Tag: Amy

  • Amy Wax’s Case Against Penn Dismissed

    Amy Wax’s Case Against Penn Dismissed

    Amy Wax was suspended and had her pay cut for the 2025–26 academic year after repeatedly making disparaging remarks.

    Jumping Rocks/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

    A Pennsylvania district judge dismissed a lawsuit Thursday against the University of Pennsylvania filed by Amy Wax, a tenured law professor who was suspended for the 2025–26 academic year on half pay as part of a punishment for years of flagrantly racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic remarks. 

    University of Pennsylvania

    In the suit filed in January, Wax claimed that the university discriminated against her by punishing her—a white Jewish woman—for speech about Black students but not punishing pro-Palestinian faculty members for speech that allegedly endorsed violence against Jews.

    “As much as Wax would like otherwise, this case is not a First Amendment case. It is a discrimination case brought under federal antidiscrimination laws,” senior U.S. district judge Timothy Savage wrote in a 16-page opinion. “We conclude Wax has failed to allege facts that show that her race was a factor in the disciplinary process and there is no cause of action under federal anti-discrimination statutes based on the content of her speech.”

    Savage also refuted Wax’s argument that the court should view “her comments disparaging Black students as a statement on behalf of a protected class.”

    “Nothing in the disciplinary process or her comments leads to the conclusion that she was penalized for associating with a protected class. Her comments were not advocacy for protected classes,” he wrote. “They were negative and directed at protected classes. Criticizing minorities does not equate to advocacy for them or for white people. Her claim that criticism of minorities was a form of advocating for them is implausible.”

    Wax was sanctioned in September 2024 after a years-long disciplinary battle over a laundry list of offensive statements she made during her tenure at the law school, including that “gay couples are not fit to raise children,” “Mexican men are more likely to assault women” and that it is “rational to be afraid of Black men in elevators.” Wax has worked at the law school since 2001.

    In addition to a one-year suspension on half pay, the school eliminated her summer pay in perpetuity, publicly reprimanded her and took away her named chair. In 2018, she was removed from teaching required courses after commenting on the “academic performance and grade distributions of the Black students in her required first-year courses,” according to former dean of the law school Theodore W. Ruger.

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  • Reading as a Listener | A Conversation with Amy Lombardi

    Reading as a Listener | A Conversation with Amy Lombardi

    “We need to learn to listen and read and interpret messages more thoughtfully,” Amy Lombardi told me. A doctoral student at the University of California at Davis, Lombardi says such skills are “undervalued and need to be taught more.” In our conversation recorded below, we talk about Lombardi’s recent article “More Is More: Explicit Intertextuality in University Writing Placement Exam Essays.” This study is an admittedly hyper-specific examination—looking at a corpus of exam essays written by incoming college students to see how they cite sources, including the phrasing (how many times do they say “says” vs. “believes” vs. “opposed”?) and punctuation (does all the mention of the sources get crammed into parentheses or are the sources actually named and discussed in the writing?). But in this very specific focus, this is still a study with bearing on a much broader topic: “receptive skills.” The phrases and punctuation that students use (or do not use) to cite sources are “the techniques they’re using to signal to the reader overtly that they’re bringing in information from other sources.” Looking at how students cite is thus a perfect site for examining larger skills such as “reading as a listener” and “listening to the text.” Isn’t writing often referred to as a conversation? Well, Lombardi notes, “these [details of citation] to me are the elements of that conversation.”

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