For months, Penn has pushed to cut Amy Wax’s salary and strip her of University honors. But it can’t seem to stop the controversial University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor from bringing a white nationalist to campus.
According to a course syllabus obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian, Wax has again invited American Renaissance magazine editor Jared Taylor to deliver a guest lecture, this time at the Dec. 3 meeting of LAW 9560: “Conservative and Political Legal Thought.” The invitation would mark at least the third appearance by Taylor at Wax’s class in four years. His visit last fall sparked a protest outside Wax’s classroom and prompted a rare schoolwide email from Penn Carey Law Dean Sophia Lee addressing the “bounds of academic freedom.”
Yet Wax, in her class activities and public appearances, does not appear to be deterred by student demonstrations — nor Penn’s yearslong disciplinary proceedings against her, which led a Faculty Senate panel to conclude over a year ago that she had promoted a “hostile campus environment and a hostile learning atmosphere” meriting major sanctions.
As she plans to bring Taylor to campus again, Wax is also pressing her case against Penn in public, accusing the University of hypocrisy while expanding on the same viewpoints that prompted the faculty panel to recommend the rare step of suspending a tenured professor. Weeks before Taylor comes to campus, Wax is scheduled to speak at a conference in Tennessee alongside multiple people who have reportedly espoused white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and racist views.
The conference, which will be held from Nov. 15-17, is organized by Taylor’s publication, American Renaissance, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a promoter of eugenics and pseudoscience. In addition to Taylor, who has alleged that there is a genetic inferiority between white people and people of color, conference speakers will include Sam Dickson, a self-proclaimed “lifelong white advocate” and former Ku Klux Klan lawyer; Martin Sellner, a far-right activist who was a part of Austria’s neo-Nazi movement until 2011; and Richard Marksbury, a former Tulane University dean with reported ties to the pro-Confederate monument movement.
The DP was unable to reach any of the scheduled conference speakers by the time of publication.
Taylor’s scheduled return to Wax’s seminar comes as Penn is yet to reach a formal resolution in its proceedings against Wax. The case has spanned four Penn presidencies, two Penn Carey Law deans, and years of community discontent — and according to Wax’s latest public comments, it is no closer to being closed.
While the faculty panel that reviewed Wax’s case recommended that the University impose major sanctions — including a one-year suspension at half pay, a public reprimand, and a loss of her named chair — it did not suggest Wax should be fired or stripped of tenure. Still, Wax appealed the faculty panel’s recommendation to the Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, the outcome of which is not clear.
In a panel appearance with the National Association of Scholars in New York on Aug. 23, Wax revealed some information about the status — and stagnancy — of the private proceedings. She implied that the sanctions against her were about to take effect in May — until, in what she described as a “Hail Mary pass,” she emailed Interim Penn President Larry Jameson directly, threatening to sue the University and cause further damage to Penn’s battered reputation. Jameson then agreed to meet with her, she said.
“He emailed me back — but not before the general counsel called my lawyer and said, ‘I will not permit the [interim] president to meet with Amy Wax unless she agrees to quit,’” Wax said on the NAS panel, according to a video of her remarks. “And my lawyer, to his credit, said, ‘Do you work for [Jameson], or does he work for you?‘”
A University spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the details of the meeting and whether Jameson supports sanctioning Wax. The professor said at the panel that she has continued to negotiate with Penn all summer over a disputed non-disparagement cause.
The faculty panel that held hearings in the case concluded that Wax’s controversial conduct and claims about race and gender have violated Penn’s behavioral standards, naming Wax’s invite of Taylor to her class as one such example.
While numerous proponents of academic freedom have defended Wax by stressing that professors have the right to invite speakers no matter how offensive their speech, the faculty panel said the case did not revolve around such rights but rather around “inequitably targeted disrespect” — citing past comments submitted under oath which denigrate Black people’s cognitive ability, refer to students as “benighted sheeples,” and allege that Mexican men are more likely to assault women.
“We regard this to be a case not of free speech, which is broadly protected by University policy as articulated in the Faculty Handbook, but rather of flagrant unprofessional conduct by a faculty member of the Penn Carey Law School,” the panel wrote in a report to then-Penn President Liz Magill on June 21, 2023.
Members of the University community are protected from “official reprisal” for hosting “controversial speakers and events,” according to Penn's interpretative guidelines for its open expression policy. The University's temporary open expression guidelines, announced in the aftermath of a two-week pro-Palestinian encampment last spring, call for “protecting the rights of the speaker” while allowing community members to protest speakers they disagree with — but not to use a “heckler’s veto” to stop speakers from sharing their views.
Representatives for Penn Carey Law, Wax, and Taylor did not respond to requests for comment by publication. The last time Wax was reached by the DP, outside her office on April 17, 2023, she declined to comment on the University’s disciplinary proceedings.
“Such initiatives send a very clear message: Don’t question the received wisdom, don’t say what you really think, or bad things will happen,” Wax said at the NAS panel. “Keep your head down, shut up, or you will be treated like Professor Wax.”
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