At Harvard, Things Are Getting Hot
Posted on June 6th, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments »
In the Globe, Marcella Bombardieri scoops the Timesâtrust me on this oneâand reports on those rumors about the return of Cornel West that we’ve all been hearing for months.
Bombardieri writes, accurately, that…
Perhaps no other event at Harvard could serve as a greater symbolic rebuke of Summers than a decision to rehire West, a scholar of religion and political philosophy. Summers’s dispute with West in 2001 produced the first major controversy of his presidency, giving him a reputation among campus critics as a bully whose approach to leadership favored attack over persuasion. Conversely, his champions saw it as evidence of a refreshing boldness lacking among most college presidents.
And as I reported in Harvard Rules, Summers later tried to spread the bogus rumor that the foundation of his disagreement with West stemmed from the fact that West had “a sexual harassment problem’âa story that you’ll never see in the New York Times, because Summers was smart enough to tell it to the New York Times, at an off-the-record meeting with the editorial board.
Another reason is that the charge is just so ugly, some people simply choose not to believe it, even though it’s not hard to confirm and has never been denied by Summers or anyone associated with him. Bombardieri doesn’t mention it, though she surely knows of it….
In any case, Skip Gates’ desire to bring West backâand, from what I hear, West’s understandable desire to return, thus truly sticking it to Larry Summersâput Derek Bok and Jeremy Knowles in an uncomfortable position. Bring West back, and you get racist conservatives and crotchety alumni up in arms. Reject the effort, and you have liberals and black professors mad at you.
My guess? Bok and Knowles would rather piss off conservatives than liberals and members of their own faculty….