Racist Educators Protected By Tenure, Progressive Educators Face Dangers
Amy Wax, a right wing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has been an outspoken racist, anti-immigration and xenophobe for many years but she remains on the university staff.
Wax is in a special class of educators who have been granted lifetime tenure, a status which is gives nearly iron clad protections, except in certain politically-charged situations. University presidents and students, however, have been unprotected as they become the epicenter of largely, left wing protests against the Israeli war in Gaza.
An emerging battleground is raging over free speech vis a vis racist commentary but professors like Wax are still protected even if they take positions that are generally loathed on such topics as holocaust denial, racism, anti-immigration and xenophobia.
Tenured instructors have remained generally immune to punishments despite their most outrageous comments and most of the time, the controversial educators have been conservative with right wing leanings.
Tenured professors can typically be fired only under extreme circumstances, such as professional misconduct or a financial emergency. Advocates for tenure say it is a crucial component of academic freedom, taking a position similar to the ACLU’s 1977 defense of a group of Nazis who were barred from demonstrating in Skokie, Ill. Free speech was the issue then, academic freedom is the issue now.
Wax, 71, has been a tenured professor of social welfare law and labor and family economics law at the University of Pennsylvania since 1991. She has made many explosively racist and anti-immigrant comments and said at a recent forum, “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”
For her far right comments she has received a lukewarm punishment by the university. The university decided that Wax will no longer be allowed to teach required, first-year classes. Last week, the penalties were boosted to a one-year suspension, removal from her endowed position and her summer pay was ended. But she remains a professor at the university.
Earlier in the year, protests against the war in Gaza put intense pressure on U.S. college leaders as students railed against university decisions to invite police in to arrest protesters. Republicans in Congress demanded university leaders do more to halt anti-Semitism and to clamp down on protests.
Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania was the first of three Ivy League presidents to resign following contentious appearances before Congress, ahead of Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Columbia’s Minouche Shafik. Other administrators have endured calls to resign from members of Congress and segments of their campus communities.
Wax is the latest and most unrepentant professor with a history of having far right views. Her position against immigration could be a template for the positions expressed by trump and his vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio. Both have supported mass deportation of immigrants. Wax believes that non-white immigrants are biologically flawed and she explicitly denies that immigrants can easily acclimate to American values. She referred to the “progressive delusion of multiculturalism and the accompanying worship of diversity.”
Wax’s latest relatively mild punishments stem from comments she made at a 2019 meeting of conservative intellectuals and media in Washington, D.C., to discuss “national conservatism.”
“National Conservatism” is a movement of journalists, scholars, students and public figures, including Vance. The group has clearly white supremacist leanings as it believes that the past and future of conservatism are to revive “the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.” Translate that into white nationalism.
National conservatism is a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a far right, public affairs institute “dedicated to developing a revitalized conservatism for the age of nationalism.” One of the conference’s organizers was Yoram Hazony, a right wing Israeli conservative intellectual and a close associate of Vance.
Wax spoke on a panel on immigration and argued for a national policy that would favor immigrants from Western countries over non-Western ones. Wax denies the values of multicultural, pluralistic America. She said her position is not racist because her view is “grounded firmly in cultural concerns — doesn’t rely on race at all.”
Wax’s 2019 address was based on paper she wrote in 2018 for the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy. It was titled, “Debating Immigration Restriction: The Case for Low and Slow.” Wax said America’s debate over immigration has been warped in a pro-immigration direction by “left-leaning elites,” whose “reactive, highly emotional, and one-sided” approach to the issue has made a serious debate over policy possible only on the right wing.
“My focus will be on what I term the cultural case for restriction,” Wax told the conference. “My position here [italics added] is that conservatives need a realistic approach to immigration that best serves and preserves our country’s status and identity as a relatively high-functioning, at least for now, Western and First World nation.” Translated, she speaks of white nationalism.
She dismissed the idea that non-Western immigrants can be taught to accept “western” values like capitalism and the rule of law. According to Wax, “Third World countries are chronically poor, a result of the poor cultural habits of the people who live there.” If they are allowed into the United States, Wax said, the nation will start to develop the dysfunction of “Third World” economies.
Wax said the nation is “better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically — at least in fact, if not formally — by people from the First World, from the West, than by people from countries that have failed to advance.” To repeat, translated, she speaks of white supremacy.
Wax said that “immigration from non-Western countries should thus be kept at a minimum so as not to compromise the dominance of groups that are closer to our cultural heritage and more effective at transmitting it.”
Wax repeated a phrase common on the alt-right, known as the “magic dirt” theory. The theory mocks liberal beliefs that immigrants will leave their native country and quickly assimilate and adopt western values. Wax said that biological realities will make assimilation unlikely if not impossible.
Among Wax’s other offensive comments:
- “Our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites,” “Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men,” African Americans and people from non-Western countries should feel shame about the “outsized achievements and contributions” of Western people and “There are not too many Black people in prison but too few.”
· “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.”
· She told a Black student “that she had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action.’”
· She said in class that Mexican men are more likely to assault women, using a stereotype similar to the biased trope that “Germans are punctual.”
· She told a student “invited to her home, that ‘Hispanic people don’t seem to mind…liv[ing] somewhere where people are loud.’”
· She said in class “that people of color needed to stop acting entitled to remedies, to stop getting pregnant, to get better jobs, and to be more focused on reciprocity.”
· She commented after a series of students with foreign-sounding names introduced themselves in class “that one student was ‘finally, an American’,” adding, “‘it’s a good thing, trust me.’”
· In 2021, Wax wrote that “As long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”
· In an April 8, 2022, interview with former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Wax criticized Indian immigrants who come to the United States and then express disapproval of the country. She said that “at some level, India is a shithole” a phrase used by then-president trump in 2018 when he also referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” during a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House.
· In the same program with Carlson, Wax said that “blacks” and other “non-Western” groups harbor “resentment, shame, and envy” against Western people for their “outsized achievements and contributions.”
· She told The Daily Pennsylvanian that “everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans” because of their “superior” mores.
· During a January 2022 interview, Wax said “there were some very smart Jews” among her past students, but “Ashkenazi Jews are ‘diluting [their] brand like crazy because [they are] intermarrying.’”
She invited the avowed white supremacist Jared Taylor to one of her seminars. Typical of Taylor were his comments, “We have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of roadside corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on our shores.”
Wax is not the only academic who has held provocative views or took unethical or even illegal actions and yet retained tenure.
Arthur Butz
Butz, 91, is a tenured Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. Two years after he was granted tenure in the university engineering school, Butz penned a book, “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” in which he claimed that Nazi Germany did not murder millions of Jews during World War II and that the extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazis was “legend.”
After publication of his book, which was generally dismissed as Nazi propaganda, the university said that tenure and academic freedom protected Butz from dismissal because he kept his denialism separate from his work as an instructor. In response to widespread protest over his denials of the Holocaust, the university hosted symposia and courses on the Holocaust, created an endowed professorship on the subject, and funded a political science fellowship dedicated to study of the Holocaust.
In 2017, Amazon.com removed the book along with other Holocaust-denying books from its U.S. and U.K. sites. From 1980 to 2001, Butz was on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Review, a publication of the Institute for Historical Review, a notorious, Holocaust-denying organization. Butz was a featured speaker at the Nation of Islam convention in Chicago in February 1985, where he presented his Holocaust denial thesis.
According to Butz:
- “The Jews of Europe were not exterminated and there was no German attempt to exterminate them…. The ‘gas chambers’ were wartime propaganda fantasies.”
- “The evidence, thus, suggests that the extermination legend owes its birth to obscure Polish Jewish propagandists, but the nurturing of the legend to the status of an international and historical hoax was the achievement of Zionist circles centered primarily in the West, particularly in and around New York.”
- He commented on the title of his book, “Let me assure you that the choice of ‘hoax’ [as the title of the book] was calculated, and that today I am even more convinced that it was a felicitous choice, for the reason that the thing really is trivial. The term ‘hoax’ suggests something cheap and crude, and that is precisely what I wish to suggest.”
Cornel West
West, a left wing African American professor at Harvard University, was an independent candidate for president in 2024. In an unusual situation, in 2021, West was denied tenure by Harvard. He left the university over the dispute and accepted a tenured post at Union Theological Seminary, where he previously taught.
West implied that Harvard’s decision was retaliation for his critical stance on Israel and particularly when he tweeted, “Is Harvard a place for a free Black man like myself whose Christian faith & witness put equal value on Palestinian & Jewish babies — like all babies — & reject all occupations as immoral?”
Another controversial professor is John Comaroff, a Harvard professor of African and African American Studies and anthropology. Comaroff was accused of sexual misconduct and in August 2020, he was placed on paid administrative leave. In 2022, the penalty was changed to unpaid leave. He resumed teaching in September 2022 and remains at Harvard. After a lawsuit was filed by several students, Comaroff characterized Harvard’s investigation as a “kangaroo court process.”
In 2018, a Georgetown University professor was punished for her anti-Republican comments during the Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court nomination hearings. The professor, Carol Christine Fair, tweeted that Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were “entitled white men justifying a serial rapists’ arrogated entitlement” and that they “deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps.” Kavanaugh had been accused but never charged with sexual improprieties years before the Supreme Court hearings. Fair is not teaching at Georgetown anymore but she remains on the staff and travels internationally for university research.
Republicans have been targeting tenure around the country, often taking aim at professors with supposedly liberal, “woke” views. In the past two years, universities or state Legislatures in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia and other states have enacted or proposed laws and policies that would limit academic freedom.
In Texas, a professor was suspended this year for criticizing the lieutenant governor in a lecture.
Florida banned diversity programs and limited tenure. Far right activist, Christopher Rufo, championed the demise of “critical race theory” as a major concern for the GOP. The theory posits that racism has infiltrated all areas of American life. Largely through Rufo’s lobbying, Florida has banned instruction of critical race theory and subjects involving the LGBTQ community in public schools.
Rufo has advocated that Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis should consolidate and restructure the New College academic departments, require board approval for any new faculty hiring or tenure decisions and conduct a mandatory board review of all course offerings and require board approval for existing and future courses.
DeSantis is proposing legislation that would give university Boards of Trustees and presidents “the power to call a post-tenure review at any time.” The plans are seen as a serious threat to the ability of professors to teach without fear of being consolidated and restructured out of a job.
DeSantis’s crusade to transform the state’s universities into right-wing models for higher education included the 2023 takeover and transformation of the New College of Sarasota, Fla. In April 2023, The New College of Florida trustees, once a liberal school and now dominated by conservatives appointed by DeSantis, voted to deny tenure to five professors.
The school’s interim president, DeSantis ally and former state House Speaker Richard Corcoran, said tenure was denied because of “a renewed focus on ensuring the college is moving towards a more traditional liberal arts institution.”
The college has only 659 students but has become an outsized focus of a campaign by DeSantis to rid higher education in the state of what the governor called left-leaning “woke” indoctrination on campuses.
Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder and history is written by the victors, inappropriate statements are judged by those in political power. A case in point was a paper in support of colonialism by Bruce D. Gilley, a presidential scholar in residence at New College of Florida.
Gilley’s research centers on comparative and international politics, with specific interests in political legitimacy and state-building, democracy and democratic transitions, climate change policy, and the Third World. His recent paper on the positives of colonialization is a perspective demonized in the progressive world and in the many nations that were formerly under the thumb of western nations.
Colonialism is defined as the exploitation of people and of resources by a foreign group. Colonizers seize political power and hold conquered societies and their people to be inferior to their conquerors in legal, administrative, social, cultural, or biological terms.
The high point for colonialism came at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Those under colonial domination included about 560 million people, of whom 70 percent lived in British possessions, 10 percent in French possessions, 9 percent in Dutch possessions, 4 percent in Japanese possessions, 2 percent in German possessions, 2 percent in American possessions, 3 percent in Portuguese possessions, 1 percent in Belgian possessions and 0.5 percent in Italian possessions.
The impacts of colonization include the spread of virulent diseases, unequal social relations, detribalization, exploitation and enslavement. Colonial conquest also has brought medical advances, the creation of new institutions, abolitionism, improved infrastructure and technological progress.
Colonial practices spur the spread of conquerors’ languages, literature and cultural institutions, while jeopardizing or destroying those of Indigenous peoples. Colonialism has been justified for offering a civilizing mission to cultivate land and life, based on beliefs of entitlement and superiority, often rooted in the belief of a Christian mission. Decolonization, which started in the 18th century, gradually led to the independence of colonies in waves, with a particular large wave of decolonizations happening in the aftermath of World War II between 1945 and 1975.
But Gilley advocates a resurgence of colonialism.
“For the last hundred years, Western colonialism has had a bad name,” Gilley wrote. “Colonialism has virtually disappeared from international affairs, and there is no easier way to discredit a political idea or opponent than to raise the cry of ‘colonialism.’ It is high time to reevaluate this pejorative meaning. The notion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thing needs to be rethought in light of the grave human toll of a century of anti-colonial regimes and policies.”
He wrote that some regions of the world should be recolonized.
“Western countries should be encouraged to hold power in specific governance areas (public finances, say, or criminal justice) in order to jump-start enduring reforms in weak states,” he wrote. “Rather than speak in euphemisms about ‘shared sovereignty’ or ‘neo-trusteeship,’ such actions should be called ‘colonialism’ because it would embrace rather than evade the historical record.”
Gilley also claimed that colonialism was a major factor in abolishing the slave trade in Africa and that there were “significant social, economic, and political gains” under colonialism.