Penn Professor’s Fight for Free Speech Heads to Federal Court
17th January 2025
Amy Wax, the tenured law professor who was sanctioned for her controversial remarks about racial issues, sued the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday for breach of contract and race discrimination, putting a dispute over tenure and academic freedom that has dragged on for almost three years into the hands of a federal court. The complaint comes after Wax was suspended for a year at half-pay and stripped of her named chair, penalties the lawsuit says are “illegal multiple times over.”
“The imposition of academic discipline violates the University’s contractual promise to Professor Wax to abide by the principles of the First Amendment,” the lawsuit reads. And “the University’s Speech Policy, which is the basis of that discipline, unlawfully discriminates based on the race … of both speakers and targets of speech.”
The complaint advances a novel legal theory that could have major implications for universities as they brace for the incoming Trump administration. Wax argues that Penn engaged in race discrimination by punishing speech that offended racial minorities but not speech that offended Jews, citing a litany of cases in which the school declined to discipline professors who deployed anti-Semitic tropes and called for the destruction of Israel.