Striding across campus with his brisk, long-legged gait, Cornel West is a dashingly familiar figure among the bricks and ivy of Harvard University. He always seems to be on his way somewhere important, hands jammed in the trouser pockets of the dark three-piece suit that has become his sartorial trademark, narrow shoulders bent slightly against the wind.
But West, an academic superstar equally at home in the classroom and on the stage, may be close to striding away from Harvard for good.
As recent reports have chronicled, West, who teaches in Harvard’s fabled Afro-American Studies program, is in the midst of a public feud with new Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers. That feud, many believe, is emblematic of larger issues that currently preoccupy universities, such as diversity, accountability and the role of intellectuals in public life.
Or is it?
As the dispute has moved from the inside pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education to the front page of The New York Times, some people are questioning its true significance: Does it strike at the heart of our ideas about race and scholarship? Or is it just a back-yard brawl between a couple of stubborn Ivy Leaguers with too much time on their hands?
“This is not about African-American studies,”said Nathaniel Norment, chair of Temple University’s African-American Studies program. “It’s about personalities and ego.”
But Michael Eric Dyson, author and DePaul University professor who, like West, speaks often about political issues, said race is the key. “It’s not about racism, but it is about race. It’s important to support West.”
Impossible, counters Shelby Steele, author and commentator. In a Wall Street Journal essay published earlier this week, Steele called West an “intellectual lightweight” whose work is “often incomprehensible.”
The trouble began in October, when Summers reportedly called West on the carpet for his non-traditional scholarly pursuits, which have included a rap CD (“Sketches of My Culture”) and association with a possible presidential run by the Rev. Al Sharpton. Summers also reportedly questioned the rigor of West’s classroom grading in light of a controversy over grade inflation at Harvard, a focus of administrative concern after an embarrassing recent report found that more than half of undergraduate grades at the elite school are A or A-.
West took umbrage. “I have never been attacked and insulted in that particular way,” he told National Public Radio. West, who recently embarked on a leave of absence, said he would consider leaving Harvard for Princeton University, home to a rival African-American Studies program with a big-name star: Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison.
The controversy quickly spread from the campus to the culture, becoming a cause celebre for those who saw it as a handy grindstone for a host of personal axes.
Fallout continues
“When something happens at Harvard, everybody listens,” said James Stewart, a Penn State University professor and president of the National Council for Black Studies. “Clearly, the attack on West is an attack on the origins and founding motivations of black studies. Yet clearly there are other dimensions, too.”
Last week, the Rev. Jesse Jackson used the dust-up to question Harvard’s commitment to affirmative action. And Sharpton told interviewers he might sue Summers for trying to keep West from joining his campaign.
Summers recently said he regretted any perceived slight and expressed support for West and the highly touted black studies program, which is led by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
But the fallout continues. West has not withdrawn his threat to leave Harvard, and op-ed columnists and other scholars have begun to weigh in. Some see it as an issue of academic freedom versus a meddlesome university bureaucracy. Others see it as a referendum on the value of African-American studies programs, which were instituted in colleges in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and which often challenge traditional notions of scholarship.
Still others see it as a reflection of the current anxiety over the role of public intellectuals — people whose lives are supposed to be devoted to impartial scholarship and hard empirical data who nonetheless engage in partisan political commentary. The debate over public intellectuals, highlighted in recent books such as “Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline ” by Richard Posner, a federal judge who teaches at the University of Chicago, has acquired new urgency during the war on terrorism, as some professors have been vilified for remarks that seem less than fully supportive of the war effort.
Balancing responsibility
“The question is — what is or should be the relationship between ideas developed in the rarified atmosphere of the academy and public and civic work?” said Stanley Fish, dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago and who, last week, launched a new course on public intellectuals.
“I talked about this in the first day of class,” Fish added. “The issues of what is a public intellectual, and the ways of balancing one’s responsibility as a citizen and as a member of a faculty, certainly are present in the situation at Harvard.”
Ayana Karanja, director of the Black World Studies program at Loyola University-Chicago, regards the dispute as a direct challenge to the essence of African-American studies. “For any scholar of color, your scholarship may be tied to community activism. The president [Summers] has criticized West for being a non-scholar. But I don’t think there is anyone who could accuse West of that — he’s a scholar par excellence and a scholar-activist. His scholarship is impeccable.
“A different philosophical question is being raised,” she continued. “Who determines scholarship? Who decides what is knowledge?”
Norment, however, does not believe his field is under attack. “I’ve not heard any mention of the discipline per se, of its content, philosophy or direction. It’s about these people at Harvard.”
Those people just happen to be two men of great achievement, longtime fame and, one must presume, healthy egos. Summers, former treasury secretary under President Clinton, was a legend on the Harvard economics faculty, earning tenure at 28 — at that time, the youngest person in the university’s history to do so. In a Harvard Magazine profile published six months ago, just as Summers ascended to the presidency, several former students recalled that their mentor often would sit down with those he presumed to be underachievers and challenge them to do better — an uncanny echo of what Summers apparently did with West.
`Dream team’ of scholars
West, for his part, is a kind of intellectual impresario, a spellbinding orator and frequent commentator on racial politics on the national scene. Author of 16 books, he came to Harvard in 1994 from Princeton. He is undergoing treatment for prostate cancer.
West, who recently cut a rap CD that celebrates black history, is among the renowned faculty members that Gates lured to Harvard in the 1990s. That group also includes the prominent sociologist William Julius Wilson, who left the University of Chicago in 1996 to join Gates’ self-described “dream team” of black scholars.
Gates’ high-profile hirings often have raised questions about the onset of an academic star system, one that rewards some professors inordinately while leaving others in obscurity. Administrators respond that they must stay in the market for well-known scholars, that an institution’s prestige is directly linked to the public recognition that its faculty members draw.
Another concern about the clout that Gates and his colleagues in Harvard’s Afro-American Studies program enjoy is that it encourages other departments to clamor for their piece of the academic pie, the “OK, where’s mine?” syndrome.
Indeed, just as Summers attempted to mend fences with West and Gates, Harvard’s Latin American Studies Department knocked on the door. Department faculty, seeking a Latino studies center to explore the lives of Americans of Latino origin, reportedly had twice been rebuffed.
Must be flexible
Now, however, their cause has new life, said John Coatsworth, director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, which boasts a faculty of more than 100 people to study Latin American nations.
“Harvard has been challenged by these events [the West-Summers feud] and needs to seize the opportunity,” said Coatsworth, who taught history at the University of Chicago until leaving for Harvard in 1992. “What we have done is try to bring this opportunity to the administration’s attention and suggest various ways it could respond. I think that it will.”
Universities are “responding to pressure” from various groups, from programs in Cuban studies and women’s studies to gay studies and lesbian studies, scholarly sub-categories which constitute “politically and culturally sensitive topics,” Coatsworth admitted.
But universities must be flexible enough to change, to recognize new areas of study and new methods of scholarship, Coatsworth added. “We have academic departments and majors at American universities that were invented in 19th Century Germany.”
Asked if he is worried about being perceived as a troublemaker who is exploiting Summers’ vulnerability in light of the West affair, Coatsworth chuckled. “That does happen. Bless ’em, that’s why universities have tenure systems.”
