Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 1:23 AM Subject: Fwd: Battle of Wills at Harvard
This article from The Chronicle is available online at this address:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i19/19a00801.htm
Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
>From the issue dated January 18, 2002
Battle of Wills at Harvard
By ROBIN WILSON and SCOTT SMALLWOOD
A year ago, Cornel West, the charismatic social critic and famed Afro-American studies professorat Harvard University, took a break from classroom duties and his busy speaking schedule for a brief turn in a Sacramento recording studio with his brother and a childhood friend. Their CD, Sketches of My Culture, was on music-store shelves by September. Over hip-hop beats and a dash of R& B, Mr. West speaks of the black experience.
"Without self-respect, you certainly self-destruct," he intones on one track. "Be true to your history. Therein lies your possibility. ... The past is prologue to your future."
Just a few weeks after the CD was released, Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard's new president, called Mr. West into his office for a private meeting. But it wasn't to congratulate him on his foray into hip-hop. Instead, the president told Mr. West to get busy on a major scholarly work and spoke pointedly to him about taming grade inflation.
When the meeting became public knowledge last month, all hell broke loose.
The suggestions deeply insulted Mr. West, who has written or edited more than 20 books -- many of them popular, one a best seller -- and is at work on more. He and other members of Harvard's star-studded Afro-American studies department, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and William Julius Wilson, began considering a move to Princeton University.
The idea that the "dream team" might leave Harvard created a firestorm of public debate over the roles of both Mr. Summers and Mr. West, and raised co ncerns about academic freedom and affirmative action. But the episode also made clear that some professors quietly support Mr. Summers's efforts to tighten scholarly standards and rein in the Afro-American studies department, which Mr. Summers said in an interview last week will no longer have a blank check at Harvard.
Mr. Summers has called his problems with Mr. West a "misunderstanding." He met with the professor again recently to try to calm the waters and issued a public statement affirming Harvard's commitment to diversity. He even agreed to reconsider a proposal for a Latino studies center that he had previously rejected.
The situation has raised important questions. Is it the role of a university president to comment on a tenured professor's scholarly output? Did Mr. Summers's legendary bluntness backfire? And what is the role of public intellectuals like Mr. West in academe?
A Test of Wills
With two forceful and outspoken players like Mr. West and Mr. Summers, the controversy was bound to become a test of wills. But the added component of race made the situation explosive and gave it legs. "I think if Larry had done this to a professor of economics or comparative literature, the person would have been much more reluctant to make a public stink," says a prominent Harvard professor who asked to remain anonymous. "Because it was a professor of Afro-American studies, it has this political cachet."
Scholars of Afro-American studies have been concerned about Mr. Summers's commitment to them -- and to affirmative action -- since he took over in July. On the watch of Neil L. Rudenstine, Harvard's previous president, the department grew from one faculty member to 16, and its professors became some of the most influential at the university.
Six top members of the department met with Mr. Summers just after he arrived and asked him twice about his views on attracting black faculty members and students. Black professors say they felt the president didn't give a clear answer, leaving them feeling anxious and unsettled. The same thing happened again weeks later when the Association of Black Faculty, Administrators, and Fellows asked Mr. Summers similar questions.
Then, in October, Mr. Summers had a private meeting with Mr. West, where he pushed him to do more scholarly work and made a point of saying that he thought Harvard had a problem with grade inflation. The rest of that conversation is in dispute, including whether, as Mr. West has charged, the president called his CD an embarrassment and questioned his role in Al Sharpton's presidential exploratory committee for 2004.
Mr. West took the comments personally, and so did the rest of his department. Before Mr. Summers arrived, Mr. West was treated like a king each time he walked into the president's office. Now, this new guy -- a brash and ambitious economist who had been treasury secretary during the Clinton administration -- was questioning him? Mr. West simply didn't have to take that. "The one thing I do not tolerate is disrespect, being dishonored, and being devalued," Mr. West said in an interview with Tavis Smiley, a National Public Radio talk-show host, that aired last week.
Since he arrived at Harvard, Mr. Summers has been pushing a kind of back-to-basics message, focusing on the traditional roles of teaching and research and saying he believes outside activities can distract faculty stars from their academic work. "What's most important in the university is the pure pursuit of the truth," Mr. Summers said in a telephone interview last week. "It would be much better if two more books that stood the long test of time were written over the next decade at Harvard than if we created two new centers on issues of the day."
The president says he hasn't met privately with a lot of professors, but such a meeting was appropriate in Mr. West's case because he is a university professor -- the highest rank for faculty members at Harvard -- and "doesn't have a dean with whom he discusses things." Still, Mr. Summers says he has spoken widely with groups and individuals on campus about the same matters he discussed with Mr. West. "The university's most precious resource is its faculty, and faculty contribute in many ways," he says. "But what's most fundamental is their scholarship and teaching."
Professors outside Afro-American studies at Harvard are concerned about what the clash between Mr. Summers and Mr. West may mean for their own independence. "Once someone's a tenured professor, if he wants to write articles for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times instead of doing his scholarship, he has every right to do that," says one professor, who requested anonymity. "Once someone is a tenured professor, they answer to God. It's as simple as that."
Mr. Wilson, the Harvard sociologist, says Afro-American studies professors in particular are being made to feel second-rate. But their work, he says, is cited perhaps more than the scholarship of Harvard professors in any other humanities or social-sciences department. He rattles off the number of Afro-American studies professors who are members of the nation's most prestigious academic societies: five elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (including Mr. West); three elected to the American Philosophical Society (also including Mr. West); and one each to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Sciences. Mr. West is also one of only 20 university professors at Harvard, whose contributions are thought to transcend an individual discipline and thus can teach in any department. They report directly to the president.
The Afro-American studies department is "proud of this record, and we wanted to sustain it, and keep it going, and here we're being painted as folks who lack academic standards," says Mr. Wilson. "It boggles the mind."
A Broad Audience
But several other Harvard professors believe Mr. Summers was right to push Mr. West to spend more time on scholarly works and less on books that reach the masses. "Many of us think that the president's basic expectations are reasonable," says one Harvard professor, who asked not to be named. "This struck us as an instance of common sense being asserted to a guy who hasn't had to answer to that before."
Mr. West's colleagues defend him as a serious scholar who in the last several years has also felt compelled to go beyond the campus. "It's not easy to reach Cornel West's scholarly material from the layperson's point of view," says Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor of law at Harvard who has acted as Mr. West's spokesman during the controversy. That's why in addition to scholarly work, Mr. West speaks in prisons, black churches, and schools, and engages in projects like the CD. "Part of this whole CD project is about trying to make connections between nationally known leaders to create a black identity among our youth," says Mr. Ogletree. "That's an ignored audience."
During the 20 years since he earned his Ph. D. from Princeton, Mr. West has written and edited highly analytical works like The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Post-Analytic Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 1985). The book that made him a nationally known authority was Race Matters, published in 1993 by Beacon Press. Since then, he has co-written books on popular subjects, such as Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995) and The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country (Free Press, 2000).
"This is a man who has gone from very meticulous research to popular speaking," says Ilan Stavans, a professor of Spanish at Amherst College and the author of a wide range of scholarly and popular books, including Latino USA: A Cartoon History (Basic Books, 2000). "I think that type of pattern is a role model. He is talking not only to 10 or 15 students, but to the entire society."
That is partly why Harvard lured him away from Princeton in 1994, scholars say. "One of the reasons that Harvard hired him was because he was a public intellectual," says Gerald Early, a professor of English and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. "He was able to bring a certain kind of audience and renown to the institution." But Mr. Early adds: "I think universities would prefer that people were able to do high-level, specialized scholarship while also speaking to the broad audience. Very few people can do that."
Toni Morrison, the black author and Nobel laureate who is also a professor at Princeton, worked with Mr. West there before he left for Harvard. She calls him "brilliant" but says he is also "on the ground." She adds: "He has a very strong commitment to people who don't have access to the information and education that he has."
Mr. West is described as devoted to his students. He teaches "Introduction to Afro-American Studies" and has missed only one class in his seven years at Harvard. He nearly missed another this fall when he got stuck in Manhattan on September 11. That day, Mr. West told Mr. Gates, who is chairman of the department, that he thought he wouldn't be able to get back to Boston because New York City's tunnels and bridges were closed.
The next morning, Mr. Gates went to meet Mr. West's students to cancel the class. But there was Mr. West. After some Manhattan roads had been reopened, he had driven up early that morning in order to make the class.
'Less of an Open Checkbook'
Mr. Summers has reiterated his support for Afro-American studies, and his hope that its faculty members stay at Harvard. But he told The Chronicle that the department could expect "less of an open checkbook from my administration than the previous one."
Blunt comments like that may hurt him most of all. Although several professors like the basic message, they believe he would be more successful if he toned it down. "He asks very direct questions, and I have no doubts that the questions he's raising are appropriate for a university president," says Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard. But he adds: "I think he needs to learn more about how to listen charismatically. That's what Neil Rudenstine had in spades."
Waiting for Princeton's Offer
Although Afro-American studies professors may have won this round with Larry Summers, it is clear they are facing a whole new world at Harvard. "Black professors were in a quite privileged spot under Rudenstine, and I think they were seeing this as a chance to make their point to Summers in an embarrassing way," says a professor who requested anonymity. But another adds: "The department is not going to get punished, but there will be limits, and I think in that sense, Summers made his point."
Although Harvard officials are portraying the clash as over, it's not. Mr. Gates and K. Anthony Appiah, another Afro-American studies professor and philosopher, are awaiting formal offers from Princeton next month. Mr. Ogletree says Mr. West, who is on medical leave this semester, won't make any decisions about his future until after he recovers from prostate surgery later this month.
"He's working on three major scholarly books," says Mr. Ogletree, who wouldn't say what the books are about because Mr. West's "editors and publishers have their own approach to publicizing them."
But Mr. Ogletree adds: "He's been producing work consistently. And he's not doing any of this because Larry Summers suggested it."
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