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UPenn law professor punished for speaking out against the Left
[FrontPageMagazine] Terrible headline in the linked article.Orwell wrote, in a time of universal deceit, speaking the truth becomes a revolutionary act. Until last week, I'd never heard of Amy Wax. She is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who landed in hot water after she co-authored a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed last August 9 with Larry Alexander, who teaches law at the University of San Diego. Under the headline “Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture,” Wax and Alexander began their piece by listing some of the sociocultural pathologies currently plaguing America – low job skills, widespread opioid abuse, inner-city gang violence, one-parent homes, and high-school and college students who lack basic skills. They went on to attribute these problems to “the breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture.” They recalled the precepts by which Americans lived in the mid twentieth century: get married before you have kids; try to avoid divorce; get educated; work hard; be patriotic, neighborly, charitable, respectful, and law-abiding. Yes, they admitted, mid-century America was hardly perfect. There was racism; there were rebels who broke the rules. But the rules themselves were good. They resulted in “productivity, educational gains and social coherence.” Now they're gone, replaced in many subcultures by “antisocial habits,” “rap culture,” “anti-assimilation ideas,” an obsession with group identity, and other destructive forces that do a terrible job of preparing young people for responsible adult lives. Every word of that op-ed was sheer common sense. (As NYU professor Jonathan Haidt observed, Wax's concerns about the black subculture were expressed in the 1960 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who at the time “was roundly condemned as a racist” but whose analysis is now echoed by countless sociologists.) Yet the op-ed was widely seen as scurrilous. The very next day, the Daily Pennsylvanian ran an interview with Wax in which she declared that “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms” were “superior” to others. “I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'” she said. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” She underscored that Western norms “aren’t just for white people” but “can help minorities get ahead.” Again, pure fact. But her Penn Law colleagues were outraged. Five of them, writing on August 20, accused Wax of waxing nostalgic for bigotry and exclusion. Ten days later, in an open letter, thirty-three Penn Law profs condemned Wax for affirming the superiority of Western culture – although the letter presented only assertions, no arguments. (One of the signatories told Wax to her face that her words of praise for the West were “code for Nazism.”) There were demands for Wax's firing, or at least her removal from academic committees. But she survived. More at the link Posted by: badanov 2018-11-08 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=527173 |