Penn hearing board recommended sanctions against Amy Wax in June, but her appeal means the process isn’t over

The case against controversial University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax — who has called into question the academic ability of Black students and said the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration — has gone on for over two years with no public outcome.

But sources close to the investigation confirmed a university hearing board made up of tenured faculty recommended in June that Wax should face sanctions, including a one-year suspension at half pay with benefits intact, but stopped short of calling for her to be fired and stripped of tenure.

The hearing board also recommended: a public reprimand issued by university leadership, the loss of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement to note in her public appearances that she is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law school or Penn, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on the matter.

» READ MORE: Penn law professor Amy Wax enraged people with her comments about Asians. Now, she may face sanction.

Then-president Liz Magill signed off on the sanctions in August, saying she stood by the hearing board’s decision. (Under faculty senate rules, the president “shall normally accept” the recommendations, and “only in exceptional circumstances” can depart from them.) But Wax appealed the ruling, alleging proper procedure wasn’t followed. That initiated another phase of the process: a review by Penn’s Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility to determine whether her claim is correct.

It’s uncertain how long that will take to come to a conclusion. But if the recommendations are upheld, it would mark the first time in at least 20 years that a tenured professor is sanctioned after the full faculty senate process was followed.

A decision to sanction Wax could reignite scrutiny over Penn’s handling in September of the Palestine Writes literature festival, which critics say included speakers with a history of making antisemitic remarks, and for resisting calls to discipline faculty and students for remarks some called antisemitic in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the country’s subsequent military response in Gaza.

» READ MORE: Penn law prof Amy Wax asks for delay of disciplinary proceedings for her cancer treatment

The U.S. congressional committee investigating Penn’s handling of antisemitism complaints, a lawsuit filed by two Jewish students at Penn, and Wax’s lawyer all have pointed to the proceedings against Wax as evidence that Penn will attempt to take action against some professors for some speech.

» READ MORE: Penn law dean starts process that could lead to sanctions on professor Amy Wax

“Penn has demonstrated a clear double standard by tolerating antisemitic ... harassment, and intimidation, but suppressing and penalizing other expression it deemed problematic,” wrote Virginia Foxx, the Republican congresswoman who heads the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Others, however, have maintained that the two shouldn’t be conflated.

Wax has been accused of making racist statements to students in the classroom — though she has denied it or alleged the comments were out of context — and of actions including inviting white nationalist Jared Taylor to speak to her class, most recently in November. Former Penn law school dean Ted Ruger said in a 12-page report initiating the sanctions process against Wax that her initial invitation to Taylor “cross[ed] the line of what is acceptable in a university environment where principles of nondiscrimination apply.”

Her comments have been pervasive and consistent, those critics argue, negatively impacting her students and colleagues.

“We know that professor Wax’s conduct and speech — not just speech but also conduct — has been ongoing for years,” said Apratim Vidyarthi, 30, a 2022 Penn law graduate who was part of a group that presented a petition to Penn with about 2,500 signatures, asking the university to launch an investigation into Wax. “There is a strong record of evidence of her saying discriminatory things toward minority students. There is that higher level of evidence that indicates that she is unfit to teach law students.”

If the academic responsibility committee, chaired by Raina Merchant, professor of emergency medicine, rules that procedures were not followed in Wax’s case, then the matter would be remanded to the hearing board for further review, according to procedures outlined in the Senate handbook.

» READ MORE: Amy Wax invites white nationalist to Penn Carey Law for a second time

And in that case, once the board renders new recommendations, under faculty senate rules they could land on the desk of interim president J. Larry Jameson, who took over following Magill’s resignation days after her congressional testimony on the handling of antisemitism drew criticism.

Penn declined to comment.

Neither Wax’s lawyer nor Wax responded immediately to requests for comment.

Wax through her lawyer had sought a postponement of the proceedings in 2022, citing her treatment for cancer. In a filing, her lawyer contended at the time that she had been treated unfairly and that the charges against her presented a “one-sided and incomplete” picture.

Among his arguments, he wrote that it was proper for Wax to invite Taylor to the seminar on conservative and legal thought, which is supposed to educate students on “conservative and right-of-center positions.”

Proceedings against Wax, 71, a professor at Penn for more than two decades, began in January 2022 when Ruger invoked the faculty review process, asserting that Wax’s “racist speech” was escalating, that multiple complaints about her promotion of white supremacy had been lodged, and that it had a cumulative effect on the law school community.

“The complaints assert that it is impossible for students to take classes from her without a reasonable belief that they are being treated with discriminatory animus,” Ruger said at the time.

The dean also asserted that in some cases, Wax “exploited her faculty access to confidential information about students in ostensible support of her inaccurate statements.”

Up until then, Penn had condemned Wax’s statements, and in 2018, removed her from teaching mandatory courses but had cited academic freedom in declining to fire her.

Some have continued to defend Wax’s right to free speech, including the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Alex Morey, FIRE’s director of campus rights advocacy, said Friday that it has told Penn for years to apply its free speech policies consistently.

“Being consistent on free expression, including refusing to take political stances, protects schools from getting in a situation like Penn now finds itself,” Morey said. “Were they consistent all along, folks exerting pressure on the school would know that pressure won’t work.”

Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn professor of the history of education who has ardently defended free speech, said Penn needs to be more consistent about protecting free speech.

“I don’t see a world in which it should be OK to call for destruction of the Jewish state, but not OK to say we should take more immigrants from Europe,” he said.

While he thinks much of Wax’s speech in the public sphere should be protected, comments she allegedly made to students would rise to the level of sanctions, he said.

“I don’t think she should be fired for that, but there should be accountability for it,” said Zimmerman, who is on the committee currently deciding whether proper procedures were followed.

Wax, an Ivy League-educated lawyer and neurologist, had a prestigious career at one time, both before and at Penn.

A Troy, N.Y., native, she got her bachelor’s degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale, graduating summa cum laude. She then studied philosophy, physiology, and psychology at Oxford. She graduated from Harvard Medical School, trained as a neurologist, and later got her law degree from Columbia, according to her curriculum vitae listed on Penn Law’s website.

She started her academic career at the University of Virginia and came to Penn in 2001. At least one of her speeches in her early Penn days contained similar sentiments that landed her in the crosshairs in recent years.

During an appearance at Duke University in 2005, she argued that while problems plaguing the minority community are an outgrowth of slavery and “gross oppression,” it’s really up to the Black community to fix them.

“The persistence of racial disadvantage doesn’t mean that society is not doing enough,” she said. “We cannot take the failure to close gaps between minorities and the majority population as dispositive evidence that the government needs to do more. Right now, I think what we need is not more programs but a kind of conversion experience, almost a sea change in the outlook within the minority community of what needs to be done and how to move forward.”

When someone in the audience asserted that ongoing problems like hunger inhibit children’s ability to learn, she shot back: “The biggest problem in the Black inner city community now is obesity, not starvation ... The reason they’re not learning is not because they’re hungry.” (In 2005, among Black residents in Philadelphia, the poverty rate was 32%, compared with only 12% for white residents.)

The same year she gave that talk, she received Penn law school’s A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course. Two years later, in 2007, she was awarded her named chair after Robert Mundheim, a former Penn law school dean. And in 2015, she received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Just two years later in 2017, criticism ensued after Wax coauthored an op-ed in which she said, “All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” Then she said during an interview that she didn’t think she’d ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class at Penn Law and “rarely, rarely in the top half,” a claim that Ruger later disputed.

In 2019, she found herself under fire again after commenting during a conference about immigration.

Then in 2021, during a podcast with Brown University economist Glenn Loury, she said immigration policies should be geared toward “cultural compatibility” and called “the influx of Asian elites ... problematic.” She later wrote on Loury’s site that “as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”

Graphics editor John Duchneskie contributed to this article.