iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
Over 2,500 students of law and other subjects, alumni, and students from other universities have signed an online petition calling for ‘tangible action’ against Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School with a history of racist and bigoted comments, for her latest remarks on non-White communities in and migrating to the United States.
In an interview on Brown University professor Glenn Loury’s web show Bloggingheads.tv last month, Wax was critical, among other things, of increased Asian immigration to the U.S., warning of the “danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country”.
“If you go into medical schools, you’ll see that Indians, South Asians are now rising stars. In medicine, they are sort of the new Jews, I guess, but these diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment,” said Wax, who herself is Jewish.
She also said Asians in the U.S. need to be a lot more “objectively grateful” and “recognize overtly all the wonderful things about our country”.
Reacting to Prof. Wax, Sudhanshu Kaushik, founder of North American Association of Indian Students a non-partisan umbrella organization that seeks to represent students of Indian nationality, origin and background told indica, “We’re waiting for the university to open up again. We plan to work with all Indian students and South Asian and Asian organizations to conduct an in-person protest against her on Penn Law’s campus. The petition itself will be delivered to Penn Law.”
“I believe there needs to be more engagement from other Indian-based organizations against her comments,” Kaushik said and added, “It’s because of comments like these that hate crime against Indians and Asians continue to rise. We must, as a society, ensure that our campuses are safe for the large student demographic.”
Kaushik said he doesn’t know any specific Indians taking her classes, but there are hundreds of Asian Penn Law students who have been petitioning in their own means to hold her accountable.
“Remember, Indian students are now the largest demographic of international students on US campuses and the number of Indian Americans in university continues to rise. Her(Prof. Wax) comments are dangerous for us,” Kaushik said sharing his concern.
Criticizing Wax’s remarks, Penn Law Dean Theodore Ruger said in a statement, “Once again, Amy Wax has, through her thoroughly anti-intellectual and racist comments denigrating Asian immigrants, underscored a fundamental tension around harmful speech at American universities.
“Like all racist generalizations, Wax’s recent comments inflict harm by perpetuating stereotypes and placing differential burdens on Asian students, faculty and staff to carry the weight of this vitriol and bias.”
Ruger issued his statement two weeks after Wax made her remarks. His statement did not, however, say if the university was planning to take any action beyond criticizing Wax’s remarks.
Wax, who has been at the university since 2001, has a history of making racist and non-inclusive comments about various groups. In 2006, she was rebuked for her public advocacy against same-sex marriage. In a 2017 interview, she claimed to have never seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class and only rarely in the top half, after which she was barred from teaching first-year law courses. In 2019 she was caught on camera saying the U.S. “will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites”.
Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer for the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the statement made to inquirer.com that might save her from losing the job said: “Wax’s most recent comments about Asian Americans came on a radio show and a written post she made after the show and are not within her primary area of academic expertise or connected to campus.”
