Amy Wax suspended for a year at half pay

It might be a little cynical to note that having no job responsibilities for a year at half pay are the normal terms of a full-year sabbatical at most research universities, and that sabbaticals are considered a major job perk.

It’s true that she’s being stripped of summer pay in perpetuity — at elite law schools that’s often equivalent to a quarter or even a third of a law professor’s nine-month salary. A very odd feature of law schools is that they pay professors to continue to do their jobs in the summer, on the theory I suppose that otherwise we would all run off and consult for Cravath at $1,500 per hour. This practice is about 40-60 years old depending on the elititude of the school in question, and is now being partially or completely abandoned at law schools under financial pressure, which means a lot, although obviously not the Penns of the world.

She’s also being stripped of her named chair, and being given a public reprimand.

This might be a good place for me to mention that when the University of Colorado’s internal investigation unit found that the law school’s dean violated my civil rights and required the central administration to sanction her for doing so, the Provost’s sanction consisted of a form letter, obviously written by lawyers, “sanctioning” her with a boilerplate reprimand in the most vague and meaningless terms possible. Provost Russell Moore then proceeded to append a paragraph, obviously written by himself, telling the dean what a great job she was doing and how much he looked forward to continuing to work with her. A couple of months later the dean posted on her Facebook page that she was appearing at a law school deans’ conference, where provosts would talk about the working with law school deans, and noted that Moore had been good enough to attend the conference, to talk about his great working relationship with her.

Moore got quasi-fired (sorry, he suddenly “stepped down” after 14 [!] years of selfless service) from the provost job last week by the new chancellor, who hopefully has some actual academic standards, and may possibly take an interest in what a complete fiscal and institutional train wreck the law school has become.

But back to Amy Wax. Her case raises a lot of interesting questions about the limits of academic freedom, which I’m sure some of you would like to discuss.