Class –
With the communication blackout still in effect, I have felt conflicted about writing to you concerning the racist garbage Professor Wax recently published. You cannot write back until the blackout period is lifted, and something about that felt unfair. But I have decided that writing to you now is the right thing to do, even though I must ask that you not reply or reach out until exam grading is behind us. Since I am currently serving in a deputy dean role, let me make clear that I am speaking here in my personal capacity as a faculty member, not for the law school or anyone other than myself.
First and foremost, I want to tell you that I am sorry. None of you should have to experience this kind of affront as the price of studying at a great institution. I was not on the faculty when Professor Wax was hired at Penn, but I am a member of the tenured faculty now. That means some of the responsibility for the harm she inflicts rests on my shoulders. Once the blackout is lifted, I will make myself available to meet with any of you to speak about that harm and address it as best I can.
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I also want to describe my own experience with her behavior when I was a new member of our community. Shortly after I joined the faculty at Penn, I was invited to speak on a panel sponsored by the Philadelphia Bar Association along with Professor Wax and one other participant. The panel focused on issues that might come before the Supreme Court, and Professor Wax spent her time talking about marriage equality. I knew that she and I had different views on the matter. I did not expect to have my humanity insulted. In her remarks, Professor Wax asserted that, “as everyone knows,” relationships between men and women are by their nature about the creation of family, community, and a focus on other-centered concerns while relationships between same-sex couples are by their nature about self-gratification, self-interest, and a focus on selfish concerns. The argument for rejecting marriage equality was obvious, she said: government can prefer relationships that benefit the community over relationships that offer no benefit to anyone but the two people involved.
When I came to Penn Law, I was the first out gay person ever appointed to the standing faculty. And here I was, sitting on a panel with a senior colleague explaining her view that my relationships, by their nature, were selfish, disconnected from family and community, and a proper object of official scorn. This was not the first time I had encountered such arguments, but I was taken aback that Professor Wax would speak in this heedlessly dehumanizing way about a colleague sitting next to her at a public event. When it came my turn to speak, I wrapped myself in my dignity and offered a contained reply. Several other colleagues were in the audience and came up afterwards to assure me she did not speak for them.
I have since come to understand that blurring the line between public policy and personal insult is one of Professor Wax’s rhetorical weapons. I wrote an essay several years ago about her tactics. (https://www.thefacultylounge.org/2018/03/guest-post-by-tobias-barrington-wolff-the-provocateurs-toolbox.html.) Following the Philadelphia Bar Association event, I also made a decision: I would engage with this person’s words and behavior when necessary, but I resolved not to let her poison my experience in the rich community I had joined.
Each time Professor Wax draws national attention with her racist remarks, that resolve is tested. I have spent more hours than I can count in conversation with students and alumni about the harm she causes: students of color who feel personally demeaned by her; alumni who encountered her behavior as students but were unsure what would happen if they spoke out; conservative students who want their ideas to have a vibrant home at Penn but do not want to be associated with her toxicity. I understand the impact all this can have on your ability to feel like valued members of this community. No matter how much of a pariah Professor Wax might be within the faculty, she holds tenure and an endowed chair, leaving you to wonder whether her colleagues actually give credence to her views. And media coverage regularly associates the Penn Law name with her enormities, putting you in a defensive posture when friends, family or members of the profession ask how this ugliness can be a part of the institution where you have chosen to study.
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I do not have easy answers for you. What I have is a commitment: I will work with you to counteract the harm this person inflicts for as long as she continues to be associated with our institution. That means taking the extraordinary step of writing you a letter that speaks in such blunt terms about another member of the faculty. It means making myself available to talk in equally blunt terms about all these matters. And it means being open to hearing from any of you who may disagree with what I have said in this letter or with my decision to write it. I hope you know me well enough to appreciate that I welcome such disagreement as much as I welcome discussion with students who see the situation in the same terms I do.
As you begin the spring semester, I want you to proceed with confidence and a feeling of empowerment. You are extraordinary lawyers-in-training doing superb work. Every one of you is larger in spirit and importance than this person and her racist provocations.
— TBW