April 16, 2002 Defector Indignant at President of Harvard By PAM BELLUCK with JACQUES STEINBERG
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 15 — Cornel West, the black studies scholar, said today that he had decided to leave Harvard for Princeton largely because Princeton had made a far more enthusiastic and heartfelt pitch to snare him than Harvard had in trying to retain him.
Speaking out for the first time since Princeton announced his hiring on Friday, Dr. West said in an interview that a series of slights over the last six months by Harvard's new president, Lawrence H. Summers, had culminated in the president's failure to send him a get-well message until only a few weeks ago, more than two months after he underwent surgery for prostate cancer.
By contrast, Dr. West said, the new Princeton president, Shirley M. Tilghman, and the new Princeton provost, Amy Gutmann, had called him almost weekly during his convalescence.
Throughout this period, the Princeton officials were seeking to persuade Dr. West to accept a job offer that they had first extended in earnest in the fall, after Mr. Summers had angered Dr. West at a meeting by questioning the quality of his scholarship and his teaching load in recent years.
"Larry Summers strikes me as the Ariel Sharon of American higher education," Dr. West said today. "He struck me very much as a bull in a china shop, and as a bully, in a very delicate and dangerous situation."
Told of Dr. West's comments, a spokesman for Mr. Summers, Alan Stone, said he did not consider it "fruitful" to respond further to Dr. West.
Mr. Summers sought the meeting with Dr. West last fall after Dr. West gained new attention off campus for working on the political campaigns of Bill Bradley and the Rev. Al Sharpton and for recording a spoken-word CD. (While the recording has often been described as rap, Dr. West said he preferred the Nietzschean phrase "danceable education.")
Dr. West, who has written or edited more than a dozen books, also contended that Mr. Summers had sought to monitor Dr. West's progress on his next scholarly work by requiring that they meet every two to three months. (The professor first disclosed that demand in an interview in January for a forthcoming profile in Vanity Fair magazine, which was faxed to news organizations over the weekend.)
Like the 16 other scholars at Harvard given the elite designation "university professor," Dr. West reported directly to the Harvard president, but he said today that he did not consider Mr. Summers his boss.
"Professors do not have supervisors, brother," Dr. West said today. "Professors are free agents to do their work, because there is a trust in their judgment about how they go about doing that work."
Both men agree that Mr. Summers tried in January and again this month to reach out to Dr. West to resolve their differences. But Dr. West said today that neither effort had swayed him.
He said he had heard Mr. Summers say "I'm sorry" three times during a private meeting in early January, after The Boston Globe first reported their rift. But Dr. West said any good feelings fostered during the meeting were dashed the next morning, when The New York Times quoted Mr. Summers as sounding far less conciliatory in public than he had been in private. (Mr. Summers was quoted as saying, in part, "I regret any misunderstandings there.")
After seeing Dr. West at a memorial service for a colleague late last month, Mr. Summers tried to reach out again, both by phone and in writing, as well as through several surrogates. But Dr. West said he concluded that the effort was too late, and he did not respond. It was then, he said, that he decided that he would return to Princeton, where he taught from 1988 to 1994.
Dr. West, who has usually responded to reporters' inquiries through a Harvard law professor, Charles Ogletree, gave at least one other interview today, to Tavis Smiley on National Public Radio. In that conversation, he also likened Mr. Summers to Prime Minister Sharon of Israel. [end]