance for the circuit judge at Stanford yesterday.
I went to Notre Dame's Commencement (a friend was graduating) in 2009 and Obama was the speaker. Because of his pro-choice standpoint, there were numerous protests and his speech (a commencement speech!) was interrupted numerous times and the hecklers were escorted out (Obama was super classy about it). I believe Charlie interviewed some midwestern bishops about it, and no surprise, they were on the side of the hecklers/protesters because inviting Obama was just so egregious and so out of alignment with the University's values that it simply could not stand. Their take was that there were some values so fundamental that a stand is necessary, even if it flies in the face of decorum.
I'm willing to accept this general principle (if not it's specific application) at face value. There are some values so fundamental, so critical to an institution's ability to function in a way that aligns with it's mission, that people who oppose those values should be excluded and their views should not be given a platform. The right has been making that argument FOR YEARS. They really don't like it when the left makes that argument.
I'm sure that Obama was classy about it, that's how he is. From your story, the university was pretty classy about it, too: they removed the hecklers.
But here's the thing: there's debate about the legal framework in regards to being pro/anti-choice. We can all feel strongly about it, but we can also all agree that such discussion is actually relevant to the legal profession. That having radical views as a legal professor is not some outlier in the job.
But the views she is expressing have nothing to do with her job! We're not discussing some obscure legal theory, we're not talking about any kind of legal opinion, or any sort of law dispute. She's not expressing a viewpoint that has anything to do with her job.
What she's expressing is overt bigotry, which goes against her ability to teach everyone fairly. I might disagree with anti-choice arguements on the merits, but I could see why they might be relevant to a law professors discussions.
I cannot see how anyone thinks that her views are at all acceptable when she's expected to teach people of all races and nationalities. That's not a free speech question, in my view. She's entitled to her viewpoints. But these are not views that should be covered by academic freedom, because there's nothing academic about them.
"We're not discussing some obscure legal theory,"
Maybe she's floating a trial balloon for her Critical (of) Race Theory.
I absolutely agree with your stance that her opinion's compromise Wax's ability to do her job on a fundamental level. She should go. Not a Free-Speech issue. A do your job issue.
But I still think the comparison between that and the Obama commencement debacle is apt, because the protesters (the pro-life movement in general) doesn't see the issue of abortion as a legal/policy issue (if they did they'd look at the epidemiology and say "oh wow, abortions per capita decreased under Obama, he's doing something right!). The see "fighting abortion" as so fundamental a function of the Catholic church and it's affiliated universities and institutions that the battle should be fought on all fronts all the time, be it appointing a Catholic wannabe rapist like Kavanaugh to the supreme court or heckling Obama during a commencement speech. (I do not agree). I don't think this is dissimilar to progressive, anti-racist concept of fight racism everywhere on every front.
What Mona omits to mention is the asymmetry of the argument, "refrain from doing x, lest x be done to you when the worm turns."
Anyone who imagines that tenure will amount to even so much as a thimblefull of evaporated spit after DeSantis (or Trump or any of the rest) finish their project of transforming the republic into a combination one-party version of the post-reconstruction American South and modern Hungarian illiberal "democracy"-- they are fooling themselves.
The future of tenure, and academic freedom generally, is written in the declarations of Florida's New College President and Board of Trustees.
There must be a limit somewhere. Mona has about three fifths of it right -- if academic freedom doesn't extend quite a bit farther than decency and courtesy, it only extends to those we agree with. And we can pretty much expect that the limits will not be set by the best people. But I'm afraid that this value has pretty much dried up and blown away on both sides of the spectrum. The difference is that when we withdraw protection from academic freedom, and each side turns to inflicting pain and retribution upon its foes, the Left's outrages amount to pillorying people on Facebook and squeezing a few professors out of certain departments, where the Right's ambitions extend to having armed brownshirts running school board meetings and closing down libraries.
I read once that tenure--in California, anyway,--was in reaction to a professor being fired for advocating public ownership of a trolley car system
I for one don't like how lots of places are trying to roll back tenure. Places like Texas and Florida, for example. I think tenure is important, and I think that by and large, lots of people deserve academic freedom.
And I would be with Mona on this, were the views being expressed in any way associated with any kind of academic arguement. But they're not. She's not saying anything that's at all relevant to any kind of legal question. This isn't like having a radical opinion on abortion or something, where even if you have a strong belief there's legal questions that can be argued. She's just spewing bigotry!
Furthermore, said bigotry goes against her ability to do her job correctly. A professor should be expected to teach every student equally; they should be expected to teach many different races and nationalities. The very hope of academic study is that regardless of one's origins, that if you can do the work you can be heard.
But her views are not academic in nature, she's not expressing any opinion about the law. She's just saying that black people aren't equal to white people. And that goes against her very ability to teach people fairly. Why should any person of color believe that they will be treated fairly as a student of hers?
My sentiments exactly. Which academic freedom is under attack if Wax is fired for this? I just don’t understand the rationale.
Which academic freedom? The freedom for white people to be racist a$$holes and pass it for as a First Amendment issue. For some Americans it’s a founding principle.
Like, I don't think I made this clear enough in my comment, but I think there needs to be a divide about how and when someone is speaking when it comes to 'speech.'
If this were a case where she was speaking as a professor of law, if she was talking about something academically, if she was talking about something in regards to her profession, or expressing some opinion outside the norm that people disliked, I could understand this sort of view where you don't want to fire them for that speech.
Like, if she was saying that Brown V. Board was wrongly decided, I would disagree with her, and think she was a terrible person, but I could understand why you could theoretically back a law professor having controversial law opinions.
But she's not expressing opinions that have anything to do with her profession. She's not expressing anything that has anything to do with law. Are we now to believe that if you have tenure that you can just do anything and that you shouldn't ever be fired for it? If she came out in a klan hood, are we just supposed to go 'well, free speech!'
We're talking about publicly expressing beliefs that cut against the very idea of education. How can a professor be expected to treat every student equally when she publicly and repeatedly claims that she does not believe some of her students are genetically capable of learning the law?
Again, none of this is based around her academic beliefs. She's not expressing anything related to her job. How these viewpoints fit into academic freedom, I don't know, because there's nothing academic about them. Again, if you expressed these views at any other job, you would probably be fired on the spot for them. Why she should keep her job, a job where she's in charge of teaching people, after continuing to express these views, I don't know.
Beyond that, Mona's viewpoint that we should 'refute' her speech is moronic. How exactly do we 'refute' someone's beliefs? How exactly do we do this so that those who are taught under her get a fair shake? How do we refute her beliefs so that we can know, for certain, that she's treating every student equally?
I don't believe we can. I don't believe this is merely a difference of opinion; we're talking about whether or not we view individuals as being equals regardless of their skin color or national origin. I don't believe you can just refute her speech and expect her to be like 'man, I was wrong, I guess I have to treat black people as equals now.'
This isn't a case where we're arguing some kind of academic theory, we're talking about real people who she is saying are incapable of being the equals of people who look like her. That's not something you can just refute with more speech!
It occurs to me that this judge is just trying to explore a new career path. Lots of people get to a certain level of success in their lives and look around and wonder, is this all there is? What new field of endeavor could I try? For some of us, it's taking up guitar lessons. For others -- mid-life career jurists, for instance -- it's seeing how far they can get by being obnoxious and making a public spectacle of themselves.
To the misfortune of all, in our America today, there are rich rewards for notoriety. Fame and power, but also fortune -- fortune in many cases beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. We all have talents; success can be won by aligning our talents with the opportunities life puts in our way. In her case, she seems to be trying out her gifts for exploiting bigotry and intolerance. It's a crowded field with many contestants, but it's very much in the American tradition to give one's dreams a try.
Tenured professor here. I am not sure what it would take to get me or any other tenured professor fired for cause. Sleeping with students doesn't. Academic fraud doesn't. Incompetent research doesn't. Exploiting your graduate students by preventing them from publishing their research doesn't. Maybe not showing up for class?
Wax's views are reprehensible but I can give a pretty long list of COVID disinformationist professors at institutions that are every bit as prestigious as UPenn. All still have their jobs. Unfortunately it seems like we have to put up with these folks in order to protect the rest of us from the DeSantis's of the world, who would keep the Wax's and fire the rest of us.
A good point. It is often not that a system is good, but rather that the alternative is worse.
A point that was made about democracy and other systems of governance . . .
Alas, I respectfully suggest the statement "if you expressed these views at any other job, you would probably be fired on the spot" is incorrect. True it might be in certain workplaces, but by no means everywhere.
You are on the mark though when you ask how to "refute" such speech. One might as well try to "refute" Putin's invasion of Ukraine, or persuade a drought to abate, or debate with a dog by barking.
What Mona misses is that this person's pronouncements are "speech" only in a very tortured sense. By "freedom of speech" in the first amendment sense, we generally mean speech intended as expression. Expression is of course an action but there is also action which is not really speech, even if it takes the outward form of expression. An action per se can be lauded, supported, opposed, condemned, or prevented, but it can't be rebutted or refuted. The bully who comes up to you in the bar, gets in your face, tells you you are ugly, and insists you try to do something about it, is not engaged in "speech".
The "speech" in question is more like "shut up, he explained" than proposing or even directly claiming x is inferior to y. To be sure, we may confidently infer that the judge does in fact believe x inferior to y, but what is really going on is nothing like an attempt to advance that view. Rather, it's just an effort to start a fistfight by making people she wants to destroy lose their temper and strike the first blow. She's like the self-righteous bigot on the streetcorner haranguing passersby with the admonition they are headed for hellfire if they don't come to Jesus. Putatively they are trying to save souls. Actually they are merely scratching their own personal itches in public.
What perhaps Mona should suggest is, not attempt to "refute" or "rebut". We might better just try to show what is really being attempted. Which of course is being tendentious for its own sake, to provoke ill-judged behavior by people she wants to malign.
I don't care so much about refutation but I have listened to some of her talks. Some are about legitimate questions, and Joseph Henrich dealt with the uniqueness of the West in his recent book about Western, Educated, Industrial societies. Max Weber also dealt with the difference with Protestant Western societies.
Even the question of who the nation should let immigrate in a fair one. Unless one believes that we must treat all nations equally.
Still she ends up as a bitter person. I think she is her own worst enemy. I don't see why we should help her become a new right wing victim.
Never understood Weber. The Southern US was a Protestant Western Society and its prosperity was based not on any work ethic but on the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans, whose owners had a life of luxury!
But why should she be able to play the bully while hiding behind tenure? How many of our institutions and norms of practice must be turned over to rightwing racists under the guise of 'free speech' before we say enough is enough.
I don't know that she is a bully (except for her power over her students). I don't really see that the universities have turned themselves over to bullies.
To me she comes off as a frustrated and angry person. And to be frank, it can be frustrating when others don't agree. So a conservative in a mostly liberal society (her university).
I see her turned into a right wing saint. But who knows.
I don’t understand how UPenn firing her is helping her to become a new right wing victim. Her legal arguments and interpretations are not why she would be fired. Her explicitly racist ideas about who belongs in her institution are why she should be fired.
I disagree that someone should be fired for expressing their views unless their contract sets forth that they cannot express certain views publicly in any forum at any time.
There is an old saw "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." We have become way too oversensitized to "offense" and "taking offense." Every thing you ever utter will "offend" SOMEone it they are looking to be offended.
Firing someone for their ideas and opinions leads to Book Burning and Book Banning and other forms of censorship.
It also leads to more silos, more tribalism, more polarization.
Peacefully protest abhorrent ideas. March. Sit in. Write letters. But engage in a way that has at least a possibility of change coming rather than ensuring any change will be bloody.
Both sides are now working to muzzle the opposition. Both are wrong.
So, she is afforded free speech protections, but the university isn’t? In fact, we are going to compel speech from the university by making them retain her?
If the path to success is being victimized, there are various ways to get there. Possibly she miscalculated, and only hoped to be made a pariah in her ivory tower, so she could sally back and forth from there to Fox to attract the attention and rewards of cancellation. Actually losing one's job is taking it a bit far. Perhaps she was just a would-be mendicant who used a knife to produce some pity-inducing scarification and accidentally cut off her arm.
There is a way to deal with her. You take away her teaching duties. You take away her staff. You take away her office and give her a closet with a desk and a phone, nothing else. You don't sign her grant applications. You strictly interpret outside income activities and refuse to sign off on consulting, honoraria, or anything else.
I think UC Berkeley did something like this with Peter Duesberg. A bunch of institutions should do this with their COVID disinformationists.
Frankly, she's not the right demographic for "right wing martyr". They are not interested in adding an aging, female, Ivy-League law professor to their litany of saints. Maybe if she were 30 years younger and blonde, had shot someone like Kyle Rittenhouse, or had been on a reality TV show. But she seems much to boring for the right to care about.
I find racism a too easy label. And when I listened to her, I found more of a gadfly. Someone who challenges the nation of racism. Still if she is fired... well it won't make my life change at all.
Ah yes, just challenging the notion of race.
“I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”
A particularly offensive and ignorant statement given that Philadelphia has had a strong stable Black middle class for centuries. W. E. B. DuBois even wrote a famous book about it. She doesn't even know the history of the city where she works!
Is she not allowed to say that?
I know a Puerto Rican man in Paterson NJ who was changing a tire in his neighborhood when he was robbed by a black guy. Is he a racist for wanting to move to Clifton or Totowa?
And I know of several black women who are single mothers - several kids before 21 and a few fathers. They climbed out of a hole (work as clerks where I worked). Can we not worry about that?
I volunteer in Paterson. We see lots of motivated kids (HS age) some are interns where I volunteer. Very few have been African American in the 9 years I have been volunteering.
Can we not observe and worry? Wonder?
Mr. McKenna, if your tire-changing man wants to move because he is looking for a lower crime area that makes perfect sense. If he wants to move because his assailant had black skin he ought to think about what he'd do if his assailant had had white skin.
There are many reasons why black people may more frequently break the law or become single mothers. Poverty, urban economic segregation, alienation and cynicism due to longstanding social prejudice (which has, indeed, gutted optimistic motivation), unequal incarceration standards, and so forth. But dark complexion is not one of them.
When you observe and wonder, I hope you bear in mind that the effects you see are not due to any simple, essential cause: skin pigment. Professor Wax's stream of comments all reduce to: good things come from white skinned people; people with different skin color don't create good things and what they're good at creating are bad things.
I admire you for volunteering.
“I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”
"I am amused when our culture doesn't show all White men the way they really are: a bunch of overweight redneck fentanyl addicts who drive pickup trucks with confederate decals and AR-15's in the gunrack".
Cheese with your crackers, anyone?
Racism is not just KKK murderers burning crosses and blowing up black churches. It's more extensive and more subtle and doesn't even require personal malice toward anyone in particular.
She is allowed to say whatever she wants. When she makes sweeping statements about an entire race of people, she should expect people to pushback against her racism and the university is not curbing her academic freedom by firing her. At this point, we have exhausted this debate. I’m going to stop responding lest I say something uncivil. Your anecdotes however, aren’t data, I would ask you to refrain from using them in an argument.
Actually argument is not what I am after. In fact it is impossible without doing a full paper on a subject. And I don't want to. But you seem satisfied that racism is the label to use against her. I do not.
Racist is a chainsaw. I prefer to see her as a frustrated person and a gadfly.
Opinions are not appropriate in a learning environment, unless it is to discuss the whole subject - opinion, observation, experience, drawing conclusions and testing them out.
Her sharing her observations and conclusions she has drawn is spreading the bias that has developed in herself. This is what makes it racist.
If I say that every peach pie I have ever smelled or tasted is gross, I am spreading bias. But when the listener approaches their next peach pie and chooses not to try it, the pie's feeling will not be hurt nor will it have missed an opportunity to provide better for its children.
When she repeatedly makes racist statements, she’s a racist. Providing cover for her bigotry isn’t something you need to do.
It’s exactly how I feel. This isn’t a difference of interpretation of statutes. This is a person making wildly racist comments unrelated to her work and a private institution just needs to abide?! Turns out the argument is that we should be comfortable compelling speech from certain actors just because. The entire “cancel culture” debate rests on the idea that certain people are afforded “consequence-free speech” while others aren’t.