Amy Wax is academic freedom's canary in the coal mine

Yesterday, the University of Pennsylvania completed its years-long end run around academic freedom to punish law professor Amy Wax. FIRE’s working hard to ensure Penn’s dubious tactics won’t become the new playbook for private universities, which, unlike public universities, are not bound by the First Amendment.

Long under pressure to “do something” about the controversial Wax — who’s been widely criticized for her views on race and gender — Penn finally got its woman yesterday. 

After conducting a nearly two-year investigation of Wax, which extended more than a year since the last real hearing in her case, Penn announced the professor would indeed be sanctioned for “unprofessionalism.” She’ll keep her tenured faculty role and serve a one-year suspension at half-pay. She’ll also keep her benefits, an important fact given that Wax has been fighting cancer while battling Penn administrators.

Regardless of whether you care for Amy Wax’s opinions, you should care what happens to her. 

Penn is a private school that nonetheless makes First Amendment-like promises to respect its students’ and faculty members’ right to free expression. Whether on a contractual or moral basis, Penn should have kept those promises. Instead, it abandoned principle for the sake of expediency.

While it remains to be seen whether Wax will keep her promise to sue Penn if she’s punished, I told The New York Times yesterday that the university’s decision “should send a chill down the spine of every faculty member, not just at Penn but at every private institution around the country.”

Penn’s dubious procedural efforts — which stripped Wax  of many of the due process protections tenure affords — paid off. If that’s all it takes to sidestep tenure, the rights of even the most protected private college faculty are tenuous at best.

FIRE has long defended Wax, and we continue to do so for two reasons. First, because her comments are unquestionably protected by academic freedom. And second, because the same principles that protect her right to hold both her views and her job also protect faculty who represent a range of viewpoints around the country. 

In our hyper-polarized political moment, faculty increasingly find themselves called “unprofessional” for their views on Israel and Gaza. Or on race. Or gender. Or abortion, or immigration, or the police, or COVID-19, or politics more broadly. Often the only thing standing between the angry college administrator — or the disgruntled donor, or the social media mob, or the local legislator coming for that professor’s job — is the time-honored principle of academic freedom.

That’s why, regardless of whether you care for Amy Wax’s opinions, you should care what happens to her. If our colleges and universities are to achieve their missions as bastions of academic excellence, faculty like Wax must remain free to speak their minds.