Under pressure from students and politicians, University of Pennsylvania Law School is initiating sanctions against Professor Amy Wax over her latest controversial remarks about race–this time, suggesting that Asian-American immigration is bad for America and that we need less of it.
This move to retaliate against a professor’s protected speech has rightly elicited criticism and concern. A letter to Penn President Amy Gutmann from the Academic Freedom Alliance, signed by Princeton constitutional scholar Keith Whittington, states that “[p]rinciples of free speech include the right of professors to speak in public on matters of public concern without the threat of sanctions by their university employer” and that the university must “publicly reaffirm the free speech rights of the members of its faculty.” As Cato adjunct scholar and George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin points out at the Volokh Conspiracy blog, while Penn is a private university and the First Amendment doesn’t apply, moves by university administrators to punish a professor’s speech outside the classroom clearly endanger academic freedom.
But it’s possible to strongly defend a person’s right to express opinions without being punished while condemning the opinions as repugnant, and that, it seems to me, is the appropriate pro-liberty stance in this case. In fact, “freedom of speech should protect even repugnant views” is the essence of the pro-liberty position when it comes to speech.
Somin makes a strong argument that, from a constitutional perspective, Wax’s viewpoint amounts to endorsing “invidious discrimination” and is incompatible with liberty principles. I want to add some thoughts on the moral and political dimensions of the controversy–particularly its relevancy to so-called “national conservatism,” a movement launched two years ago with the fairly explicit goal of providing Donald Trump-style nationalist populism with an intellectual foundation.
(Here, I should pause to say that I have known Wax slightly—mainly from conferences and other events—for over two decades and that our interaction has always been cordial. Fifteen years ago, I mentioned, quite positively, her remarks on affirmative action at a National Association of Scholars event in New York. The later drift of her opinions troubled me, but I never thought the time would come when I would feel compelled to condemn her rhetoric as pernicious.)
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