The University of Pennsylvania Law School is mentioned in The Bob Zadek Show only as the institutional affiliation of guests, never as a topic in its own right. Two guests are identified with it: Amy Wax, described by Bob Zadek as a professor of law at the school, and Joe Cohn, identified as a 2004 graduate. No excerpt describes the school’s founding, curriculum, faculty, or administration.
Amy Wax and the bourgeois norms op-ed
In a November 2017 episode, Bob Zadek introduced Amy Wax as a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, noting that she is a tenured professor who is well-regarded and has written extensively in her areas of expertise, and that she served on the staff of the Solicitor General of the United States Amy Wax Defends Bourgeois Norms (2017). Zadek framed the hour around two issues: the degree to which the academic establishment reacted negatively to a tenured law professor expressing her opinion with a colleague in an op-ed piece in a mainstream media publication, and the issues that drove Wax to write the piece.
Wax said the piece was called something like “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture,” and that it was really Larry Alexander’s idea initially. She said he showed it to her in a different form and asked if she liked it and wanted to work on it with him, and she agreed. She described Alexander as a longstanding friend and colleague, and said they had talked about some of these issues before. She said she changed some things and that they were trying to make the piece more universal, because she thought there was a tendency to focus on the upper-middle class if you are upper-middle class yourself. She said she told him these were a cultural script or set of behaviors and precepts that can help anyone, regardless of their background, their level of education or affluence. She said the piece was published in the Philly Inquirer on August 9th, and that she had connections with some of the op-ed editors there who had asked her to write before.
Zadek said Wax had written several months earlier that she commented on her views on the decline in what was called in her piece “bourgeois values,” and that she bemoaned the fact that due to the change in cultural norms in our country there was a decline in the outputs from the younger generations and students. He said the piece caused quite an uproar. The excerpt ends as Zadek asks Wax to explain the core premise of the piece to listeners who probably had not read it.
Joe Cohn, FIRE, and campus civil liberties
Joe Cohn is introduced in a December 2022 episode as the Director of Legislative Policy at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and as a 2004 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Fels Institute of Government Administration Do you know your rights? (2022). Zadek said the hour would discuss sexual harassment and discrimination on college campuses, the role of the federal government in general and the United States Department of Education in particular in regulating the protection of victims of sexual harassment as well as the violators of those rights, with specific attention to the due process rights of the accused or the absence of those rights.
Cohn described FIRE’s founding in 1999 as a fair and effective advocate for the civil liberties of students and faculty at institutions of higher education. He said that since 1999 the organization had been on the front lines of those issues through advocacy on the ground at the schools themselves and advocacy in the media, and that he was brought on in 2012 to add advocacy in the halls of government. He said this was because government actors—not the public universities that are also government actors, but members of Congress, state legislatures, the White House, and federal agencies—were starting to tell colleges and universities what they needed to do, and they were not always telling them to do the right thing that complied with constitutional rights.
Zadek noted that FIRE’s former name, before it broadened its mandate, was the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In the same introduction he described Cohn’s degree from the law school alongside his degree from the Fels Institute of Government Administration.
Across episodes
The University of Pennsylvania Law School is touched on in three episodes: the November 2017 episode with Amy Wax and the two December 2022 episodes with Joe Cohn. The excerpts show no development in how the school is treated; in each it appears only as a credential or affiliation, and no guest discusses the institution itself.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the University of Pennsylvania Law School was founded, where it is located, how it is governed, or what it teaches. They do not say whether Amy Wax’s op-ed prompted any action by the school, or what response, if any, the law school or the university made. They do not describe Joe Cohn’s course of study there or connect his legal education to his work at FIRE. Nothing in the excerpts addresses the school’s role in the Title IX or due process disputes discussed in the 2022 episodes.