Still the Center of a Storm

University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax is back in the news. The leader of Black Lives Matter in Philadelphia is calling for her to be fired for remarks she made recently that BLM insists are racist.

BLM leader Asa Khalif told the school they must fire Wax or else face major disruptions on the Philadelphia campus. Wax's offense was to have claimed in a radio interview with Brown University Professor Glenn Loury, that “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class and rarely, rarely in the top half. I can think of one or two students who’ve scored in the top half of my required first-year course.”

Penn Law Professor Amy Wax

Ms. Wax has stirred up controversy before. Last summer I wrote about the firestorm she generated when she claimed that “single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks” as well as “the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants,” are symptoms of decline in the lower echelons of our socio-economic structure.

In a follow-up interview Wax noted that Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior. “I don’t shrink from the word, ‘superior,’” she said, adding that “everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify” these values and that “everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

Khalif insists that, “Anyone with the types of beliefs she holds teaching black and brown students is a danger to them and their future. We are unwavering in our one demand that she be fired. Based on her beliefs and the things she has said, she is a threat to black and brown students.”

Unfortunately, Khalif's threat to disrupt the campus is exactly the wrong way such matters should be handled in a civilized society in which liberty is cherished.

In a healthy, intellectually mature environment like a major university is supposed to be, the first question that would be asked is whether what Professor Wax alleges about minority achievement at her law school is in fact true. Is it indeed the case that black and brown students rarely finish in the top 50%? Surely it would be easy enough to find out.

If it is true, then the next step should be to ask why that is so and focus on the causes of black and brown underperformance rather than seek to punish the person who calls attention to it. On the other hand, if it's not true that black and brown students fall disproportionately outside the top tiers of their class then Prof. Wax should be confronted with the actual statistics by university administrators and invited to publicly recant her claim.

If she's honest and is shown her mistake, she will. If she doesn't, and can offer no compelling reasons for refusing, then, and only then, should she be suspected of harboring some sort of animus against minority students.

To refuse this sensible course of action and opt instead for demands that a woman be denied her livelihood, to engage in threats of disruption and perhaps worse, to choose to create an Orwellian climate of fear and forced conformity such as prevails on many campuses today, a climate in which everyone is afraid to say anything, no matter how true or reasonable, that someone else might be offended by, is to revert to the tactics of 20th century fascism and communism.

It is a favored tactic of oppressors who wish to suppress ideas they don't like to keep them from being openly discussed. It's a tactic employed by people who couldn't care less about liberty or truth, who don't even believe there are such things, and who are interested only in promoting whatever is necessary to achieve their own cause.

It's also a tactic employed by those who have little to no confidence that their side of the case can actually stand on its own merits or that the facts of the matter will support them.