Amy Wax barred from teaching mandatory first-year class at Penn law

[Valin]

Power Line

Paul Mirengoff

March 14, 2018

Readers may recall how Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, incurred the wrath of the left, including black law students at Penn, by saying that which must not be said — the social practices at the heart of middle class America from the late 1940’s through the 1960’s are a recipe for success, personal and societal, and their rejection is a recipe for dysfunction and decline.

Wax and her co-author Larry Alexander found themselves under fire for “normalizing” white supremacy. For Wax’s critics on the left, that’s what pointing out the positive effects of stable families, obtaining a good education, working hard, and eschewing substance abuse and crime amounts to.

I don’t know whether Wax ever got out of hot water for her common sense statements, but if she did it wasn’t for long. The law school has just barred her from teaching a first year course required of first year students. It did because she commented on the the poor performance of African-American law students in her classroom.

 

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The fact that “black students,” i.e. more than one, have finished “in the top of the class” isn’t inconsistent with Wax’s statement that she hasn’t had a black student in the top quarter of her classes (or doesn’t recall having one). The claim that “black students are extremely successful both inside and outside the classroom. . .” is too vague to carry meaning.

The issue is how the performance of Penn Law’s black students stacks up against the performance of its other students. Despite being pressured by the anti-Wax petition, the administration apparently is unable to deny that it doesn’t stack up well.