The University of Pennsylvania¡¯s law dean condemned the call by a professor at the Ivy League institution for a nation ¡°with more whites and fewer non-whites¡± but stopped short of embracing demands for disciplinary action.

The law professor, Amy Wax, told a National Conservatism held last week in Washington by the newly created that the US should favour immigrants from Western countries over those from non-Western nations.

Many immigrants are too loud and cause too much litter, and the US ¡°will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites¡±, Professor Wax told the conference, according to the .

More than 1,500 people and groups signed a organised by Penn¡¯s Latinx Law Students Association calling for changes at the university that include removing Professor Wax from any teaching role and hiring more racially diverse faculty.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

¡°Throughout her tenure at Penn Law,¡± the petition says, ¡°Professor Wax has continuously antagonized students of color and the Penn community.¡±

Her past public controversies have included an interview in which she said Penn¡¯s black students perform poorly, and these led the university last year to remove her from teaching mandatory classes for freshman.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

Penn¡¯s law school dean, Theodore Ruger, said in a written on Monday that her comments last week were ¡°repugnant to the core values and institutional practices of both Penn Law and the University of Pennsylvania¡±.

But he did not address the call for her removal from Penn, and suggested?a range of possible interpretations of her comments. ¡°At?best,¡± he wrote, ¡°the reported remarks espouse a bigoted theory of white cultural and ethnic supremacy; at worst, they are?racist.¡±

The dean referred a request for an interview to a Penn spokesman, who offered no response beyond the statement. The spokesman that Professor Wax will be taking a planned sabbatical during the coming year.

The conference last week was a high-profile attempt to reconcile conservative politics with the growing global trend of nationalism. Participants included the Trump administration¡¯s national security adviser, John Bolton, and Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican of Missouri.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

Professor Wax spoke to the gathering about a she published last year in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, in which she warned of danger from large-scale immigration.

In the paper, she defended ¡°legitimate nationalistic concerns, both economic and cultural¡±, for restricting immigration, ¡°primarily from the Third World to the Western or First World¡±.

Such suggestions are not racist, Professor Wax argued, because legitimate objections to immigrants are based on their cultures not their race.

¡°The concerns of humble and ordinary folks who harbor doubts about the prevailing wisdom ¨C so-called ¡®Trump voters¡¯ or deplorables ¨C are rarely if ever engaged on the merits but rather dismissed as frightening evidence of bigotry, political extremism, and the rise of a dangerous populism,¡± she wrote in the paper.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

The petition protesting her comments demanded that Penn¡¯s law school, in addition to the condemnation and removal from teaching duties, take more aggressive actions to diversify its faculty and create a broadly welcoming environment.

Professor Ruger said that such a process was already under way, with the law school hiring 10?academic staff since 2016 ¨C most of them women and half of them non-white.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com