People love my conversations with Amy Wax. Fresh off the news that Penn has sanctioned her for making very politically incorrect but mostly true statements, she’s back on the podcast to talk about the whole experience. See here for our first discussion, which focused on immigration, and the second in the midst of the ordeal she was going through with Penn.
The university tried to buy her silence to end this whole affair, but Amy characteristically refused. Penn claims to adhere to the principle of academic freedom, but says here that it is punishing conduct, not speech. This is an old trick that I discuss at length in The Origins of Woke. It is true that speech is a form of conduct, and conduct doesn’t become allowable just because it is speech. Imagine a professor who went around harassing black students by whispering racial slurs in their ears. But this is not that, nor anything that should be considered close to an edge case if the principles of free speech and academic freedom are going to mean anything at all. The position of Penn is in effect that talking about different statistical distributions across groups is conduct that can be punished.
We start by going over the fallout from the Penn controversy and whether she will be planning a lawsuit. The conversation moves on to the state of the academy more generally, why things have gotten this bad, and some of the pushback we have seen and why there hasn’t been more of it.
We then begin to talk about the election, and the unique appeal that Trump has to the Republican base. Amy is not exactly enamored with the man, but as a political pragmatist, she is supporting him anyway. She explains some of her main policy priorities, namely the need to save the academy, crime, and the rule of law. On the last point, I push back a bit by arguing that if this your concern, then Trump is clearly inferior to just about any other American politician one might imagine.
Amy and I go into some of our differences on whether you should talk to the media, even if you think they’re likely to be unfair. In the end, she tells me that I’ve given her something to think about, which I was very glad to hear. I’ve also been on a long-running crusade to get Amy on Twitter. I think she would be uniquely good at it and build an absolutely massive following. She says that she’ll think about that suggestion too, but I unfortunately don’t believe she’ll do it, even though the world would be a much funnier and more interesting place with an Amy Wax Twitter account.
Some of my previous articles come up during the conversation. See “The Biomechanics of Trumpism” and “Coping with Low Human Capital” in particular.