In Sanctioning Amy Wax, Penn Targets Truth
Religious wars between Catholics and Protestants devastated 17th century Europe. An estimated one-third of the German population perished in the Thirty Years War, in part because adherents of each faith could not tolerate the other’s supposed heresy.
In today’s Western universities a similar, if less bloody, war has been unfolding between two deeply held and incompatible faiths. One faith––that objective reality, or truth, exists––is losing ground to the ascendant faith that believes systemic forces unjustly order society by identities like race, sex, and gender.
The Truth Faith holds that, although truth itself can never be known with certainty, there is a sacred process of truth-seeking. Specifically, truth-seekers believe that anything can be questioned, and that truth does not differ among individuals or groups. Knowledge production in the Truth Faith is messy, decentralized, and dynamic.
Perhaps the best example of the Truth Faith is the adversarial court system, where dueling sides engage in argument and cross-examination to reconstruct the closest approximation of truth.
By contrast, the Social Justice Faith orients believers toward engineering equitable outcomes based on groups. Believers guard against truth-seeking challenges by declaring their beliefs “beyond debate” or accessible only to those with certain “lived experiences” or mystical “ways of knowing.” Social justice institutions are definitive, centralized, and nearly impervious to opposing views.
The prestige of modern universities in the West can largely be attributed to scientific innovation rooted in truth. However, New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has observed a recent shift away from truth and toward social justice. The shift is most visible in the expansion of identity-based policies in student admissions and faculty hiring, where more qualified candidates are regularly getting passed over solely due to the color of their skin.
Recently, the Social Justice Faith landed a major blow against truth in the form of sanctions against Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. In a statement the university claimed that she has engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct” and has a “history of making sweeping and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” The university then outlined a series of punishments for Wax, including a one-year suspension, reduced pay, and a loss of her named chair.
One might assume that Wax cruelly discriminated against minority students. But examples detailed in a Faculty Senate report reveal no such thing. For instance, as documented in an appendix with the unintentionally hilarious title “Examples of inequitably targeted disrespect,” Wax opined that black people are not primarily disadvantaged by overt racism but rather by behavioral patterns of “educational under-achievement, high crime rates and family breakdown.” Penn seems far less interested in making any attempt to refute her statements than in expressing condescending concern that minorities are too fragile to hear them.
The distinguished black economist Glenn Loury––who suffered no ill effects from Wax’s words––remarked that he found the accusations against Wax “absolutely shocking” because she made either “demonstrable statements of fact or legitimate statements of opinion, some of which I’ve made myself.”
During an appearance on Loury’s podcast, Wax noted that she didn’t think she’d “ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half” at Penn Law because they’d been admitted under a double standard. Similarly, over the span of 20 years she rarely observed black students ranking in the top half of her large first year civil procedures class. The Dean of Penn’s Carey Law School at the time, Ted Ruger, complained that Wax’s statements were false, while incorrectly claiming––in the same email, no less––not to have the data to prove it.
Having one’s intellectual inadequacy so exposed would normally be cause for embarrassment. But the new Social Justice Faith inures functionaries against experiencing that very appropriate feeling. To them, systemic forces are the only allowable explanation for racial disparities; bold truth-seekers like Wax are heretics to be purged from polite society. A warm cocoon of conformity shields them from feedback and makes course correction difficult. This explains how university administrators can publicly behave foolishly and yet confidently preside over their campus fiefdoms, all the while appearing blissfully ignorant of incredulous onlookers.
Wax’s case shows that brave truth-seekers can penetrate the opposing ideological fortress. Like her dissident contemporaries Elizabeth Weiss and Frances Widdowson, Wax has steadfastly refused quiet settlements in favor of exposing administrative misdeeds. And the post-October 7 period has only accentuated Penn’s hypocrisy in sanctioning Wax’s reasoned opinion while rampant, base anti-Semitism on Penn’s campus gets a pass.
Although simmering campus violence is not likely to reach Reformation levels, social justice-led persecutions of non-believers can do nothing but hasten us along that dark trajectory. Trust in universities is falling as they sacrifice truth in pursuit of social justice. But courageous people like Amy Wax offer hope that, if only out of self-preservation, our universities will return to the one true faith.
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