Cornel West Reflects
Posted on October 3rd, 2009 in Uncategorized |
The former Harvard University Professor has written a memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir. He talks about it here with Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, which is a radio station or a blog, I’m not really sure.
On going to Harvard:
But I was working hard. I was a straight-A student, student body president, concert maestro’s first violin, ended up going to Harvard College. Never been to East Coast, never even seen Ivy League universityAnd Harvard was magnificent. Martin Kilson, my dear mentor, Preston Williams, my mentor, as well, they’re at Harvard. John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Roderick Firth—I had a magnificent time at Harvard. And it did change my life, since it exposed me to a much broader array of ideas…
And here he is explaining to Goodman what happened with Larry Summers:
When [Summers] arrived at Harvard, he met with every department other than Afro-American Studies. And so, Skip, my dear brother Skip Gates, knew something was wrong, so Skip Gates had already written a three-page single-spaced letter to Larry Summers when Larry Summers requested to meet with me, because he figured that Summers had something to say to me. And I said, “Why do you have to write that to the president?” I’d never met him before. But Neil Rudenstine, who was magnificent, who had been president, we had no problems with.
And as soon as I walked into the office, he starts using profanity about Harvey Mansfield. I said, “No, Harvey Mansfield is conservative, sometimes reactionary, but he’s my dear brother.” We had just had debates at Harvard. Twelve hundred people showed up. He was against affirmative action; I was for it. That was fine. Harvey Mansfield and I go off and have a drink after, because we have a respect, but deep, deep philosophical and ideological disagreement. He was using profanity, so I had to defend Harvey Mansfield.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, so you’re saying Lawrence Summers was using profanity?
CORNEL WEST: Larry Summers using profanity about, you know, “help me ‘F’ so and so up.” No, I don’t function like that. Maybe he thought that just as a black man, I like to use profanity. I’m not a puritan. I don’t use it myself. I have partners who do. But I don’t like people who feel comfortable using it without my permission and not knowing me, you see what I mean? And then from there, it went on and on. “Well, you supported Bill Bradley, didn’t attend classes.” Not true. “Well, you’re deeply into hip-hop, and it’s an embarrassment.”
There’s a lot more, inclding West’s thoughts on Summers’ presence in the Obama administration….
6 Responses
10/3/2024 10:21 am
I hate to pick nits, but you say West “has written a memoir,” while the Amazon page for the book notes that it was ghost-written by David Ritz, “the co-author of the autobiographies of Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and B.B. King.” Funny to see an academic using a ghost writer, excuse me, “co-author.”
10/3/2024 10:23 am
No, I think that’s a totally fair point, and I just missed it. Not nitpicking at all. In fact, West has gotten in trouble with this before; a few years back, he had a website whose introductory language made it sound like West was the second coming. He obviously didn’t write it and seemed not even to be aware of it, and he took a lot of grief for it—deservedly.
10/3/2024 11:05 am
While we’re nit-picking, Summers didn’t meet with my department either (I was chair all of his five years), or any (humanties) dept. I suspect. Mansfield, Bradley, hip-hop, pretty much what was out there on the LS/CW exchange
10/3/2024 11:18 am
maybe Larry was also upset about the 1000 a night hotel rooms for 1 and 500 dinners for 2 charged to afro-am.
man that aged claret with my dear brother tastes sooooooo good
10/4/2024 11:48 am
Even if Bro West cost much -including the cost of the claret and the hotel rooms- he still taught a very large number of students.
A more appropriate way for Larry to assess his contribution would have been to divide all expenditures -salary, benefits, sabbaticals, claret and hotels- over the rolling average of students Bro West taught over a 3 year period.
Using this simple procedure would reveal that there are many fat cats in fas that are a lot more expensive to the University, even if they don’t stay in expensive hotels or drink expensive wine, because they teach very few students, or don’t teach at all.
But using this way to evaluate the costs and benefits of faculty members to the University would make sense only if the University placed a high value on the education of students, a point questionned in the last issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
I’m not advocating for Harvard banking the expensive claret tastes of its faculty, only suggesting that an appropriate analysis of costs in a university needs to be guided by a prior analysis of what it is that the university values, and then by how each member of the community contributes to that value.
The first paragraph of this book review brings up clearly the question of value. In which of the three groups described by Mr. Stossell would the scholarship of most Harvard faculty fall?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/Stossel-t.html
10/5/2024 11:33 am
Let me stir the pot in this thread a little by saying that West did himself and his intellectual prestige a real disservice in two ways with this memoir: first, by using the aforementioned co-author/ghost writer; second, by letting Tavis Smiley release the book through his vanity publishing imprint rather than letting a real publisher edit, publish, and promote this.
The book itself just looks ugly and aesthetically amateurish and it is receiving what seems to me like a weak promotional push because SmileyBooks has no experience marketing things to a broad national audience. What could have been a very high-profile event pegged to a discussion of black public intellectuals under Obama instead comes off like another vanity project. What a shame.