Litigation, Free Speech and the University of Pennsylvania
Because Penn promises its professors academic freedom, the letter argues that the school breached its contract with Wax by punishing her for protected speech. It notes that Penn took no action against professors who spewed anti-Semitic bile after the October 7 attacks. And it uses Penn’s double standard to make a creative legal argument: By punishing speech that offended racial minorities—but not speech that offended Jews—the university engaged in unlawful race discrimination when it singled Wax out for punishment, the letter says.
“The University’s speech policies … transparently discriminate on the basis of race, including most notably the race of the subject of the speech at issue,” the letter reads. “As such, they violate federal law’s various prohibitions against race-based discrimination.”
Wax’s lawyer, Jason Torchinsky, a former official in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, said the case could mark the first time a university has been sued for having racially discriminatory speech policies.
