A professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School claims the school's dean recently asked her to take a leave of absence after she published a controversial op-ed last year, but the school says the dean was merely discussing a routine sabbatical with her.

Amy Wax alleges in a new Wall Street Journal op-ed published Feb. 16 about free speech on campus that Penn Law Dean Ted Ruger asked her to stop teaching required first-year courses in addition to taking a leave of absence after her first op-ed created a firestorm. Wax offered the request as an example of how college campuses pay lip service to free speech and free inquiry when in reality those who espouse views that are not politically correct face personal attacks rather than reasoned debate.

The law school on Tuesday disputed Wax's characterization of events, saying that Ruger's conversation with Wax was not in response to her op-ed, but a routine discussion about her taking a sabbatical.

“Mentioned in her recent op-ed was a discussion with the dean about the timing of a regularly-accrued sabbatical, a discussion the dean has with many faculty members each year, as every tenured faculty member enjoys a sabbatical benefit, with full pay,” said Penn Law spokesman Steve Barnes on Tuesday.

Barnes said Wax is scheduled to teach her popular “Conservative Legal Thought” course both semesters next year.

“The dean has repeatedly and publicly defended the rights of Penn Law faculty and students—professor Wax, her critics, and others in our community—to express their views freely and openly without fear of censure,” Barnes said.

What's not in dispute is that the original op-ed, published on Aug. 9, led to a backlash against Wax and co-author Larry Alexander, a professor at the University of San Diego Law School. Critics charged that their op-ed, published in August in The Philadelphia Inquirer under the title “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country's Bourgeois Culture,” was racist. (Alexander said on Tuesday that some students raised objections at the time, but that he has faced no official repercussions at San Diego.)

The initial op-ed argued that a breakdown of American cultural norms in the 1950s and 1960s such as marriage before children, respect for authority, and low levels of substance abuse and crime, has undermined American's stability and strength.

Wax acknowledges in her latest op-ed that one passage in which the authors argued that “some cultures are less suited to preparing people to be productive citizens in a modern technological society” proved particularly controversial. They offer the “rap culture of inner-city blacks” and the growing “anti-assimilation ideas” among Hispanic immigrants as some of the examples of negative trends.

Some 33 of Wax's Penn Law faculty colleagues published a response in the campus newspaper that condemned her op-ed piece.

“We categorically reject Wax's claims,” it reads.

Wax's Wall Street Journal piece argues that her faculty critics should not have condemned her but instead should have offered a substantive critique of her arguments.

“This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question,” reads Wax's op-ed. “But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and way of life—something not possible in today's atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.”