Tenured Professor Amy Wax, Under Siege for ‘Truth Telling’ on Race, Makes Her Case
She is both very bright and highly principled. She speaks the truth without fear. The moves against her are pathetic. If they succeed, the matter will just end up before SCOTUS, where she will win
The future of tenure in American higher education could turn on the fate of a septuagenarian professor who teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania who has an intense mien and history of inflammatory opinions of which she has no regrets.
Professor Amy Wax has catapulted to national attention because of comments about race and gender that have made her a truth telling seer to some and a bomb throwing bigot to others. In refusing to back down, she could break the back of tenure, the system of a job-for-life that in its modern contractual form has been the coin of the academic realm since 1940.
Ms. Wax has come to represent a test case because of both the extremity of her pronouncements — she has alleged to have made a series of controversial comments over the years asserting discrepancies in cognitive ability relating to race, has claimed that she has never seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of their class, and called India a “sh-thole” — as well as Penn’s effort to oust her.
“Universities,” Ms. Wax tells the Sun in the course of a nearly one hour conversation, “need to have room for people like me to explain the opposition and above all, to explain to students that there is another point of view” than the reigning one, which she regards as “lopsided, stunted, and inadequate.”
Ms. Wax speaks in the forceful tones of someone who has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court. Her resume includes all the usual gold stars, plus a white coat; she graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed a residency in neurology before turning to the bar full time.
Now, Ms. Wax is facing what she calls “a formal attempt to take away my job,” notwithstanding that she secured tenure two decades ago and holds a named chair, another mark of distinction. The dean of her law school, Theodore Ruger, is initiating disciplinary action against her to determine whether her patterns of speech warrant a “major sanction.” This could include firing, despite her tenure.
For Dean Ruger, it appears personal. He told students at a town hall meeting in 2018 that he is “pissed off” that she remains on faculty, a reality which he says “sucks.” He explained that the “only way to get rid of a tenured professor” is a process that will “take months.” That effort is now underway.
Dean Ruger’s report, which reads like a criminal complaint, accuses Ms. Wax of a “callous and flagrant disregard for our University community” in the form of “incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements.” He finds that faculty “call her presence demoralizing and disruptive” and students steer clear of her courses.
Ms. Wax asserts that this line of accusation heralds a dawning age where universities “can take away your job and your tenure just for what you said and for your opinions.” She calls Mr. Ruger “one of the worst deans in America” and accuses him of “groveling and pandering” to students.
Even some of Ms. Wax’s defenders have their doubts. The director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech stalwart, told the New York Times that “academic freedom has to protect the Amy Waxes of the academic world, so that it can be there for the Galileos of the academic world.” Ms. Wax allows that she is “unhappy” with that explanation.
Ms. Wax has, in turn, filed a grievance against the school, which she says is targeting the expressions of opinion that she is “fully and totally entitled to make by every tradition and standard in academia.” She calls Penn’s effort to sanction her a “direct attack” that aims to enforce a “rigid orthodoxy of permissible speech and expression.”
The grievance, which aims to arrest the disciplinary push against Ms. Wax, acknowledges that her opinions are “at times hard to hear or read” but asserts that they find support in “empirically based sources.” It adds that no Penn faculty member has “ever been formally charged with an infraction of University rules based on what he or she has taught, written, assigned to students, or opined in the media. No one.”
The lack of any accusation of sexual or behavioral misconduct sets Ms. Wax’s case apart from other instances where the shield of tenure has been pierced, such as the firing of a professor of the Classics, Joshua Katz, at Princeton. Mr. Katz was ostensibly dismissed over a lack of candor regarding a sexual relationship with a student, although he has claimed that was pretextual.
With Ms. Wax, it’s all about speech. She sees herself as a trespasser of an “unseen borderland” that cuts through campus, beyond which “dissent is not tolerated.” This zone is policed by academic hunters of “crimethink” that aim to “get rid of people or silence people or punish people” like her.
Not spared Professor Wax’s indignation is the “tea table gossip of modern journalism.” In particular, she calls the New York Times a “rag” and tells the Sun that their report that she describes herself as a “race realist” — asserted in the recent profile of her case — is “made up.”
The Sun asks Ms. Wax whether she feels that she has inflicted “severe harm” on her students, as Penn alleges. She rejects this “weaponized” notion of harm, where disagreement and offense have “transmogrified that harm into something that warrants discipline or ejection of a person who inflicts the harm.”
Ms. Wax is asked if it shows “discriminatory animus” to make the statement that “on average women are less knowledgeable than men?” She claims that “every study that’s been done worldwide” discloses that finding. Punishing her for statements like that one, she argues, will mean the “destruction of academic freedom.”
Ms. Wax acknowledges the utility of a “certain kind of restraint and decorum when talking about groups and comparing groups and making generalizations especially in a diverse society.” Alongside that caveat, though, is her aspiration to “defeat wokeism by developing a counter narrative.”
Ms. Wax’s account rejects the “premise that all groups are equal in their skills, ability, preferences, and talents.” That, she says, is both untrue and “not to be expected in a free and diverse society.” She sees the “core of wokeness” and its “central pillar” as the conviction that in the absence of racism “all groups are equal, equally capable and assimilated to positive norms.” She does not believe that.
Ms. Wax fiercely objects to Penn’s accusation that her pedagogy is marbled with bias and that her convictions compromise her classrooms. She tells the Sun that she has “never been biased against any student.” She elaborates that she treats “every student the same” in that she “responds to who they are as an individual” and demands from Mr. Ruger “forensic proof” to the contrary.
The Sun asks Ms. Wax if she misses teaching first year law classes, which are devoted to the basics of the legal canon. She was stripped of those duties in 2018. She responds that she’s told by colleagues that it is “no longer fun” to teach first year courses because “you’re always on your guard against committing some kind of violation or infraction of the progressive and woke rule book. ”
One particular flashpoint in l’affaire Wax was her invitation of the white supremacist and editor of American Renaissance, Jared Taylor, to speak to a seminar she was teaching on conservative thought. Mr. Taylor has written a book entitled “White Identity.” He was a contemporary of Ms. Wax at Yale.
The Sun pushes Ms. Wax on the merits of importing Mr. Taylor to her classroom. She responds that “whether you like it or not Jared Taylor is an educated informed articulate proponent of a far right position.” She explained that “students know nothing about this stuff” except that “they are supposed to condemn it and call it evil.”
Ms. Wax worries over this ignorance of both students and academic administrators of positions they find repugnant, saying how neither her pupils nor their instructors can “define a white nationalist,” which signals a state of “complete and total ignorance.” Spreading her arms and leaning forward in her chair, Ms. Wax declares “I am a teacher, I am a professor, and I am there to banish that ignorance.”
Within this condition of what she calls “educational malpractice,” Ms. Wax contends that she is a “very important person at the University of Pennsylvania” because of her “pastoral role” as mentor and confidant. She suggests that she is the only faculty member at Penn conservative students believe will not “turn them in” for contraband thought.
The professor casts back to her childhood to explain the distinction between “defending your right to say something” and “agreeing with what you say,” a difference that to her has been lost. She recalls sitting at the “dinner table when the Nazis marched through Skokie and my father said ‘I’m proud to live in a country where the Nazis can’” fly their flag. The American Civil Liberties Union defended the marchers then, but would be unlikely to do so now.
If Ms. Wax is a kind of pastor to the unwoke, her congregation stretches beyond Penn’s campus. She sees herself as channeling the thinking of an “enormous chunk of our democracy,” voicing opinions that are “discussed in living rooms and kitchens behind closed doors and at dinner parties” but have no place in the contemporary academy.
Reaching for examples of the kind of opinion she speaks that others wouldn’t, she cites Charles Murray’s “Facing Reality” for the persistent existence of a “one standard deviation difference in cognitive ability between blacks and whites.” She points to “differences in family structure and family stability and birth rates out of wedlock” as “really important.”
Speculating on her future, Ms. Wax calls the case against her “pathetic” but acknowledges the possibility that a “show trial” undertaken by a “kangaroo court” could oust her. She explains that she “would love to stay on” and that, aided by deep-pocketed backers, she is going to “fight the good fight to the death.”
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The Legally and Morally Flawed Case Against Trump
Although we don’t yet know entirely how it will be structured, enough of the Manhattan District Attorney’s case against Trump has found its way into the public domain so that we know the general parameters. The centerpiece of the case is a misdemeanor charge under Section 175 for supposedly falsifying his business records. The theory is that Trump paid his former lawyer $130,000.00 in a series of reimbursements to Cohen and labeled them as legal expenses to conceal that the money was really to pay Adult Film Actress, Stormy Daniels for a nondisclosure agreement and that somehow this scheme violated federal election laws.
From a legal perspective, this bizarre wielding of State prosecutorial power in pursuit of what is essentially an alleged federal crime is seriously flawed.
For starters, it is not a crime to be a philanderer, if in fact Trump did have an affair with Ms. Daniels. She has claimed publicly that there was no affair – but who knows. It is not a crime for Trump to pay so-called “hush money” either. I hate it when people call it that. It is a legal contract called a “nondisclosure agreement” and it is not in the least uncommon. Particularly for a celebrity who is a married man with many business interests. There are myriad reasons – unrelated to his Presidential Campaign – for Trump to pay the money to Ms. Daniels.
The case is legally flawed for a second major reason. Specifically the Manhattan DA has a major Statute of Limitations problem.
It’s worth noting that the Federal Elections Commission and the Department of Justice have already looked at all this and took no action back when it was fresh. Nevertheless DA Bragg is essentially trying to stuff a federal campaign finance crime into a state law business records charge. The business records case under Section 175 is a misdemeanor and the statute of limitations is two years. If DA Bragg manages to shoehorn an alleged violation of the federal campaign finance laws into the Section 175 charge – despite being a state DA and not a US Attorney – then the business records case becomes a felony and has a five-year statute of limitations. My iPhone tells me this is 2023 – nearly seven years after any such Section 175 business record crime would have occurred. So, the statute of limitations has clearly run. Nevertheless, I wait on pins and needles to see what whackado legal theory DA Bragg pulls out of his…..hat to claim the statute of limitations has somehow not expired.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in the potential indictment is on moral grounds. The whole thing is immoral and rotten to the core. This is a political weaponization of the criminal justice system. This expected indictment comes as the 2024 presidential election season is kicking into high gear. Donald Trump is leading in some polls as he seeks the Republican Nomination for President of the United States. If this indictment were truly grounded in good-faith, it could have been prosecuted back when it allegedly occurred. There’s no legitimate reason to bring it now. Only politics.
At its core, the justice system relies on trust. We must have faith and trust that the prosecutors we elect to serve our communities will wield the awesome power of their office fairly, objectively and without regard to his or her personal political biases. The public needs to have faith that prosecutors are using their power to objectively pursue legitimate crimes.
This indictment would represent a perversion of the justice process and will undermine public confidence. This blatant hyper-partisan abuse of power will undermine public confidence and poison the well for legitimate cases that truly do need to be prosecuted. New York is in the midst of a crime crisis the likes of which are unprecedented. One would hope DA Bragg would aggressively pursue and prosecute murderers, rapists, and robbers with the zeal with which he is pursuing the former President of the United States for a seven-year-old alleged bookkeeping crime.
Nobody who’s paying attention needs me to tell them that Trump is not in friendly territory. The DA and nearly all politicians in New York are democrats and Trump is the bane of every democrat’s existence. One hopes Trump will find a fair-minded and impartial judge who won’t be afraid to do the right thing and dismiss any legally defective indictment, but I am not holding my breath. I can’t even begin to ponder how Donald Trump would find a fair jury in New York.
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Goodbye America, Hello Banana Republic
America as the “shining city on a hill” is gone. It has been replaced by a country with a weaponized criminal justice system, a radicalized educational system, and a news media that is a mouthpiece for a tyrannical government.
It is difficult to be hopeful about America after twenty-six disastrous months of the Biden administration. All the progress of the previous administration has been reversed. Our country is no longer economically robust, energy independent or secure at our borders.
We face a border crisis, a crime crisis, an economic crisis, a banking crisis, an education crisis and are fighting a proxy war against Russia. To make matters worse, a “woke” leftist agenda has become dominant at our nation’s top corporations, universities, government agencies and media outlets.
At the forefront of this destruction has been the most radical presidential administration in American history. The Biden administration has weaponized the Department of Justice to attack its political enemies, including parents, pro-life activists, and supporters of President Donald Trump who participated in the January 6, 2021, protests in Washington D.C.
While plenty of Americans have been targeted by “blue state” prosecutors and Democrats in the Department of Justice, the individual who has received the most abuse is former President Trump.
In fact, the former president has been besieged from the day he descended the “golden escalator” at Trump Tower and announced his presidential campaign. What followed was an unrelenting assault on Trump including almost universally negative media coverage, the coordinated release of the “Access Hollywood” tape and actual government spying on his campaign.
Although the phony “Steele dossier” was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, it was used to grant “FISA” warrants to surveil Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy advisor.
The mistreatment did not stop after Trump’s 2016 victory. His National Security Advisor, Lt. General Michael Flynn, was the target of an FBI sting operation and was forced to resign. The charges of “Russian collusion” led to the establishment of a Special Counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Despite the efforts of 18 Democrat prosecutors and a $32 million investigation no “Russian collusion” or obstruction of justice was proven.
Even though the Mueller investigation was a major waste of resources, deranged Democrats continued. The next obsession was the first impeachment of President Trump over a “perfect” phone call to Ukrainian President Zelensky. Trump was trying to determine details about the corrupt relationship between the Biden family and Ukraine. The result was his impeachment and eventual acquittal.
Soon thereafter, COVID-19 struck, compliments of communist China, which led into the highly disputed 2020 election.
Recent polls show that 61% of Republicans believe that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected President of the United States. The following January 6th, millions of Americans held that view, including the large crowd of Trump supporters who gathered in Washington D.C. to protest. This led to the unprecedented second impeachment and acquittal of President Trump.
The demonstrators were not trying to overthrow the government, but to protest what they believed was a stolen election. The congressional committee that investigated the so-called “insurrection” was incredibly biased and partisan. Their target, not surprisingly, was President Trump.
Recently, new video footage has been shown to the American people which paint a different picture of what happened. Many of the protesters were not violent and were praising police officers and following their instructions.
Their next abusive tactic occurred last August. As President Trump was planning his 2024 campaign for the White House, FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago home and conducted a ten-hour search. While Trump’s attorneys were forced to wait outside, agents rummaged through his home, including his wife’s closet and his son’s bedroom.
Interestingly, classified documents were also found at the office and home of Joe Biden, but there was no FBI raid. In Biden’s case, everything was handled differently by the Department of Justice. The search was scheduled with Biden’s attorneys and conducted in an orderly manner.
In November, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate the classified documents recovered in the Trump raid and his involvement in the January 6th protests. According to reports, Smith has been aggressively spearheading this ongoing investigation.
As that probe continues, Trump is also being investigated by a Fulton County, Georgia Grand Jury for supposed efforts to pressure state officials to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The latest outrage involves an investigation in New York City that will reportedly lead to the President’s arrest this week. The District Attorney is resurrecting an old charge that President Trump improperly reported the payment of “hush money” to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged tryst between them. Trump denies the affair and calls the entire case “and old and fully debunked (by numerous other prosecutors!) fairytale.”
The vicious political persecution of Trump is akin to what occurs in “banana republics.” No longer is our country too advanced for such shenanigans to occur here. With partisan Democrats prosecuting in “blue states” and in the Department of Justice, there is an ongoing, ruthless campaign to obliterate Trump politically.
Their goals are not only to destroy Trump, but also to destroy what he represents, the “America First” agenda. The political establishment and Deep State do not want the needs of Americans at the forefront. Instead, their priorities include international affairs, global wars, and funding for the military industrial complex.
While our country suffers economically and has an open border, the political establishment is concentrated on the Ukrainian war, climate change and other issues of little importance to most Americans.
Trump jeopardizes the financial interests of his political enemies by focusing on the real desires of Americans. Instead of spending $6.5 trillion on unwinnable foreign wars, Trump wants Americans to prosper economically.
His “America First” agenda threatens very powerful interests. Thus, he has become the first American President to endure government surveillance, two impeachments, an FBI raid, and a presumed arrest. The banana republic has arrived.
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Muslim woman Exposes the Woke Army
We are all familiar with radical terrorist cells that once set in motion commit acts of mayhem destroying American life and property. But there is another kind of terrorist network operating in America. Rather than blow things up, these terrorists tear things down from within the institutions themselves. Rather than plant explosives, these terrorists infiltrate local, state, and national governments and businesses and use the power of acquired positions and the wealth given them by George Soros, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other enemies of the United States to incite opposition to and riot against American institutions and values. Whether driven by a bin Laden-kind of perverse theocratic hatred for Western freedom and religious pluralism or by far-left desires to transform our country into a communist state, these radicals want to put an end to America as the greatest bastion of liberty the world has ever known, and establish in its place dictatorship.
In her excellent new book, Woke Army, former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Q. Nomani reveals the identities, locations, and actions of this heretofore clandestine network of radicals. It exposes their plot to take over America and their methods. Her book is an eye-opener. A Muslim born in Bombay, India who has traveled throughout the Middle East, she spent her youth in Morgantown, West Virginia. Since her arrival in America and citizenship here, she has adored our foundational principles of individual liberty and religious pluralism. “I embraced liberal American values of freedom, self-determination, and secular government,” she writes. She is part of a Muslim reform movement which embraces conceptions of equal rights for men and women and acceptance of other faiths, including the Jewish faith and the state of Israel. For that, she has been condemned as worse than heretical by many in the same network of radicals she exposes in her book. “I have been viciously attacked as a ‘Zionist media whore,’ ‘racist,’ ‘American apologist,’ and ‘Islamaphobe,’” she writes.
Nomani strongly opposes all forms of racism and religious bigotry, including anti-Semitism. She has a long history of public defense of equal protection of the laws and equal opportunity regardless of race and gender. A professional journalist and author, she was the former colleague of Daniel Pearl who was abducted by radical Muslim terrorists from Nomani’s home in Pakistan and thereafter murdered. She is also, along with Suparna Dutta, one of the original founders of Parents for TJ (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology), where she opposed race-based exclusion of Asians imposed as part of the school’s “equity” agenda.
Nomani defines these obscured threats to the survival and success of liberty this way: “The Woke Army is an organized, well-financed global network of Muslim radicals and leftist activists who exploit the freedoms of the West to promote a system of beliefs that runs counter to any values of freedom.” She explains how these radicals incessantly exploit means to destroy the United States, uniting with Marxists, among them those in BLM and Antifa, to maintain a constant assault and effort at erosion of everything from law enforcement to public education. Together, they subvert foundational American “values of democracy, meritocracy, and progress” and promote essentially self-destructive and divisive ideological concepts like critical race theory, cancel culture, and anti-Semitism as a means to shake and crush the United States, ultimately enabling the foment of a revolution to bring about, in the case of the radical theocrats, a Muslim theocratic dictatorship, and, in the case of the Marxists, a communist state.
They operate in political positions of power, such as on school boards, boards of education, high schools, and universities; local, state, and national political offices; non-profit organizations; and businesses large and small. The picture she paints is one of insinuation of radical elements into these institutions all over the United States.
In her first few pages, Nomani boldly lists by name and position and organization those who are a part of this radical network. She finds certain common sources of financing and activity behind them. She writes “the network’s national security influence” is “funded by . . . George Soros.” She explains that it is “counterintuitive that Soros, who survived the Holocaust as a teen born into a Jewish family . . . was financing a great deal of this network, most of them anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.” She explains that Soros has, for example, increased his support for the radical group Muslim Advocates from $78,000 in 2006 to $1.7 million in 2019.
She reveals that as far back as the 1950s radicals began plotting means to overthrow the United States and establish either a theocracy or a communist dictatorship. She documents the arrival in 1981 of the now deceased Ismail Al-Faruqui of the Muslim Brotherhood to Virginia and how he purchased buildings in Herndon at 500 Grove Street. That location would thereafter serve as the address and center for all sorts of radical groups and as the funding base for others nationwide and worldwide. She explains that Al-Faruqui even acquired a lucrative chicken slaughter house in Georgia to help fund their political operations, Mar-Jac Poultry, Inc. Nomani records the history of development of these groups and their alliances with Marxist entities. She also records their success in landing large donations again and again from George Soros’s funding entities, often to pay for political operations against American institutions by radical Muslim groups in conjunction with or as a complement to Marxist groups.
This kind of ever present, persistent terrorism is now big business in the United States. Nomani reveals that the radical agenda is being promoted across the country. Her book Woke Army is a wake-up call to all freedom loving Americans. It asks us to recognize that the terrorism threat is not limited to violent massacres but involves a persistent decades old and continuing effort to infiltrate essential American institutions and use them as bases for the elimination of all foundations of American liberty. Grave threats to the survival of our nation from Biden’s open border policies, Soros-baked prosecutors’ anti-incarceration agenda, and Marxist CRT indoctrination in the schools are exacerbated by this dedicated network of radicalsand Marxists who exploit those weaknesses at every opportunity. We must awake to the reality of the Woke Army and turn the power of local, state, and federal law enforcement against it. We must first remove those in office who stand in the way of defense of Americans’ rights to life, liberty, and property.
https://townhall.com/columnists/jonathanemord/2023/03/20/nomani-exposes-the-woke-army-n2620862
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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