Amy Wax

Tuesday

Amy L. Wax

Wokeism is stifling thought in America’s universities

The American education system needs drastic reform from bottom to top.  Our K-12 schools, both public and private, have come to be dominated by radical left-wing ideas. Schools not only indoctrinate students with a one-sided view of history and society, but they also increasingly fail in their core mission of imparting the basic skills needed to function in our advanced and complex society. Likewise, our universities, professional schools and graduate schools are in the grip of a far-left ideology that has compromised their traditional missions of truth-seeking, knowledge creation and the preservation and transmission of western culture and the advanced skills essential to its vitality and prosperity.

universities

Thursday

Paul du Quenoy

NYU sacks a professor because his class is too hard

Just before the start of the fall semester, New York University fired the distinguished professor in organic chemistry Maitland Jones Jr. NYU’s dean for Science Gregory Gabadadze informed Jones in a terse letter that his work “did not rise to the standards we require from our teaching faculty.” Jones is a legend in his field who literally wrote his subject’s 1,300-page textbook Organic Chemistry. He had been teaching at NYU on a renewable one-year contract since his retirement, in 2007, from a forty-three-year career at Princeton University. During his time at NYU, Jones won teaching awards. In 2017, he was named one of NYU’s “coolest” professors, a distinction he shared with only seven of his nearly 10,000 colleagues. Jones’s offense? His class was too hard.

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

The Ivy League scolds come for Amy Wax

I have always admired the tag corruptio optima pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. Take the Ivy League. These super-rich, super-prestigious institutions are so wealthy and so beguiling because, once upon a time, they represented and — more to the point — successfully transmitted to their students the prime civilizational values of our culture. We’re told, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the light we see from distant stars is very old and, in some cases, is light from stars that were long ago extinguished. It is same with the Ivy League and their near competitors. Today, they are utterly bankrupt — not financially, of course. No, in a good old greedy capitalist sense, they are filthy, stinking rich.

amy wax

Saturday

Toby Young

2019 was not a good year for freedom of speech

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ That’s often the response of complacent academics when people like me draw attention to the erosion of free speech on campus. For instance, Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, wrote an essay for the Atlantic last June entitled ‘Free Speech on Campus is Doing Just Fine, Thank You.’ But is everything rosy in the groves of academe? I thought I’d take this opportunity to look back on the year gone by and see if 2019 was a good or bad one for intellectual freedom in American higher education.

freedom

Monday

Peter Wood

In defense of Amy Wax

University of Pennsylvania Professor of Law Amy Wax was subjected to a smear campaign following her remarks at the National Conservatism Conference on July 15, 2019. A writer for the website Vox, Zach Beauchamp, characterized Wax’s statements on immigration as 'an outright argument for white supremacy.' The founder of the conference, Yoram Hazony, quickly denied Beauchamp’s allegation. Hazony tweeted, 'In fact she made no such argument.' Beauchamp held his ground and offered what he said was a transcript of part of Wax’s remarks. Others, such as David Marcus, Rod Dreher, Jeremiah Poff, Steve Sailer, Mark Pulliam, and Steven Hayward  pointed out that Beauchamp had completely mischaracterized Wax’s remarks.

amy wax