Brace yourselves: Amy Wax is back on the show. She may enrage you. She may invigorate you. But she does not disappoint. Amy is certainly one of the most controversial academics in the country today. If you don’t know why, you will after listening to this conversation. And she’s paying a price for her views. The University of Pennsylvania, where she is a full professor of law and was, until recently, the occupant of a named chair, has slapped her with a set of heavy sanctions for statements she’s alleged to have made before her students. Amy argues that she’s being punished simply for engaging in the kind of free inquiry universities are supposed to protect.
Some of Amy’s arguments here will be familiar to those who know her views: her praise of “bourgeoise values,” her critiques of Asian immigration, her claim that the US should actively work to maintain its “Anglo-Protestant” majority, and her belief in nationalism. But all of these topics emerge under the rubric of a single question: Why does Amy have to seek venues outside of her university to talk about these issues? Penn says it’s punishing Amy due to her “conduct” rather than her ideas. But this is merely a cover story meant to obscure what seems to me the real issue, which is that many of Amy’s views challenge the way universities go about their business. Penn can’t have a professor openly suggesting that black students on its campus may not be top performers, even though many of them were surely admitted with test scores that predict they won’t be.
That’s a hard thing to hear if you’re a black student at Penn Law. I can imagine how it would feel. But it’s also an empirical matter. We could look at the students’ grades and exam results and determine whether Amy is right or wrong. The fact that Penn hasn’t done so—or that it hasn’t admitted publicly that it’s done so—should tell us all we need to know about why Amy Wax is being punished.
1:41 Penn’s sanctions against Amy
7:47 What’s at stake in the charges against Amy?
14:03 The trouble with “hate speech”
17:48 Should we abolish the nation-state?
21:38 The debates that can’t happen in the university
26:44 Ethnonationalism and group differences
33:11 Amy’s defense of maintaining an “Anglo-Protestant” American majority
42:32 Amy’s concerns about Asian migration
47:52 Are immigrants bringing lax attitudes toward property rights with them?
52:52 Glenn: Immigrants impart dynamism to a culture that’s always been in flux
1:01:13 Glenn and Amy talk about porn
1:07:51 The absence of virtue in political discourse
1:13:05 Amy’s next steps
Recorded October 12, 2024
Links and Readings
Amy’s Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed, “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture”
Glenn and Amy’s 2017 conversation, “The Downside to Social Uplift”
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message
William Vogelei’s Claremont Review of Books review of Robert Kagan’s Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again
Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
Daniel Di Martino’s recent appearance on The Glenn Show
Irving Kristol’s 1971 essay, “Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship”
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