As Amy Wax predicted, no blacks made top quarter of Penn Law School class of 2023.

For 7 years, Penn's administration has been sitting on data that could prove who is telling the truth: Amy Wax or themselves.

Of all of Professor Amy Wax’s myriad sins against the Woke worldview, the one that seems to have gotten the Penn Law School administration most obsessively angry with her was what she told Brown U. economist Glenn Loury during a 2017 podcast discussing the “downside of affirmative action. According to CNN:

“Here is a very inconvenient fact Glenn, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class and rarely, rarely in the top half,” Wax told Brown University professor Glenn Loury in a video of the interview that recently gained attention.

When asked to elaborate, Wax said she was basing her numbers on personal data.

“I have a class of 89, 95 students every year. I see a big chunk of students every year – so I am going on that, because a lot of this data is a closely guarded secret.”

UCLA law school professor Richard Sander has been studying the problem of “mismatch” at law schools due to affirmative action for years. Blacks who would do fine at law schools where they were not so overmatched intellectually due to affirmative action find themselves sucked up into the stratosphere of legal education, where they find the cognitive atmosphere pretty thin.

For example, Penn, which ranks somewhere between 4th and 10th most exclusive among US law schools, has a median LSAT score of 172 for its class of 250. But only about 19 blacks in the U.S. score 172 or higher on the LSAT each year, and most of them no doubt go to the top 3 law schools, Yale, Harvard, or Stanford, due to affirmative action. So, very few of the blacks at Penn scored in the upper half of Penn’s class on the LSAT, much less in the top quarter of the class (only 10 blacks in the country equaled or bettered Penn’s 75th percentile score of 174).

Wax’s boss, law school dean Ted Ruger, denied her statement:

“It is imperative for me as dean to state that these claims are false: (B)lack students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn Law,

Well, how many? And what about the top quarter?

You’ve got the data, so why don’t you publish it?

and the Law Review does not have a diversity mandate,” Ruger wrote.

“Contrary to any suggestion otherwise, black students at Penn Law are extremely successful, both inside and outside the classroom, in the job market, and in their careers.”

But in the 7 years since then, Ruger has not, to the best of my knowledge, presented any evidence for his denial.

Why not?

All about privacy, you see:

The dean’s statement also said that Penn Law does not permit the public disclosure of grades or class rankings, and does not collect or publicize grade performance by racial groups.

The Penn Carey Law School certainly collected data on the race of applicants, but this suggests that it just does not want to know if its affirmative action admittees were doing as badly as their LSAT and GPA scores would forecast.

But, I now realize, it’s simply not true that Penn Law “does not permit the public disclosure of grades or class rankings.” In fact, Penn Law discloses the approximately top quarter of its graduating class annually when it publishes its Honor’s List (summa, magna, and cum laude) as part of its graduation ceremony. Here’s the 2023 list, for example.

In turn, that discloses that the individuals in the others 75% of the class were not in the top ~25%.

A tenured college professor who has some time on his hands after being fired for doing politically incorrect research took the 75 names on Penn’s 2023 Honors List and looked up their pictures online. (Only a few ambitious young Ivy League lawyers don’t get their pictures online.) He found 60 whites, 10 Asians, 3 MENAs, and 2 whites who might be a little Asian. One white with an Eastern European surname looks conceivably, say, 1/8th black, but none of his relatives look at all black, so he’s probably not black at all.

Keep in mind that its’ probably easier to make the top quarter of the class on overall GPA than in a mandatory first year contract law class, because Ivy League law school students get to take a lot of optional classes their third year with fluffier grading. So, it would hardly be surprising if black affirmative action admits did slightly better overall on average, by prudently picking easy optional courses, than in the meat-and-potatoes first year contract course.

But, this quick and dirty analysis suggests that the burden of proof in this 7 year old controversy is now on the Penn Law School administration. After all, they have the data and they’ve been keeping it secret all these years, even now when sanctioning Professor Wax.