There may not be a single reader of this column who knows the name Amy Wax who has about as many degrees as a household thermometer. Currently Dr. Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University Of Pennsylvania Law School where she was honored with the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence. She earned a B.S degree from Yale College, an M.D. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. She is the author of “Race, Wrongs, & Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.”
Here are some comments taken from her speech at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. on December 12th, 2017. “Academic institutions should be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions and issues that affect our society and our way of life—something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.” And “Offense and upset go with the territory; they are part and parcel of an open society. We should be teaching our young people to get used to these things, but instead we are teaching them the opposite.”
In her speech that day, she dredged up a list of ‘behavioral norms’ that were generally accepted following WWII until the 1960’s. “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”
Professor Wax’s name popped into the limelight when she and Professor Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego Law School co-authored an op-ed that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on August 9th, 2017. Titled “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture”, the piece criticized the status of American society. Mentioned in the op-ed were too few trained workers for available jobs, workforce participation at depression-era levels, widespread opioid abuse, homicides in inner cities, nearly half of all childbirths born out of wedlock, college students lack basic skills and high school students rank well below the skills of students in many other countries.
The leader of ‘Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania’ is reported to have commented that if she isn’t fired within a week, he plans to make things on the campus very uncomfortable. An open letter published in the University’s newspaper, the ‘Daily Pennsylvanian’ signed by 33 fellow law department members criticized everything in the op-ed. The newspaper editors invited students to report any ‘stereotyping and bias’ perceived to assess her fitness to continue teaching. Several of her colleagues criticized the op-ed for praising the culture of the 1950’s.
In her defense, a Professor at NYU wrote on his website, “Every open letter you sign to condemn a colleague for his or her words brings us closer to a world in which academic disagreements are resolved by social force and political power, not by argumentation and persuasion.”
About half of all childbirths are to single mothers. The cost of some college educations has migrated to be the responsibility of taxpayers for high school graduates whether or not these graduates should be in trade school, the military or in jobs to support families. Many drop-outs from high school and college join gangs, enter the drug trade and some of our daughters get pregnant by accident or design. More than 60 million abortions have been performed since 1973 (Roe v. Wade) of which 30% were by Planned Parenthood and another 30% were performed on Black women. Divorce strikes 39.8% of marriages, up from a rate of 25% in 1951.
For eight years we were led down the dead end path toward ideological autocracy away from the Constitutional Republic our forefathers envisioned and created where accountability is reality, corruption is punished and liberty, justice and freedom are the gold standard. Dr. Amy Wax is the epitome of one who rises above political correctness and the spurious wisdom of warped assumptions that gush from the lips of liberal, progressive Democrats who bask in the illusion of socialism where shared suffering is the common numerator.