Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is currently suspended for making racist and sexist remarks, spoke at a March 25 Cornell Law School Federalist Society event. Her talk centered on reforming a higher education system she said was captured by “woke ideology.”
Two Cornell University Police Department officers were present at the event, and Dean of Students Jenny Hutcherson warned students before Wax spoke they could receive a notation on their record if they disrupted the event.
The Cornell Federalist Society is a chapter of the national Federalist Society, a legal group focused on promoting conservative and libertarian theories. Six of the nine current Supreme Court justices are current or former members.
Wax was criticized for “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements” and labelled a “white supremacist” by Theodore Ruger, then the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, in a 2023 complaint.
She told a Black colleague that it is “rational to be afraid of Black men in elevators,” and has said that America would be “better off with more whites and fewer non-whites,” that “gay couples are not fit to raise children,” and that a Black student only got into Ivy league universities “because of affirmative action.”
Wax’s appearance at Cornell was condemned by the Native American Law Student Association in a letter to the law school's student body, and law students individually.
“The purpose of her platform is not to engage in any search for truth, but rather to advocate openly for a return to explicit racialized caste systems,” a statement sent from NALSA to the law school student body on March 26 reads.
“There is a horizon where free inquiry ends,” Ola Eboda J.D. ’27 wrote in a letter sent to the student body before the event, arguing Wax’s appearance “sets out to desecrate the identities of people.” Eboda is the vice president of the Black Law Students Association but said he wrote the letter in a personal capacity.
While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, in response to a Black student who asked Wax if she agreed with a panelist’s statement that Black people are inherently inferior to white people, Wax said “you can have two plants that grow under the same conditions, and one will just grow higher than the other,” according to a 2022 letter written by Ruger.
During the hour-long March 25 event, attended by about 20 people and moderated by conservative Prof. William Jacobson, securities law, Wax argued that universities are self-perpetuating institutions obsessed with a “cult of diversity” rather than searching for truth and pursuing new knowledge.
“We put a man on the moon — with an undiverse team,” Wax said.
While the NASA team that worked to send man to the moon was mostly white, Black women made crucial contributions to the project and President Kennedy made efforts to recruit Black scientists across the segregated South to NASA.
She said uniquely “Anglo-Protestant” ideas of democracy and dissent were being abandoned by universities in favor of the “moralization of disagreement,” or the idea that “the people who disagree with you, or have a different point of view or a different vision about how society should be run are not just mistaken or wrong, and we have to try and persuade them of that, but they are evil.”
Part of universities’ “capture” by “wokeness,” according to Wax, was due to increasing female representation in higher education.
Women “are much more concerned with creating a safe space, making people feel good, inclusion, you know, emotional well-being, those sorts of what I call the values of the nursery and the kindergarten,” Wax said. “Should we give them equal time? And I say, well, not in a university, because women's priorities are not fit to purpose.”
Wax also addressed her recent suspension and ongoing legal battle against the University of Pennsylvania.
“I have been sanctioned by my own university. Why? Because my ideas are so offensive and upsetting that students can't be in the same room with me; they can't learn from me. I can't teach them, I'm a threat,” Wax complained. “Now, that's all subjective.”
“I'm curious why you feel that it is perhaps your responsibility to espouse rhetoric that denigrates and dehumanizes people that do not look like you?” asked Ian Hayes J.D. ’26 to Wax after she finished her prepared remarks.
“‘Dehumanize’ is jargon,” Wax retorted, before Hayes brought up Wax's belief that “all cultures are not equal.” Wax responded by asking if the “culture of the Taliban” was equal to that of “the West.”
“I think fundamentally she doesn’t think that people who are not white, people who do not look like her, have the same value, and that they don’t belong in institutions like Cornell,” Hayes said in an interview with The Sun, adding that Wax “mischaracterized” his question.
Zarah Naqib J.D. ’26 told The Sun it “was frustrating to watch her obfuscate questions from students who didn’t necessarily align with her values or views.”
Hayes, who is the editor-in-chief of the Cornell Law Review, said he was told by a member of the Cornell Federalist Society that Wax would be speaking six days before the event was made public.
When the event was made public — required by Graduate and Professional Student Activities Funding Committee guidelines, who the Cornell Federalist Society receives funding from — it was at 2 a.m. the day of the event. It was not posted on CampusGroups as required by GPSAFC rules.
Eboda said he felt the timing of the publicization was because the Cornell Federalist Society “didn’t want” those not in the Federalist Society at the event, he told The Sun.
“They knew exactly what they were doing,” Naqib added. “That was something that was done intentionally so that there was not an opportunity for students to rally against her.”
Eboda added that law school administration, specifically Dean Jens Ohlin and Hutcherson, would have been aware of the event before it was publicized.
Hayes said Hutcherson told him the paperwork for the event was only finalized on March 22, three days before it was publicized.
Naqib said there was a “double standard” between how the law school allowed the Cornell Federalist Society to bring a speaker on such short notice and “all of the obstacles” faced in the past organizing events about Palestine.
Ohlin and Hutcherson did not respond to a request for comment.
According to Hayes, Naqib and Eboda, Ohlin did not reach out to anyone, including affinity groups, after the event.
“I was in the military for a pretty good amount of my life, and the one thing that carried over from the military is when you’re the leader of people, you show up for them. And he didn’t show up,” Eboda said.
Ohlin is “a feckless individual who does not have any moral or ethical backbone,” Eboda said in an interview with The Sun. “Everything is about, ‘how do I get more money for the University for the law school?’ ‘How do I get my name to be bigger?’ ‘How do I become an individual that becomes not a dean of a law school, but a president of a university?’”
The previous dean of Cornell Law, Eduardo Peñalver, was elected President of Georgetown University in 2025.
When asked for comment on the event, Nikolai Rura J.D. ’26 and Max Wilson J.D. ’26, co-presidents of the Cornell Federalist Society, said Federalist Society national policy does not allow chapters to make public statements of any kind.
They added that the society “host[s] a diverse range of speakers on campus, and the process for Prof. Wax was the same as all of our other guests.”
Wax and the University declined to comment.
“I'm disappointed by the response of the administration. I'm disheartened, but not surprised by the responses of my peers. I think, at the end of the day, that's just what it is. That's just what it's like to be in America,” Hayes said.
Atticus Johnson is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a senior writer for the News department and can be reached at ajohnson@cornellsun.com.
