Penn Law Professor: U.S. Better Off with More Whites, Fewer Nonwhites

Credit: Daily Pennsylvanian and Alice Heyeh

American universities provide platforms for far-right professors, as well as far-left ones. Meet Prof. Amy Wax. At an academic conference last week, she reportedly said:

“Conservatives need a realistic approach to immigration that … preserves the United States as a Western and first-world nation. We are better off if we are dominated numerically … by people from the first world, from the West, than by people who are from less advanced countries.”

Wax was speaking at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference. 

Speakers included National Security Adviser John Bolton, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and tech billionaire Peter Thiel, among others.

Reaction: More than 1,000 student groups and individuals at Penn have signed a petition calling for Wax to be relieved of all teaching duties. Wax’s dean, Ted Ruger, condemned her remarks.

“At best, the reported remarks espouse a bigoted theory of white cultural and ethnic supremacy; at worst, they are racist. Under any framing, such views are repugnant to the core values and institutional practices of both Penn Law” and Penn.

History Note: There is nothing new about professors at elite universities embracing racially-tinged viewpoints and theories.

In 1912, New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson (by then, former professor and president at Princeton) published a book that singled out the “sturdy stocks of North Europe” for contributing to America’s early success while disparaging “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland.”

Many academic economists were strong believers in eugenics, a field that gave scientific justification to racism. 

A political scientist, Lothrop Stoddard, published The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920), portrayed a world dominated by rapidly multiplying yellow, brown, and black people that threatened to end the white race’s domination of civilization. 

Stoddard concluded: “People as they are wholly or mostly by whites, they have become parts of the race-heritage, which should be defended to the last extremity no matter if the costs involved are greater than the mere economic value.”

More recently, a former colleague at UIUC, Prof. Robert Weissberg, was fired from the conservative National Review for delivering a talk on “viable alternatives” to white nationalism, including the creation of “Whitopias.”

He argued that liberals are beyond reason in matters of race: Explaining to liberals the necessity of racial consciousness for whites, according to Weissberg, “is like trying to explain to an eight-year-old why sex is more fun than chocolate ice cream.”

These statements are proof that unfiltered speech is self-revelatory.