After years of woke harassment, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) has finally issued sanctions against law professor Amy Wax. Her crimes? Making unquestionably accurate statements and constitutionally protected opinions, which happen to be what Normal Americans actually say and think. Can’t have that in a major American university. UPenn is one of the primary centers of leftist scandal in American academia, the Sandusky pedophile revelations being among the most notorious, though many others are available via any search engine. Her punishment?

After more than two years of disciplinary proceedings, the University of Pennsylvania will sanction outspoken conservative law professor Amy Wax “for a major infraction of the university’s behavioral standards,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The paper received advance notice of the sanctions against Wax, which will include one year at half pay, loss of her named chair, and public reprimand—though she will not be fired or lose tenure.

What sort of reprehensible manic is Wax? What did she say? She asserted societies with traditional values are happy and successful, and the lack of those values causes many problems. She was, unsurprisingly, called a racist for this mild opinion. Then she dared say that black students seldom finish in the top half of graduating law school classes. Despite voluminous empirical evidence to support that contention, the full weight of the DEI/Woke establishment descended on her.

Well. There must be more than enough evidence of Wax’s horrible and illegal treatment of others, right? Not so much:

Since then, critics have derided further statements of opinion by Wax, including statements made entirely outside the university context, as “racist.” Yet up to and including Ruger’s recent letter requesting “major sanctions,” Wax has never even been accused—still less, found culpable—of any discriminatory action taken against a student or colleague. To the contrary, according to an anonymous source with personal knowledge of the internal university process, an independent investigator “found no evidence of bias in Wax’s dealings with students,” and instead suggested that “there is reason to believe that students have mischaracterized or reported faulty recollections of statements Wax allegedly made.”

The usual charges of Wax’s words “causing harm” to students and to the University have been bandied about, but in two years, those expected and nonsensical charges have never been substantiated. One would think a law school would be among those disciplines most interested in upholding free speech and due process. One would think wrong. It seems law schools these days are among the wokest on campus, and the most likely to egregiously violate the constitutional rights of anyone daring to oppose their orthodoxy. Prior to announcing her punishment, UPenn tried to silence Wax behind the scenes. 

They came up with a settlement that would keep Wax on base salary during her suspension and would have given her $50,000 to offset her loss of summer pay if she’d shut up about UPenn’s unconstitutional abuses, and waive her right to sue:

Wax refused to sign the non-disparagement clause, she told the Free Beacon. The result was a breakdown in settlement talks and the imposition of the harsher sanctions originally approved by former Penn president Liz Magill, who signed off on the pay cuts for Wax one month before she defended the rights of professors and students to call for the annihilation of the Jewish state.

As one might suspect, university administrators and professors are not short on arrogance, and have double standards for “causing harm:”

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Going after Wax is not terribly bright:

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Attacking someone with Wax’s experience and accomplishments on such ludicrously political grounds calls into question the sanity, intellects and decency of UPenn Administration and much of its faculty. However, for a university that obviously rejects objective reality and substitutes its own, while trying to force everyone else to live in and praise it, it’s par for the course.

It’s yet another example of the utter corruption of academia, which for a very long time has not stood for free inquiry, academic excellence or the Constitution. How a free society can long endure when the graduates of such institutions have no appreciation of the legal and cultural foundations of our republic remains an open question.

It took the Gibson family years to finally force Oberlin College, another notoriously leftist institution, to pay up for their egregious and false abuse of the Gibson family and business. It will likely take additional years for Wax to prevail against UPenn, but prevail she surely will, and sane Americans can only hope she’ll make them pay, individually and as an institution, so dearly even the wokest of the woke will have to at least pretend to be decent, honest people in the future.

It's a start, but one that should never had been necessary.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.