West Matters

When the 10 participants in FM’s panel discussion on Afro-American studies arrived at the dimly lit Adams House Conservatory, they found only a dark, rectangular wood table instead of a more metaphorically satisfying round setting. The table may have been narrow, but the discussion was broad. Each of the 10 people that crowded around the table’s misshapen edges came from a different point on the political spectrum. Ross Douthat, the stately editor of the Harvard Salient, sat straight and tall on one end of the table, while Gerard McGeary, the clean-cut Campus Outreach Director of the Harvard College Democrats, manned the other end. Sujean Lee—the goddess of the Undergraduate Council herself—sat at the table’s midpoint.

The students were supposed to come together to talk for one hour about current issues surrounding Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, but the discussion of a single encounter between President Lawrence H. Summers and Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 quickly turned into a much larger and longer debate—encompassing such issues as the role of the intellectual in American society, the conduct of our rookie president and quasi-racism among Harvard’s upper-crust alumni.

An edited transcript of the discussion follows.

Guests:

Moderator:
Kate L. Rakoczy ’04: Faculty reporter, The Harvard Crimson

McCarthy: There is one thing I would like to talk about that very much disturbs me. I spend a fair amount of extracurricular time working alumni events and working with the Alumni Association in particular, and I get to spend time with some of the older alums, some of the very much whiter alums and wealthier alums. And because of what I look like they tend to speak freely around me because they don’t know really what I do or what I think or that I’ve been seen at Living Wage rallies and elsewhere. And so they talk to me in the bathroom of the Faculty Club between meetings. I was at the fall meeting of the Alumni Association this past weekend, and I was so struck by the number of people who assumed that this problem was something that was generated by West. They assumed that this was something Cornel West blew out of proportion. They assumed that Cornel West had made this a problem. They assumed that Summers had a legitimate grudge because they assumed Cornel West was somehow not of the caliber of someone like, say, Harvey Mansfield, or some other heavily-endowed professors at Harvard. And it seems to me that we need to resist that, and that it is there.

I know that people have written to Summers to congratulate him on leaning into this uppity man over in the Barker Center. And that really concerns me. I don’t know how widespread it is, but it’s certainly there and I want to keep in mind that Summers is hearing lots of voices. There may be people, like many of us, who say, “You know what. You screwed up, Larry. You stepped on someone’s toes. You may have gone further than that and really disrespected someone because you have false information.” But for every one of those voices he’s hearing, he’s also hearing voices that are saying, “Great job. Go get him.” And those people think that they own the place. That’s a huge problem, and I think the assumption that somehow West’s scholarship may not be up to the level it is, is an assumption, especially when we haven’t even read it. Think of Lani Gunier. When she was supposed to be the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Bill Clinton and those that sunk her nomination in Congress never read her stuff. There is an assumption, perhaps, that black excellence is exceptional or somehow out of place or outside the norm. There is that notion that black excellence is not supposed to be too widespread. I think that when we position people like Cornel West and Skip Gates as the sort of paradigmatic examples of black excellence things like this unleash the possibility for people to question black excellence and to talk shit about black excellence in a way that is really deeply racist.

Douthat: But Tim, don’t you think that that is something that Cornel West brings on himself by being basically outside of his scholarship. He’s not among Harvard intellectuals, but he’s a bomb threat to public intellectuals. He’s someone who likes going out and spreading controversial things, like his comment on September 11th. Inevitably, he does this much more than anyone else in the Af-Am department. I think if this had been an issue between Skip Gates and Larry Summers you would have had fewer people at the Alumni Association saying, “Way to go, Summers.” I mean, obviously, you would have had some who are going to be racist and frame it as such, but I mean, Cornel West is by his own choice a polarizing figure.

McCarthy: No question. But that doesn’t give people the right to question whether or not he deserves to be here in the position that he is in.

Douthat: Sure.

McCarthy: If he says that September 11th has niggerized America, yes, that’s going to alienate people and that’s going to piss people off, and they are going to be like, “God, why is he saying that on C-SPAN?!” But the fact of the matter is that doesn’t mean he is any less excellent. It just means that he is using the platform he has because he has earned that space, because he has done a lot of stuff that is quite excellent. He is using that space to raise issues that other people might not raise. And as someone who likes to throw bombs and talk shit myself, I think I’m glad he has one of those platforms, and that it’s so far up. I think we all have positions that we want people to listen to us on. I mean certainly, we talk about leadership all the time. Everyone at Harvard is always talking about leadership. Why do we want to be leaders? Because we want platforms where people will listen to us.

Douthat: But the price you pay for that is that people are going to make judgments about you without having read your 1979 book on the American evasion of philosophy. They are going to make judgments about you not just based on the things like Race Matters, but on things like what you say on C-SPAN.

McCarthy: But my point is that the questions don’t have to be about whether or not he deserves to have the University professorship based on his work, but those questions can be phrased as, “You said something that really bothered me. You said something that I completely disagree with.” Not, “You said something that makes you any less excellent or unfit to be here.” There’s a difference.

Douthat: But I’m just saying that the people you’re running into in the bathroom, knowing that Cornel West is a bomb-thrower of a sort, their reaction is simply going to be that if a bomb is thrown, well, who throws the bombs most of the time?

McCarthy: But you throw bombs every week!

Douthat: Right, but I expect people to go into a bathroom and say, “Ross Douthat is a nut.” I mean that comes with the territory, especially in the Barker Center.

Breece: I’ve never heard Cornel West be unreasonable and throw a bomb, as you call it. He’s a little bit too polite for that in the speeches that I’ve heard and what I’ve read.

DeAraujo: I have to disagree with what was just said. Because I think that if he is continuously making comments that alienate most people, most Americans, mainstream, his peers, white people, then that could make him unfit. Okay, I’m actually kidding with some of those. But who is funding a University professorship? That guy you were talking to in the bathroom who is sending a million-dollar check.

I doubt Middle America takes Harvard seriously at all. I think it’s almost a liability, especially in the political sense, to say you went to Harvard. Al Gore, of course, tried to hide that. But I think the case is there that those comments could make West unfit to have such a prestigious position, to have such a huge platform. He has to be responsible for that platform. We talked earlier about President Summers discussing with his faculty about how to deal with September 11th. The president realizes that the Harvard name that they so zealously try to protect from being used by the people carries a lot of weight with it, and you have to use it responsibly. It reflects so poorly not only on the institution, but on alums, on people who will graduate in a year and a half from now. It reflects poorly on everyone.

Okunseinde: I don’t think that is irresponsible.

Rakoczy: I think we are entering into a discussion on freedom of speech.

Losier: Who defines what is responsible here?

Okunseinde: I think what you are talking about here would be more of an issue if he was trying to win a popularity contest. Because what you said before, that he is going to alienate too many people and that is irresponsible, what is irresponsible about that? I think people who are truly progressive are going to have tons of people out there who don’t want to hear what you are going to say. I think that the only reason why you think it is dangerous for us to say it is because a lot of people won’t want to hear it.

Douthat: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. No one is suggesting that Cornel West is saying things that should get him fired from Harvard, or anything like that. All we are saying is that Cornel West has become in the past five or 10 years a polemicist. I mean, if you open up the Cornel West Reader or Race Matters or read any of his op-eds, he’s saying things that—while they aren’t utterly loony—they are of a certain extremely left wing stripe that is—I mean it’s a polemic. I like polemics, there is nothing wrong with writing polemics—I hope, for my own sake. But the point is that you are going to build up a certain public image, and it just seems that you (McCarthy) were suggesting that there was something quasi-racist about all these white alums having this impression that Cornel West must not deserve to be here because he is doing XYZ. I’m sure that there are such people, but I’m sure the majority of those white alums just have the impression of Cornel West that he has cultivated himself as a left-wing polemicist. And so they are thinking to themselves, “What is this left-wing polemicist doing with a University professorship?” And they may be wrong, his scholarship may have been impeccable, but he has created this image for himself.

Breece: So, are you [Douthat] agreeing with him [motioning to DeAraujo] that Harvard needs to be about the business of myth-making and continuing to maintain a myth of Harvard? Isn’t that basically what you are saying, that Harvard has a name and a lot of weight comes with it?

McCarthy: Are you [Douthat and DeAraujo] suggesting then that if you are at the vanguard of your craft, you are a public intellectual with a wide audience and that because of that you should toe the line and stay mainstream and say exactly what Middle America would want to hear? You know, I said at the beginning of the year at a rally that we should think before we bomb and that got me put as number 32 on Lynne Cheney’s list of subversive academics. The fact of the matter is that there are lots of people out there, many, many people who e-mailed me and called me when they say that and said, “Good for you.” Including many of my classmates who went to Harvard with me and graduated from here and they said, “Good for you. Thank God you’re using whatever little platform you have to say these kinds of things and raise these kinds of issues.” And if I’m getting that kind of thing, Cornel West must be getting it 150,000-fold, and I think that that is a responsibility—talk about responsibility—to use the position he has to raise the kind of questions he does. I’ve never heard him say anything vindictive, hurtful, spiteful, anti-American, any of these things that people charge him with. And I think some people are quick to charge him with these things because they have some stuff going on that makes them uncomfortable with the fact that we have a black as a University professor. I will say that. There are racist white alums who don’t want Cornel West to teach at this school, much less in the position that he is.

Breece: And to sympathize with that kind of intellectual lethargy is something I will not be a proponent of at all.

DeAraujo: First of all, I don’t sympathize with that point of view. Obviously I’m waiting for the day when there’s a Latino University professor. We should be able to judge as members of the Harvard community. People outside that community see Harvard as an example, as an institution that leads, and with that in mind we can make decisions. And maybe I’m buying into the Globe article where they tried to link him with Sharpton, but that is not who Professor West is, and you can’t let him—or even if he brings it upon himself—he just can’t become that.

Gayle: Well, I think it is very much who he is, with this whole freedom of speech notion and academic freedom. Look at Professor Mansfield, he can say whatever the hell he wants.

DeAraujo: And he was criticized overtly—and he was wrong.

Gayle: Well, you can certainly judge people when you do it, though you need to do it respectfully. And that is what is at the heart of the issue with Professor West. I mean, Professor West left the meeting feeling like he was disrespected. To bring it back to this whole situation, that’s the whole way freedom of speech should work. If you are going to judge someone, do it respectfully. I can’t stand Professor Mansfield, to be honest, but I respect him as an academic and I respect what he does, and he certainly has the right to say and do what he wishes. Now, will I challenge him should he open his mouth again? Yes. Will I do it respectfully? There are ways to go about it.

On the Dream Team

McCarthy: One of the resentments in the Afro-American studies field—and it is a field of study—is that this department here has taken on a kind of iconographic status in the realm of academia. One of the things that disturbs me is that we talk about that history—and history changes as we incorporate questions about race and power, equality and inequality—is that the only historian in the African-American studies department is Evelyn Higginbotham. And she is never mentioned within the cohort of folks who always seem to represent the field here. It seems to me that if the primary charge of that department is going to be to ask questions of history and culture and art and all these things, as it should be, we need to focus more on the modes of inquiry rather than the people who are doing the inquiring. I think the first priority should be about method and the kinds of things we are studying. The fact that everyone outside of Harvard is talking about Cornel West and Larry Summers and whether Skip Gates and Kwame Appiah are going to go with Cornel and not about what Higginbotham or Tommie Shelby is doing or about Jamaica Kincaid is emblematic of a larger misfocus.

Douthat: I think it is possible that this could be good for the department in a way. It could of course be disastrous as well, but I think that if the department can weather something like this, can weather having two of three or four of its best faculty leave, then that would be a great success. Because it seems to me that as Tim said, right now from an exterior perspective the Af-Am department is defined by the fact that we have the best black professors in America, not by the fact that we’re doing Af-Am studies better than anyone else. This is the sad position of higher education, that any time you have six or eight big names in one place, people are going to focus on this dream team idea, but it is still not ultimately what a department in this university wants be about, I think.

On the cd

Gayle: Are we judging the actual work itself, or the medium through which it is depicted? I haven’t heard anyone questioning what is actually said on the CD. All I’ve heard us questioning is the fact that it’s a rap CD.

Douthat: OK. I’ll question it. I’ve listened to it and I think that as art, it’s embarrassingly bad, it’s another failure and if I made it, I’d be embarrassed. And I’m not trying to question the validity of spoken word or rap or any of those traditions. I just think that Cornel West has made a rather bad spoken word CD where he says a bunch of rather banal things that are not terribly interesting.

McGeary: Hip hop is a big movement among the youth. And a majority of students who Professor West is going to be teaching, is going to be trying to connect with, have in some way been touched by the hip-hop movement, hip-hop culture. And so for him to experiment in sort of this art form, I felt was a way of improving his teaching skills. And sort of doing some inquiry that gives him a more authentic voice when he’s talking about youth culture, when he’s talking about black youth culture. So I thought it was perfectly legitimate for him to sort of explore this art form.

Douthat: But, my understanding of it, and obviously nobody will ever really know what went on at that meeting, was that it wasn’t just that President Summers called him in and said, “What the heck are you doing recording a rap CD?” This was sort of a larger criticism of Cornel West over the last five years; I mean it hasn’t just been recording a rap CD. It’s been acting and working on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s next presidential campaign. It’s been participating in student protest. It’s been, and I mean this is just according to reports, that Summers questioned him about reports he heard of West missing Af-Am lectures in order to go on speaking tours and a variety of things. I mean, none of them may have been true, but I did think that if some of them were true it would be legitimate for a University president to speak to a University professor about such things. I mean I don’t think anyone thinks that President Summers is going to take away Cornel West’s tenure or stifle his academic freedom or prevent him from publishing books.

McCarthy: One of the things that I do know, because one of his head TFs for the three major courses that he teaches is one of my closest friends, is that he has not missed a class since he’s been here. In fact, on September 11th, Cornel was in Times Square. He apparently called Skip Gates and said, “I’m not going to be able to get out of Manhattan because no one is getting out of Manhattan, and I’m not going to be back for my 11 o’clock lecture tomorrow.” And Skip Gates went and informed Martha Nadell, my friend, that he was going to show up and cancel classes the first day. When he showed up the next day, Cornel West suddenly walked in because he had borrowed a friend’s car and drove from Manhattan in the morning so he could be at his class. There are very few people who teach at this university, there are very few people who attend this university who have that level of commitment to what they do and have that sort of moral imperative to be where they’re supposed to be.

On the media

DeAraujo: I think in defense of President Summers, he never made any of his views of the way Cornel West was comporting himself public. One of the underlying factors here is that all of us have indirectly gotten our information from the Boston Globe. It’s been framed in a very political way by the Boston Globe which, frankly, as a Boston native I know has a very poor relation with Harvard University. So President Summers hasn’t made any of these public comments. We actually don’t know what went on in the conversation. So I think it’s unfair to take, really, the way The New York Times and the Boston Globe have framed it and say that there’s also some great tension. Anthony Appiah left because he’d been planning it. I think President Summers got a real raw deal from the Boston Globe, from The New York Times. They wanted the story. They created it.

Okunseinde: And I think the way journalism is now, is that if it’s a black person, they’re going to bring in they’re black, whether or not it’s relevant whatsoever. It’s always going to be dropped in. So if you’re going to report on “Oh, he’s one of the forethinkers of his generation,” then it’s “He’s one of the black forethinkers,” or “He’s one of the forethinkers of the black generation.” So, it might not have even been relevant, but it would be brought in. Then, I think someone would’ve seen it, would’ve seen the connection. And you always want to bring in the black-white issue.

Losier: I think it’s also an issue of power as well. If you look at what happened with the sit-in and the way the contentious debate between the sides took place, it was always about who had the power. Who had the power to negotiate? Who controlled? Who had the high ground, to a degree? Is the president going to be forced to do whatever this black professor wants him to do? Is Cornel West going to be able to stand up for what he thinks is right and speak his mind? Or does he have to follow the dictates of a university president? Race tinges it in a way, but it’s very much about power. I think it’s key that it follows the sit-in, which was also covered along the same lines, especially in the conservative press.

On Summers’ conduct

Hsu: I don’t know how everyone else feels, but I think that the reason why there are tenured positions is for a certain level of intellectual freedom. The Afro-American studies department—or any ethnic studies department—should in general steer away from whatever Eurocentric standards may be used to apply to academia. And the existence of tenure and academic freedom is what allows more creativity and extension in these fields. If one person believes that a spoken word CD is not academia, then it is not in his position to pass judgment on someone else who has tenure and thus bears the charter, mandate and obligation to explore his creativity.

McGeary: Professor West gets criticized all the time, in many forms, and he accepts criticism very, very well. One of the things he said is that it was maybe not about what was said by President Summers, but about how it was said. And what I’ve heard from many professors—black, white, male and female—is that President Summers’ people skills aren’t up to snuff. In the beginning, one of the things that worried me about this whole issue is, “What is going to happen in the future because of his leadership abilities?” If he is going to make criticisms he has to know how to do that in a diplomatic way. If all our professors are feeling insulted by our president, the quality of academic work at this school is going to go down. I think this is indicative of a larger problem.

DeAraujo: I think you can’t completely fault Summers. Frankly, a lot of professors act like prima donnas, and I think they are the ones with thin skin and fragile egos. Rudenstine deferred a lot to the faculty—that is the way he did stuff. This way isn’t wrong, however. I don’t think we can just chalk this up as a character flaw.

Breece: He’s also the member of a corporation. He has been under a lot of pressure especially if we place this entire moment historically—it’s weird to consider yourself as a part of an historical moment, but I think the events of September 11 kind of forced us to. President Summers, and I care not to speculate which way, seems to have been under a lot of pressure to accommodate the faculty in certain ways. He certainly called faculty members in, had meetings with departments telling them they needed to be more patriotic. He is never above criticism for that, just as the members of the Af-Am department should never be above criticism.

Lee: This exemplifies the difference in leadership styles between Rudenstine and Larry Summers. This would not have happened under Neil Rudenstine, and it epitomizes the way that he is different, in just that Summers is more active, more vocal, more aggressive, and I think that we should appreciate that. Even toward the student body it carries over. In an optimistic way, at least we see that he has some life in him.

McCarthy: There is another aspect of this that I think is important that is sort of lying beneath the surface. I know for a fact that he has pissed people off at the Ed School and at the Divinity School and at the Law School and at the Kennedy School. That’s not a great start. And the other thing that concerns me as a humanist is the way Summers seems to be targeting just those in the humanities. Could that actually be at the root of this? Part of the reason why he has come in so anti-Rudenstine is the fact that he doesn’t particularly have any warm embrace for the humanities. And whether or not that means that the humanities are being cursed and that they are moving out of fashion and will soon die a slow and quite miserable death is a question, and I hope it doesn’t, for my own job security in the future. But it seems to me that we’ll only move on from this if we learn from it, and I’m not convinced yet—and I’m more skeptical of power than a lot of people are at Harvard—I’m not convinced that he has necessarily learned from this. I mean, I think he has a certain agenda. He came in with one. The Corporation helped him to have it, but I’m not sure he’s learned. There seems to be a pattern of things he is emphasizing and reporting and a pattern of things he is not supporting and I am concerned about the things he is not emphasizing and not supporting.