The University of Pennsylvania (Credit: UPenn)
Progressive authoritarianism was very strong at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts before the school closed its doors permanently in 2024. For several years prior to the closure, the school had been trying to remove tenured professor and renowned critic Camille Paglia, who had been teaching at UArts since 1989.
The controversy surrounding Paglia came to a head in 2019 when she delivered a lecture on sexual issues and western art. Leftist students wanted to ban the lecture or require Paglia to host a talk-back with students afterwards. When Paglia refused, the lefties set off a fire alarm, in effect canceling most of the lecture and forcing the evacuation of the building.
By 2019, Paglia was already skating on thin ice at UArts. The lefties hated it when she stated:
“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”
“There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”
David Bernstein in his 2004 book, You Can’t Say That, describes how leftist activists begin the vivisection of their victim with social-media callouts, after which they strongarm authority figures [university administrators] to impose an outcome — censorship — in their favor.”
While UArts’ persecution of Camille Paglia may be a thing of the past, things aren’t so good at the University of Pennsylvania.
Penn law professor Amy Wax sued the university in January 2025, alleging the university violated her tenure rights in October 2024 when it suspended her from teaching for one year with half pay following an investigation into public statements she made about minority groups that many deemed racist.
“If you ask six different people what a racist is, you get six different answers,” Wax told one interviewer recently. She added that universities have gone astray because they’ve been captured by a far-left ideology. “This is not an education,” she says, “it’s a one-sided tilted education. It doesn’t allow certain ideas to be expressed or discussed.”
But you’re not allowed to say these things when you work for a major university, where only left-wing views matter. While universities like Penn tolerate pro-Palestinian student protests and disruptions of Jewish groups under the guise of academic freedom, that same liberty is not extended to conservatives.
Throughout the years Wax has steadfastly defended her right to hold unpopular opinions about race and referred to herself as a "casualty in the culture wars.”
UPenn, however, would like nothing better than to send Wax packing.
In 2022, Penn was all over the news when Wax was castigated by Penn faculty and students for seeming to discriminate or promoting “hate” against Asians. The controversy was nothing new to Wax, a veteran of many bumpy collisions with Penn going back to 2006 when the faculty of Penn Law rebuked her for her stand against same-sex marriage. But that was nothing compared to the brouhaha resulting from her comments that the United States is better off with less Asian immigration.
These comments were aired during a Dec. 20 interview with Brown University professor Glenn Loury on his web show. Wax criticized Asian immigration to the United States, warning of the “danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country.”
Wax, who is Jewish, said: “If you go into medical schools, you’ll see that Indians, South Asians are now rising stars. In medicine, they’re sort of the new Jews, I guess, but these diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment now.”
She also stated that Asians tend “to conform to whatever the dominant ethos is,” and since “wokeness is now the luxury belief of the upper class [in institutions and academia], this is what Asians now feel they have to ape.” She also said that the immigration of “Asian elites” to the United States is a problem because they tend to support the Democratic Party.
Whether you agree with Wax on the Asian question or not, her right to hold such beliefs and still be permitted to teach at Penn is one of the principles of academic freedom.
But with the dominance of wokeness in Academe, after Wax’s comments to Loury went viral, there were calls for her immediate removal despite her tenured status. These calls came from faculty and lefty student activists who have been monitoring Wax since 2006. So great was the backlash this time that Philadelphia City Council condemned Wax and called for UPenn to put its foot down — i.e., fire her. A bipartisan letter signed by sixteen out of seventeen City Council members and then-Mayor Jim Kenney was sent to Penn president Amy Gutmann.
The Daily Pennsylvanian, UPenn’s newspaper, went ballistic, stating that Wax’s latest comments amount to a “cumulation and increasing promotion of white supremacy.”
Wax was also vilified on the city’s local news stations. Indeed, the ‘breaking news’ aspect of these reports placed her Asian comments alongside reports on the Russia-Ukraine situation.
Surprisingly however, the Academic Freedom Alliance addressed a letter to Gutmann arguing that Wax should not face formal consequences for her comments.
The chair of AFA’s Academic Committee, Princeton University professor Keith Whittington, was quoted as saying that he found it “disturbing” that Penn responded to pressure from students but especially by lawmakers by invoking a formal sanctions process against Wax.
There were also calls for the Dean of the Law School, Theodore Ruger, to discipline her. That discipline came in the form of her removal by Ruger from teaching first-year curriculum courses. Ruger was quoted as saying that Wax spoke “disparagingly and inaccurately.”
The incident put Wax on the Progressive Left watch list even though she was speaking about her personal experience at Penn and not surmising what happens — or would happen — at other law schools. In 2019, she earned the triple tiara-label of racist-xenophobe and all-around hater when she co-authored an op-ed of some 800 words arguing for a U.S. immigration policy favoring people from Western countries over non-Western countries. And in yet another video with Loury, Wax explained how that op-ed was printed in her Philadelphia hometown “little newspaper” [the Philadelphia Inquirer], a coy putdown of the Inky’s high-minded opinion of itself as the newspaper of record in Philadelphia. The op-ed, “On Bourgeois Values,” posited that all cultures are not created equal and that some are superior to others.
“I noted that global migrants flock to European countries. They don’t risk their lives in rickety boats to go to Venezuela or Zimbabwe,” Wax wrote. sounding much like Ann Coulter in her immigration classic, “Adios America.”
Wax has labeled the curriculum at Penn Law and other law schools as having been “propagandized” by diversity, equity, and inclusion supervisors which she says has ruined her own students’ knowledge of legal concepts over the years.
“I have seen my students change over even ten to fifteen to 20 to 30 years… They have become these cowed, benighted sheeples. It’s just unbelievable. So not only are they thoroughly intimidated as they should be, but they are ignorant.”
