Chronicle of Higher Education - web daily - June 20, 2002
Neoconservative Scholars Pull Out of Conference After Learning That Cornel West Will Attend By PIPER FOGG
Several prominent neoconservative scholars and writers have backed out of a conference at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York -- after finding out that Cornel West was among those who would be participating. Organizers of the conference, which will examine the legacy of a neoconservative hero, Sidney Hook, said the scholars objected to Mr. West's presence because they thought he was "not enough of a scholar" of Hook.
"I had never been presented with a list of participants," said Hilton Kramer, an art critic and editor of The New Criterion who had originally agreed to speak at the conference, scheduled for October. "When I saw that Cornel West was a participant, I decided that it wouldn't be appropriate" to attend. He declined to elaborate.
Hook, a philosopher who would have been 100 this year, was a radical Marxist in his younger days but passionately embraced anticommunism later in his life, making him a hero to many neoconservative scholars. In 1985, Ronald Reagan awarded Hook the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in 1989.
"The idea, initially, was to collect a slate of intellectuals from different disciplines and different backgrounds" for a discussion of Hook's work, said Robert B. Talisse, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who is one of the organizers of the conference.
The conference organizers had lined up a heavy-hitting group of neoconservatives that included John Patrick Diggins, a history professor at the CUNY Graduate Center; Mr. Kramer; Irving Kristol, a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute; and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a professor emerita of history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Liberal scholars were also set to attend, among them Christopher Phelps, an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University at Mansfield; Richard Rorty, a philosophy professor at Stanford University; and Robert B. Westbrook, an intellectual historian at the University of Rochester.
Mr. Diggins, Ms. Himmelfarb, and Mr. Kristol are among those joining Mr. Kramer in boycotting the event, conference organizers said. Mr. Diggins, who is in France, was not available for comment. Mr. Kristol and Ms. Himmelfarb declined to comment.
Mr. West was not originally on the program. But in March, after Mr. Rorty dropped out, the organizers looked for a prominent replacement. They chose Mr. West, a philosopher whose writing on race has made him a nationally known figure. Mr. West has been in the news recently, after he decided to leave Harvard University for Princeton University, after a public falling-out with Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers. (See an article from The Chronicle, April 15.)
But conference organizers said they selected Mr. West because of his scholarly work in philosophy, Hook's field. Mr. West is the author of The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), which contains a substantial discussion of Hook's work. Mr. West is also the editor of Post-Analytic Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 1985).
When Mr. Diggins found out about Mr. West's participation, said conference organizers, he threatened to pull out and take others with him if they didn't rescind the invitation to Mr. West.
Matthew Cotter, a history graduate student at CUNY and one of the conference organizers, said he learned in March that Mr. West had agreed to come, but waited six weeks before telling Mr. Diggins, who was his academic adviser last year. Mr. Cotter said he wanted to make sure that Mr. West was definitely coming. "When I broke the news to Jack, he was quite furious," he said. "He questioned Cornel West's scholarship. ... He felt he'd been duped."
Mr. Cotter called the tactics of those who pulled out of the conference "dogmatic." "They seem to be the same tactics Sidney Hook spent his entire intellectual career challenging," he said.
Mr. Phelps agreed. "It's not clear to me how it serves to pull the plug on a conference just because you disagree with a given participant's point of view," he said.