NEW: Penn tried to buy Amy Wax’s silence by offering her a deal: it would water down the sanctions against her—and take a pay cut off the table—provided she kept quiet about the case and stopped accusing the university of censoring her.
As you might guess, Wax refused.🧵
It was Wax’s refusal to take the deal that prompted Penn to announce Tuesday that it was suspending her for a year at half pay and stripping her of an endowed chair.
The sanctions, which also include a permanent loss of summer pay, were immediately condemned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which framed them as a precedent-setting blow to academic freedom.
"After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook," FIRE said. "Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn's willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor."
But behind closed doors, the school was prepared to let Wax pay a much lower price—provided she keep her mouth shut about the two-and-a-half-year-long case that made Penn a pariah among academic freedom advocates and compounded the fallout of anti-Israel protests on campus.
The quid pro quo was outlined in a draft settlement agreement presented to Wax in August and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
That agreement—the product of months of negotiations between Penn and its embattled gadfly—would have let Wax keep her base salary during the course of her suspension and thrown in a one-time payment of $50,000, partially offsetting the loss in summer pay.
In return, Wax would agree "not to disparage the University" over the two-year-long process to which it subjected her.
She would also waive her right to sue Penn or disclose the evidence she had presented in internal hearings to clear her name, including testimony from former students who called into question the charges against her.
Wax refused to sign the non-disparagement clause, she told the Beacon. The result was a breakdown in settlement talks and the imposition of the harsher sanctions originally approved by former Penn president Liz Magill.
Magill, you may remember, signed off on the pay cuts for Wax one month before she defended the rights of professors and students to call for the annihilation of the Jewish state.
"It doesn’t surprise me one iota administrators tried to pay [Wax] out to keep her quiet," said Alex Morey, who leads FIRE’s campus advocacy programs. "In fact, that seems very much on brand for Penn these days."
The draft agreement underscores Penn’s anxieties about a case that became a major liability in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, when Magill and other officials said they couldn’t punish anti-Semitic speech because of Penn’s supposed adherence to the First Amendment.
The university took no action against a cartoonist who depicted "Zionists" drinking the blood of Gazans, for example, or against students and professors who celebrated the worst pogrom since the Shoah.
But Magill did agree to sanction Wax for saying, among other things, that diversity officials "couldn’t be scholars if their life depended on it."
The double standard attracted a raft of ridicule and became Exhibit A in Wax’s argument that she was the victim of selective prosecution.
It also created ammunition for a possible lawsuit—Wax had said she would sue the university if it sanctioned her—a threat that hung over the settlement talks and may have made Penn more willing to engage in them.
It is rare for universities to sanction tenured professors and all but unheard of to do so over political speech. Penn made an exception for Wax, the school said on Tuesday, because her "sweeping and derogatory generalizations about groups" amounted to "targeted disparagement."
Those generalizations included the claim that black law students "rarely" finish in the top of their class—a statement Penn said breached the confidentiality of student grades—and arguments about racial differences in IQ.

Other offenses were more banal, such as Wax commenting that "family breakdown" had harmed African Americans.
In a 2023 memo recommending sanctions against Wax—which became the basis for the pay cuts announced Tuesday—a university panel described that comment as an example of "inequitably targeted disrespect."
The further the case progressed, the more controversial it became. Leaks about the proceedings, which often violated norms of due process, alarmed academic freedom watchdogs and drew fire from both sides of the political spectrum.
Wax herself lambasted the process in interviews and podcasts—one of which was noscriptd the "DEI Witch Hunt at Penn Law"—keeping the case in the news as the university did damage control over the disastrous congressional testimony that cost Magill her job.
The settlement agreement would have put the kibosh on further controversy. That is why, Wax told the Free Beacon, she repeatedly refused to sign it.
"This case is about free expression," Wax said. "Penn wanted absolute silence. The big question is: Why do they want to hide what they’re doing?"

Read the full story here: https://freebeacon.com/campus/how-penn-tried-to-buy-amy-waxs-silence/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1839306672004804878.html

"If only all you stupid vaccine injured people would shut up, our jobs as propagandists would be much easier."

"On Monday, UChicago’s president defended my right to say low IQ is why black people are murdering and mugging my classmates.

"Today, UChicago announced that someone has anonymously donated $100 million to support free speech.

Wow!" Daniel Schmidt

https://twitter.com/realdschmidt/status/1839339930734260247

Note sent to students in 1968 by the wardens and fellows of Wadham college, Oxford.

BAC consulting: British-educated businesswoman denies making Hezbollah explosive pagers at Hungary company | The Independent

"A British-educated businesswoman has denied allegations of manufacturing the pagers used in an audacious attack against Hezbollah.
The handheld devices killed at least 12 people and injured 3,000 after they simultaneously detonated across Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday afternoon in a suspected Israeli operation.

The Taiwanese company whose branding was on the technology claimed Budapest-based firm BAC Consultancy made the devices under a three-year brand licensing agreement.

But University College London (UCL) graduate Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, the CEO of BAC Consultancy, said she was just a link in the supply chain and did not make the pagers.

Ms Barsony-Arcidiacono studied for a physics PhD at UCL between 2002 and 2006, according to her LinkedIn page.
She then went on to study at the London School of Economics and the University of London for various postgraduate qualifications between 2009 and 2017.
She also recently worked with the European Commission as an “evaluation expert” and as a “groundwater resource manager” for Unesco.

On her company’s website – which went offline on Wednesday morning – her work was described as “bridging technology and innovation from Asia”."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/hezbollah-bac-consulting-hungary-cristiana-barsony-arcidiacono-b2615410.html

ROBINMG 🚀

"To fully appreciate the work now offered to the English reading public, we must carry our minds back two hundred years to the time when Newton made known to the world the law of universal gravitation." -Lord Kelvin

https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/preface-to-the-english-edition-of?utm_source=activity_item

"A Temporary Flight Restriction Notice has gone out via a Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) closing off all air space around Washington DC from surface to 99,000 feet, until further notice.   This type of all-encompassing closure simply does not happen.  Something big is up."

https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news-selections/national-news/strange-worrisome-all-dc-air-space-to-99-000-feet-closed-until-further-notice

Most employers ditch diverse recruitment amid ‘anti-woke’ backlash
https://web.archive.org/web/20240920084932/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/19/employers-ditch-diverse-recruitment-anti-woke-backlash/

"Hackers in the UK targeted 19 major railway stations to display a message to anyone accessing wi-fi which warned about terror attacks and “the Islamisation of Europe.”"

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/hackers-target-uk-rail-network-wi-fi-warn-islamisation-europe

Taylor Swift makes an entire audience of mostly children scream "fuck the patriarchy" at her concert.

I have to give a shoutout to all the fathers who work hard to provide and buy their 14 year old daughters tickets to see Taylor Swift so that she can brainwash an entire generation to hate men.

Join @awakenedspecies

Hot penny day?

https://ift.tt/62Jc8Zl

When CyberPolygon takes down the Internet, Soros wants to be ready to fill the information void.

https://thedailyguardian.com/fcc-fast-tracks-soros-controversial-media-takeover/

🏖️ The Washington Examiner reports that Biden has taken 532 days off in less than four years:

"That's about 40% of the 1,326 days Biden has been in office. It would take the average American, who takes 11 days off a year, about 48 years to accumulate that many vacations."

Libido Dominandi -- "required reading for all men"

Yes, this is a real article.

"In conversations caught on hidden camera, New York City’s former COVID czar said that he’d organized a pair of sex parties in the second half of 2020, as New Yorkers coped with peak pandemic social isolation. “The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then,” Jay Varma told an undercover reporter with whom he thought he was on a date. In a video compiled from several recordings taken this summer, the onetime senior public-health adviser to city hall describes the two events that took place in August and November of 2020. He also talked about his work promoting vaccination in the city by making it “very uncomfortable” for those who wanted to avoid the shots."

https://archive.is/2024.09.22-123502/https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/09/jay-varma-covid-sex-parties/679983/#:~:text=In%20conversations%20caught,avoid%20the%20shots.

⁣We, the people of the United States, don’t care what your “prominent” Ukrainians think.

X (formerly Twitter) CLICK HERE

@ScottRitter | Substack | Donate