Cornel West, the acclaimed social critic and well-known scholar of race and religion who has been feuding with Harvard University’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, is leaving Harvard for Princeton University, where he will be a professor of religion and African-American studies.
Mr. West’s future has been in play since October, when Mr. Summers reportedly questioned his scholarly work and spoke to him about helping to tame grade inflation. Sunday’s edition of The Boston Globe reported that Mr. West is quoted in an interview in the June issue of Vanity Fair as saying that Mr. Summers also wanted to personally review Mr. West’s scholarly work every few months to make sure it was up to par. That suggestion made Mr. West want to resign on the spot, he told Vanity Fair.
Following the meeting, Mr. West said he was insulted by the suggestion that his scholarly work was not up to Harvard’s standards.
An unidentified Harvard official quoted in Vanity Fair said that Harvard administrators do not monitor professors and called the exchange a “regrettable misunderstanding.”
“I am excited to return to the greatest center for humanistic studies in the country,” Mr. West, who was previously a faculty member at Princeton and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy there in 1980, said in a statement released by Princeton. “I look forward to being a part of President [Shirley] Tilghman’s vision that promotes high-quality intellectual conversation mediated with respect.”
Mr. West clearly felt that respect was lacking at Harvard, where he was part of a “dream team” of black-studies scholars who have questioned Mr. Summers’s commitment to their field of study.
Mr. Summers said in a written statement issued by Harvard that the university is “grateful to Cornel West for his significant contributions to Harvard’s academic life, especially the great inspiration he provided to so many students. We will miss him and I wish him every success at Princeton.”
Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard, who lured Mr. West and others to Harvard, on Saturday told The New York Times that he thought Mr. West’s departure was “devastating” for Harvard. In a statement issued by Harvard, he said: “Cornel West’s recruitment to Harvard was crucial in establishing the department’s place of leadership in the field of Afro-American studies. ... He is a beloved professor. He will be sorely missed.”
“It’s great for us,” said Amy Gutmann, Princeton’s provost, of Mr. West’s decision. Ms. Gutmann said she was not bothered by the controversy surrounding Mr. West’s departure from Harvard. “There are thousands of other universities that he could have gone to,” she said. “People’s reasons for leaving are generally complicated.”
However, she added that she would “love for the rest of this to just go away. I hope we can put it behind us.”
Mr. West is the second well-known professor of African-American studies to leave Harvard recently. K. Anthony Appiah announced in January that he would leave Harvard for Princeton. However, Mr. Appiah said his reasons were purely personal. He had been commuting between Boston and New York City, where his partner lives.
In addition to the appointments of Mr. West and Mr. Appiah, Princeton’s board announced on Saturday that Eddie Glaude, formerly a student of Mr. West’s at Princeton, will leave Bowdoin College to join Princeton’s department of religion. Mr. Glaude is a rising young scholar of religious studies.
“They’re putting together an extraordinary group of people known for their tremendous work,” Mr. Glaude said of Princeton in a telephone interview Friday. “It’s a great place for me to continue to mature as a scholar. Something very special is going on there.”
Mr. Glaude, who received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1996, is also a close friend of Mr. West, who is the godfather of his son.
“Cornel was an inspiring teacher of undergraduates and graduate students when he was at Princeton,” said Ms. Gutmann. “Eddie was one of the students he inspired. He’s probably the brightest young star in religious studies. ... This gives us breadth and depth in African-American studies and religious studies.”
Ms. Gutmann said she believes the additions will make Princeton the pre-eminent university in the two areas. “This isn’t the end,” she said of the university’s hires in the two fields. “But it reinforces our commitment to making this an intellectually dynamic community.”
Mr. West’s best-known scholarly work is The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), a history of pragmatism from Ralph Waldo Emerson to the present. The book that made him a nationally known authority was Race Matters, published in 1993 by Beacon Press. Mr. West has also been described as a public intellectual, and he speaks in prisons, black churches, and schools, and has even recorded a CD. He is an activist on many political fronts and was arrested last week in Washington, D.C., in a peaceful demonstration encouraging American military intervention in the Middle East.
He was the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard. At Princeton, he was a faculty member from 1988 through 1994, as the Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion. At both Harvard and Princeton, a university professorship is the highest rank for faculty members, a special designation that carries many perks.
Princeton trustees also announced the appointment of Chang-rae Lee, the author of Native Speaker, a novel that tells the story of a Korean-American outsider who is involved in spying on a Korean-American councilman. The book won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the American Book Award. (See an article from The Chronicle, April 7, 1995.) Mr. Lee will leave Hunter College of the City University of New York to become a professor in the Council of the Humanities and Program in Creative Writing.
Background articles from The Chronicle: