Amy Wax KOs Penn Law

By An Old Friend

Professor Wax is notorious for suggesting that some cultures don't do well in Western societies and recommending that people take up bourgeois values in order to thrive – so much so that she was recently bounced from teaching her class for first-year law students at the University of Pennsylvania. Below is her latest, from the 3/23 Wall Street Journal.

N.S.: My colleagues talk about how tough Amy Wax is, but what impressed me most when we crossed paths at a mini-conference at the National Press Club in September 2016, was how polite she was. Especially given the contrast to the boor sitting a few feet away, who interrupted me.

I was speaking to her privately, before the conference began, about urban crime and fakestats. She assumed I was talking about leftists who wage war on the cops. She spoke of “a structural double-standard,” that went beyond hypocrisy, of people who would never tolerate handcuffing the police in their own lives, but I was coming from the opposite direction, from the failure of broken windows policing, and the “solution” of statistical fraud by police departments.

Interestingly, a gangly young man who formed a triangle with us knew exactly where I was coming from, because he knew my work! (That rarely happens at such formal affairs.)

I started saying how James Q. Wilson’s programmatic writing proffering “broken windows policing” contradicted itself, when the boor interrupted me, denying there was any such contradiction.

I guess the boor figured I didn’t have the social standing to criticize the late Wilson. Maybe they’d been friends.

I’m a great admirer of James Q. Wilson, and in some ways consider myself his successor. But I’m not so corrupt that I would carry water for someone who was wrong about something, merely out of cronyism. I studied philosophy for the better part of four years with the great Hans Joachim Krämer, and yet I debated with Herr Krämer all the time.

The boor was named Charles Murray. I didn’t tell him to mind his own business, or debate him (then), even though he was wrong, but I locked swords with him during the Q&A after the paper by Jason Richwine and the comments by Wax and Murray, and I’m satisfied that I got the better of the exchange.

Murray made an excellent argument in favor of supporting Trump in the election, and then concluded with a non-sequitur of declaring that he would never vote for him.

I countered with the moral principle that if you desire the ends, you desire the means.

It made no impression on him. I just threw up my hands.


In any event, Penn is trying to destroy Amy Wax, but she has been fighting back.

It all started last summer, when Wax co-wrote an essay arguing that non-whites stood a much better chance of thriving in America by adopting rather than defying bourgeois values.

Colleagues and recent alumni condemned her in a petition, but without making any attempt to refute her argument.

More recently, in an interview on black economist Glenn Loury’s radio show, Wax said that to her knowledge, no black Penn law students had graduated in the top quarter, and few had graduated in the top half of the class. The school was admitting people through affirmative action who couldn’t cut it.

Penn Law Dean Theodore Ruger struck back by suggesting that Wax was a liar. He also barred her from teaching a class she’d taught for years to first-year law students, all the while lying in insisting that he wasn’t punishing her.

What school officials, above all Dean Ruger, have been doing in defaming and isolating her reminds me of what their counterparts at City College (CCNY) did to my old grad school logic professor, Michael Levin in circa 1988-1990, and which I chronicled in my magazine, A Different Drummer.

Michael Levin was the most brilliant man in the department, he had unsurpassed intellectual integrity, and was also a very patient teacher, I’m told, with less than stellar black students.

He had written in an article in a conservative Australian journal, Quadrant (something like our Commentary in those days), and in a letter to the American Philosophy Association (APA) newsletter of racial IQ differentials.

Levin’s CCNY Dean of Humanities Paul Sherwin and department chairman Martin Tamny responded by seeking to bar Levin—in violation of the college’s bylaws, custom, rules on intellectual freedom, the First Amendment, and all intellectual ethics—from teaching freshman and in particular, black students. (Black students actually liked taking his classes, which he did not politicize!) CCNY got away with this for a semester, but then Levin insisted on teaching his old class.

(Tamny, who was a brilliant cosmologist, would later confess to having been a weakling, in the matter of Leonard Jeffries, However, he was equally guilty of cowardice in the matter of Michael Levin.)

Martin Tamny was replaced in 1989 as chairman by Charles Evans, who was made of considerably sterner stuff. Evans reinstated Levin to teach freshman philosophy, and took a tough public stand on his behalf. (Evans granted me a lengthy interview on October 25, 1990.)

Paul Sherwin tried to scare off black students from taking Levin’s classes, he created a “shadow section” meeting the same day and time as Levin’s, and when that didn’t work, affirmative action black apparatchiki simply overrode the choices of black students to take his class.

Physical intimidation was also in play, with white communists and black supremacists (INCAR) taking over Levin’s classroom and shutting it down, and the CCNY Faculty Senate voted 61-3 to censure him. (CCNY did nothing to the trespassers.)

Another communist group at the CUNY Graduate Center (my old graduate school), CRASH, sought to cost Levin the ability to teach graduate classes.

Levin had to sue and win, in order to force CCNY to stop terrorizing him. However, he did not sue for monetary damages.

Meanwhile, during the same period black supremacist CCNY professor Leonard Jeffries, who openly taught racist doctrine, had no intellectual integrity or scholarly accomplishments, and was reportedly guilty of misconduct, sued the CUNY system, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Jeffries’ bosses had sought to remove him from his chairmanship of the CCNY Department of Black Studies, which he’d held for 20 years, but never should have had, to begin with. Meanwhile, his department had issued terroristic threats against “the Jewish people” and employees of the New York Post.)

At the time, I defended both men in my magazine, but should not have defended Jeffries, due to his terroristic threats and thuggery—he also traveled around campus accompanied by a goon squad.

Amy Wax must not only sue Penn, but she must demand:

• Millions of dollars in damages;
• The heads of those who dishonored her, including Law School Dean Theodore Ruger and Penn President Amy Gutmann; and
• Abject, full-page apologies to Wax, to be published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, signed by Ruger and Gutmann’s respective successors.

That is the only language that the contemporary antiversity understands.
 

The University of Denial
By Amy Wax
23 March 2018
Wall Street Journal

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away,” observed Philip K. Dick in “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.”

Somewhere deep in a file drawer, or on a computer server humming away in a basement, are thousands upon thousands of numbers, with names and identities attached. They're called grades. They represent an objective reality, which exists independent of what people want reality to be. They sit silently, completely indifferent to indignation, angry petitions, irritable gestures, teachers' removal from classrooms -- all the furor and clamor of institutional politics.

[N.S.: Actually, grades are not objective. As I demonstrated in what was for many years the state-of-the-art study on college grade inflation, student members of affirmative action groups get inflated grades. See: “Making Up the Grade: Notes from the Antiversity,” published under the pseudonym Robert Berman, Academic Questions, Spring 1998, or my 2001 series on the Internet: here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)]

Those numbers are now solely within the control of the individual students who earn them and the educational institutions that generate them -- powerful entities ruled by bureaucracies that serve as gatekeepers to privileged positions in our society. They are jealously guarded, protected by cloaks of confidentiality and secrecy. But they are what they are. Hiding facts is not the same as changing them.

Of course the numbers can be ignored. When it comes to grades -- which measure students' knowledge, proficiency and achievement -- we can declare they don't matter and that complete nondisclosure is therefore a wise course.

The problem is that students, including law students, go out into the real world. They are hired, paid and expected to perform, and their actions have real consequences for others. Whether we like it or not, grades help predict future performance. Some social actors acknowledge this, implicitly or overtly. As a law professor, I observe, for example, that federal judges unapologetically select clerks based on academic record and rank, and that elite law firms are also highly grade-conscious.

Another reason measures of academic performance are hard to ignore is that students often expect equality of results and -- especially in our identity-conscious world -- issue loud demands for equality in group outcomes. When that doesn't happen, frustration and disappointment ensue, followed by charges of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.

Those accusations are bound to provoke concern from the accused, especially those who deny that bigotry is the chief cause of certain inequalities by pointing to possible alternatives -- including group disparities in qualifications, skills, performance or life choices. Keeping key documentation about the sources of disparities out of view does not prevent people from discussing them and their consequences. They are a regular topic of conversation behind closed doors, in offices and hallways, around kitchen tables, in living rooms and in private correspondence.

But what everyone currently understands, and recent events reinforce, is that these conversations may not take place publicly or even be acknowledged openly. My students know that. So do working lawyers and judges, and everyone else trying to run institutions, decide cases, serve clients, and make a buck. So do employers and other citizens, including many people, young and old, from around the country who have deluged me with letters, phone calls, and emails setting out forthright, common-sense observations, such as this one: "The facts about the comparative performance of the different groups on [for example] the bar, medical boards, SATs, MCATs, LSATs etc. are well-established. Viewing these facts as offensive will not make them go away."

The mindset that values openness understands that the truth can be inconvenient and uncomfortable, doesn't always respect our wishes, and sometimes hurts. Good feelings and reality don't always mix. But there is a price to be paid for putting the quest for psychological comfort over openness on matters central to how our society is organized. While some people benefit from the favored view, others lose out. People accused of bigotry and discrimination -- claims that are more pervasive than ever -- are understandably unhappy about being deprived of the ability to defend themselves by pointing to alternative reasons for group differences. Hoarding and hiding information relevant to such differences, which amounts to predetermining a verdict of "guilty as charged," violates basic principles of fair play and gives rise to justified resentment.

Universities, like other institutions, scheme relentlessly to keep such facts from view. Yet although the culture war is now tilted against those accused of discrimination, politics persists, and frustration tells at the ballot box. The deeper price is that people come to believe that truth yields to power, and that political pressure should be brought to bear to avoid inconvenient realities.

Some in this camp claim benign motives. They seek to safeguard the feelings of those who might be distressed by public knowledge. One can argue about when, how and in what form the disclosure will best balance personal privacy and our society's need to know. But when facts are concealed, they do not change. They have consequences whether or not we are prepared to face them.

That belief that political force determines objective reality has characterized totalitarian regimes world-wide and throughout history -- regimes that are responsible for untold amounts of human misery. That mindset is dangerously inconsistent with the kind of free society Americans have painstakingly built and defended over many centuries, at the cost of blood and treasure. Perhaps we no longer want such a society. But we relinquish it at our peril.

Ms. Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.