No Preliminary Injunctions Against Penn’s Sanctions on Prof. Amy Wax
From today’s decision by Judge Timothy Savage (E.D. Pa.) in Wax v. Univ. of Pa.:
After a lengthy disciplinary process, the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”) found that longtime law professor Amy Wax had engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct.” It imposed sanctions of a one-year suspension at half pay, loss of summer pay in perpetuity, loss of her named chair, and a public reprimand.
Wax brought this action asserting breach of contract (failure to adhere to the disciplinary process prescribed in the Faculty Handbook); racial discrimination under Title VI, Title VII, and 42 U.S.C. § 1981; and false light invasion of privacy. She seeks a preliminary injunction enjoining Penn from implementing the sanctions….
Wax joined the faculty of Penn Carey Law School as a tenured professor on July 1, 2001. Five years later, she was named the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law. On March 2, 2022, Dean Theodore W. Ruger sent Wax a letter charging that she had “shown a callous and flagrant disregard for [the] University community” and inviting an informal resolution. The letter cited the following instances of Wax’s conduct:
- When asked by a Black student if she agreed with the claim that Black people are inherently inferior to white people, Wax responded: “You can have two plants that grow under the same conditions, and one will just grow higher than the other.”
- Wax asserted on a panel that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”
- Wax told the New Yorker that “women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men” and “less intellectual than men.”
- Wax publicly described Black people as having “different average IQs” than people of other races, such that “Blacks are not going to be evenly distributed throughout all occupations” and that this phenomenon is “not due to racism.”
- Wax asserted that “the United States is better off with fewer Asians” and that Asian people lack “thoughtful and audacious individualism.”
- Wax told a Black colleague that it is “rational to be afraid of Black men in elevators.”
- Wax, speak
Article from Reason.com
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