Pennsylvania School of Law professor pokes the beehive
Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law has poked a stick into a beehive. Tenure is liberating that way. In an op-ed for Philly.com, she argued, with Larry Alexander, a law professor at the University of San Diego, that the decline of “bourgeois values” since the 1950s has contributed to a host of social ills. Male labor-force participation rates are down to Depression-era levels. Opioid abuse is epidemic. Half of all children are born to single mothers, and many college students lack basic skills.
This is right out of the Charen hymnbook. Behavioral standards that were nearly universal in the 1950s, they contend — such as stigmatizing idleness, getting married before having children and remaining married afterward, “going the extra mile” for employers or clients, eschewing substance abuse and crime, and upholding an ethic of self-control and delayed gratification — reigned from the 1940s to the 1960s, and contributed to economic growth, social cohesion and educational gains.
The thrust of the essay was right about the importance of bourgeois values. The response of some segments of the University of Pennsylvania community to Wax and Alexander illustrates the powerful undertow of illiberalism in academia. Wax and Alexander expressed mainstream views that you will find at the center-left Brookings Institution and the center-right American Enterprise Institute, as well as at leading universities. It contained not a particle of racism. No matter. Wax’s exploration of behavioral norms was damned as white supremacy.
Part of what provoked the firestorm was Wax’s assertion that “not all cultures are created equal.” This is a red flag for sociology and anthropology types. But their dudgeon is preposterous. They are, in fact, in thundering agreement. The conviction that not all cultures are equal is the heart of their worldview. They obviously believe that Alabama’s culture, circa 1952, was inferior to that of Philadelphia in 2017. If pushed, they might even concede that Afghanistan’s cultural practices vis-avis women and minorities are inferior (that word!) to Belgium’s — though that would be more challenging for them.
Some of Wax’s colleagues have engaged with her ideas without dialing the meter to 11. But 33 members of the law faculty published a letter anathematizing her. While acknowledging the value of academic freedom, they followed their denunciation with a gaudy non sequitur:
“We believe the ideal of equal opportunity to succeed in education is best achieved by a combination of academic freedom, open debate and a commitment by all participants to respect one another without bias or stereotype. To our students, we say the following: If your experience at Penn Law falls substantially short of this ideal, something has gone wrong, and we want to know about it.”
Good Lord, nothing that Wax said remotely called into question any of those principles. In fact, it was the hysterical response, not the article, that betrayed the values of open debate. As for bias and stereotypes, if the left cannot get past its blinkered view that all discussions of character and behavior are code for racism, it will do great harm to all, but most especially to minorities and the poor. If everything is racist, then nothing is.