Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  Visibly upset. “I believe in diversity, but I also believe in excellence,” Summers snapped.

  If the mood in the room had been precarious before, this remark pushed it off a cliff. Neil Rudenstine had believed that diversity was a prerequisite for excellence; Summers seemed to be suggesting an incompatibility between the two.

  “In retrospect, he might not have meant that,” remembered Higginbotham. Possibly Summers had simply misspoken. Still, when he inserted the but between diversity and excellence, then “all of a sudden, we looked at each other and thought, ‘Oh dear, I wonder if he thinks these two things don’t go together. Because we certainly think that excellence and diversity go together, and we don’t want anybody here who isn’t excellent.’”

  Gates changed the subject by telling Summers about Transition, a journal devoted to black studies, which Rudenstine had funded with monies from the president’s office. Gates hoped that Summers would continue to support Transition. Still annoyed, Summers wrapped up, saying, “I’m judging everything on a case-by-case basis. Make the case.”

  After less than half an hour, Summers was gone, and the professors’ moods ranged from puzzled to anxious to grim. “My God,” said one, “it’s not just that he’s not going to help us; it’s that he wants to destroy us.”

  For the next several months, Gates didn’t hear from Summers. Then, one day, in early October, he got a phone call from the president. There was something on his mind. He had been hearing some worrisome things about Cornel West, things that made him wonder if West was upholding his responsibilities as a faculty member. There were rumors that West had skipped classes to campaign for New Jersey senator Bill Bradley in the 2000 Democratic presidential primary. That he was contributing to the problem of grade inflation at Harvard. And that he was neglecting his scholarship, publishing popular books rather than serious academic works.

  Summers was very concerned. He wanted to meet with West as soon as possible.

  In the months to come, Cornel West would be labeled an egomaniac, a con man, a charlatan, a tenured radical, and a media whore. None of these caricatures explained him. West’s story did not easily translate onto the pages of the daily newspapers whose columnists and editorial writers were so quick to judge him.

  West was born on June 2, 1953, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of an Air Force administrator and an elementary school principal who had met at Fisk University, an all-black college in Nashville, Tennessee. His paternal grandfather was a Baptist minister. When West was just a few years old, the family moved to Sacramento, California, where he was raised.

  Growing up in the 1960s, West was a dissident and nonconformist from an early age. When he was just nine, he refused to stand and salute the American flag along with the rest of his fourth-grade class. His teacher slapped him. He slapped her back, and was promptly suspended from school.

  But whether in school or not, West had a passion for learning. As a kid, he spent countless hours reading in a traveling bookmobile, a public library bus that traveled to neighborhoods whose residents didn’t have easy library access. One of the books he read was a biography of Harvard graduate Theodore Roosevelt, whose story so inspired West that he decided he wanted to go to Harvard after finishing at Sacramento’s John F. Kennedy High School. Harvard accepted him, and in 1970 West began his freshman year in Cambridge. He lived just across the hall from William Samuelson, the son of economist Paul Samuelson and Larry Summers’ cousin. One year later, Larry Summers would begin his first year down Massachusetts Avenue at MIT.

  Thirty-five years ago, there weren’t many students at Harvard like Cornel West, a lower-middle-class black man whose enthusiasm for scholarship was as urgent as his commitment to social justice. He loved Harvard and all its riches—brilliant professors such as the philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick, gifted classmates, libraries with their millions of volumes, like nothing he’d ever seen before. “You could get lost in Widener Library for two years,” he remembered. “Man, you’d come out knowing something.” At the same time, West wanted to make Harvard more responsive to the social exigencies of the era. He became president of Harvard’s Black Student Association, a radical student group at the time, and in 1972 the group took over President Bok’s office in a protest over Harvard investments in Angola.

  West worked to help pay his way through school, washing dishes and working “dorm crew,” a job that still exists at Harvard. Rather than having students clean the bathrooms inside their suites, the university pays other undergraduates to do the dirty work. It’s one of the better-paying campus jobs, so dorm crew slots tend to go to the neediest students. As have hundreds of Harvard students before him and after, Cornel West literally cleaned the shit of his more affluent classmates.

  Even so, he ran out of money. Unable to pay for four years of college, West took sixteen classes in his junior year, twice the usual eight Harvard students take per year. He graduated magna cum laude in June of 1973 and headed to Princeton to start graduate work in philosophy. After finishing his doctorate in 1980, he taught at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, Yale, and Princeton over the next decade.

  As a young professor, West cut a charismatic figure. He is tall and slender, with a large afro and heavy, black-rimmed glasses. Following the model of 1950s jazz musicians, he wears three-piece black suits with black wingtips, a black tie, and a white shirt. And he has a physical intensity and a contagious passion for his material. A West lecture can glide smoothly from Dante to Nietzsche to Chekhov to Duke Ellington. Onstage, West sounds more like a preacher than a professor. It is a performance, but not an act; for someone so dramatic, West is strangely lacking in self-consciousness. “He is always the same—completely guileless,” said one scholar who knows West well. “There’s a kind of public Cornel,” the man you see at a lecture or conference. “And then you go have a drink with him afterward, and he’s exactly the same person.”

  West’s 1993 book, Race Matters, accelerated his growing renown and popularity. Written in response to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the book is a manifesto for black progress and racial healing—criticizing, for example, black anti-Semitism and calling for improved relations between blacks and Jews. It also attacks American capitalism and the market economy, which West sees as a kind of drug dealer to black America. He warns of “unbridled capitalist market forces…that have devastated black working and poor communities…. The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism.” Race Matters sold half a million copies, and West acquired a reputation as a public intellectual—a scholar who used his learning to address a popular audience on topics of current interest. He began popping up on the television talk-show circuit, making the rounds on CNN, PBS, and C-SPAN.

  Gates and Appiah wanted West at Harvard, and in 1994, with Rudenstine’s support, they got him. While West had liked Princeton and appreciated the intimacy of a small community that valued undergraduate teaching, what was going on in Af-Am at Harvard felt too important to miss. “I wanted to be part of the team,” he said. “Skip’s team.”

  Four years later, Rudenstine elevated West to the position of University Professor, the highest status a scholar can attain at Harvard. President James Bryant Conant created the position in 1935 because, in the words of Harvard historian Richard Norton Smith, Conant wanted the University Professor to “roam as he wished across disciplinary bounds, teaching as he saw fit, conducting research or simply pondering.” West and sociologist William Julius Wilson would be the first two blacks appointed University Professors, and West certainly roamed: he taught in the college, the divinity school, and the law school.

  West’s promotion prompted subterranean grumbling among the faculty, some of whom took it as another sign of Rudenstine’s favoritism towards African American Studies and sniped that West’s record of publications didn’t merit the position. Though he had published more than a dozen books, the most recent ones were popular works, more journa
lism than scholarship. Sometimes he had a co-writer; other times he was only the editor. He’d co-written or co-edited three books with Skip Gates alone.

  Even as West’s scholarship grew shallower, he broadened his political activities. In 1995 he supported and attended the “Million Man March” organized by Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan. In 2000 he campaigned for Bill Bradley, who was running for the Democratic nomination for president. After Bradley dropped out, West stumped for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. And in August 2001, the controversial New York activist Al Sharpton announced that West would be heading his presidential exploratory committee.

  At the same time that West was involved with black political figures whom many critics considered anti-Semitic, he was vigorously speaking out against black ant-Semitism. If it wasn’t a contradiction, it was certainly a gray area. But West argued that such moral absolutes were a luxury he could not afford. Like Skip Gates, he walked a tightrope between blacks and whites, albeit in a slightly different way. Gates liked high society, and it liked him; West felt out of place amid rich white people. He was oriented toward the streets, the neighborhoods. That was where he could make a difference. And sometimes that meant that you had to mix with flawed characters.

  In 2001 West recorded a spoken-word CD called Sketches of My Culture. It sounded like a Beat poet riffing to a hip-hop soundtrack. Though the album would, in subsequent months, repeatedly be described as a “rap” record, with all that that label implied to many whites, its inspirational themes were intended as an unambiguous rebuke of the misogynistic, violent side of rap. “Since black musicians play such an important role in African-American life,” West argued, “they have a special mission and responsibility: to present beautiful music which both sustains and motivates black people and provides visions of what black people should aspire to.”

  It was all about communication, West said, about teaching young people. If you were a black academic from the inner city, you couldn’t just lecture to upper-crust kids at Harvard. You knew they were going to make it. You had to remember where you came from—and who was still back there. It was your responsibility to be an intellectual, a well-dressed black man who carried himself with dignity, because black youths needed to see the choices they had, that they were capable of becoming other than basketball players and hip-hop artists. But you also had to speak to them in a way that they could relate to. Maybe white professors didn’t—couldn’t—appreciate the position West was in.

  And, yes, ego was a factor too. Cornel West was human. He liked being recognized on the street, liked the sight of a rapt audience. And, yes, West was making money. When he charged it, his fee for speaking at universities and conferences had risen to $10,000 an appearance. But would it make more sense to live in an ivory tower, to cede young black America to Suge Knight or other apparent apostles of the thug life? For West, that would have been an abdication of responsibility, a betrayal of self. After all, he was a man who had learned to read great books in a bookmobile, a traveling public library. That’s what Cornel West wanted to be—a traveling public library that could change kids’ lives the way that, decades before, a bus filled with books had changed his.

  Depending on your point of view, that self-image was either imperative or egocentric—and, no question, West’s persona and politics were making him enemies. Two of them were Martin Peretz, then a Harvard professor and owner of The New Republic, and Leon Wieseltier, the magazine’s literary editor. Peretz had been a civil rights activist while earning his doctorate at Harvard in the 1960s, a true believer in the political solidarity of blacks and Jews. In the aftermath of that decade, he had grown markedly more conservative, somewhat disillusioned, generally distrustful of left-wing politics, and ever more deeply steeped in his Jewish faith and culture. In 1993 Peretz endowed a Harvard professorship, the Martin Peretz Chair in Yiddish Literature, with a gift of several million dollars. He is a force to be reckoned with around Harvard—wealthy, part-owner of one of the last mainstream journals in the country to review academic books, absolutely fearless and unafraid to make enemies, while at the same time socially active, throwing catered dinner parties at his tasteful home in an expensive neighborhood near campus. For many years he taught undergraduate seminars at Harvard, often taken by ambitious young men who wanted to work at The New Republic.

  Like Peretz, Leon Wieseltier takes faith seriously; a former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, he is a scholar of Jewish culture. Like West, Wieseltier has an attraction to the dramatic; West had bit parts in the second and third Matrix movies, while Wieseltier had a cameo on The Sopranos. He is a striking man, the Lou Reed of literary editors. Tall and so thin as to be almost gaunt, Wieseltier has long, flowing white hair and dresses in untucked shirts, black jeans, and cowboy boots. And, like Peretz, he uses his position at The New Republic to reward those writers and politicians of whom he approves and rebuke those who do not meet his standards.

  Cornel West was a member of the latter group. In 1995, Wieseltier wrote a scathing essay, “All and Nothing at All,” portraying West as an incoherent thinker obsessed with his public persona—an essay that, by several accounts, greatly influenced Larry Summers. “Since there is no crisis in America more urgent than the crisis of race, and since there is no intellectual in America more celebrated for his consideration of the crisis of race, I turned to West, and read his books,” Wieseltier began. “They are almost completely worthless…monuments to the devastation of a mind by the squalls of [literary] theory.”

  Wieseltier noted that many American writers had been lamenting a paucity of public intellectuals. They fretted that scholarship had grown too obtuse, too removed from public discourse. But, Wieseltier asked, was being a public intellectual mostly an excuse for avoiding the hard work of serious thinking? “Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question,” Wieseltier suggested. “Where are the private intellectuals? Philosophers have for too long been trying to change the world. Perhaps it is time to think about it.”

  Wieseltier’s essay was eagerly consumed in the halls of academe, where, as in all fields of human endeavor, a juicy takedown of a successful colleague appeals to people’s baser instincts. And, to be sure, Wieseltier put into words what some academics already felt but did not care to state in public.

  Yet even when they had their political differences, many of West’s Harvard colleagues liked him. Alan Dershowitz, ever vigilant about anti-Semitism, didn’t think much of his colleague’s empathy for Al Sharpton, but he never believed that West was anti-Semitic and he considered West an inspiring teacher. Government professor Harvey Mansfield, a conservative, had known West since the latter was an undergraduate, when he’d taken courses taught by Mansfield. “I like Cornel,” Mansfield said. “The way that he presents himself to the world—his hairstyle, the black suit—doesn’t offend me, as it does some.”

  Nor did Wieseltier’s attack hurt West among Harvard students; West remained one of the university’s most popular professors. Behind a lectern, he was motion, energy, and intensity—the polar opposite of, say, Martin Feldstein. “He resonated with people,” said a student named Johanna Paretzky, who graduated in 2003. The daughter of a black father and white, Jewish mother, Paretzky emphasized that West’s appeal wasn’t just to African American students. “White, black, it didn’t matter. He was just completely invested in what he had to say.”

  West’s primary course, African American Studies 10, was a survey of blacks in American history and literature. But “he would stand up there and say, ‘None of this is history, it’s all now,’” Paretzky remembered. West’s emphasis on the current-day relevance of his material made Paretzky feel greater enthusiasm for studying it; this wasn’t just stuff you talked about in class and then discarded when you went out into the real world. The annual CUE Guide reviews showed that many students shared Paretsky’s feelings: West consistently earned a 4.6 or4.7 out of a possible score of 5, significantly higher than Larry Summers had scored among his undergraduate
students.

  West’s importance extended beyond the classroom. At an institution where students chronically complain that the faculty are too busy and self-important to care about them, West was one professor who would actually engage with undergraduates. “He was a pop star, but in the small ways of creating community, he was important,” said Krishnan Subrahmanian, the 2003 class marshall. “You’d see him walking down the street and he’d say, ‘What’s up, brother?’ He was inspirational, passionate. He made people care.” West seemed to know everyone—he’d call you “brother” or “sister”—and when he saw someone he knew, he’d give that person a warm hug, get immersed in an impromptu conversation about anything from a new translation of Virgil to the latest Prince CD. It could take Cornel West half an hour just to make the five-minute traverse across Harvard Yard, so many people wanted to talk to him—and he to them.

  Harvard professors have a reputation for not being particularly grateful when students come to their office hours, the allotted time students can visit them to discuss material in person. Some professors make students call for appointments weeks in advance; students quickly get the message that they have to be crammed in amid higher priorities. But West’s office hours frequently lasted as long as the students wanted to stay. He hosted reading groups with graduate students that went on until late in the night. “He’d talk about things you don’t often hear on campus,” said John McMillian, a graduate student in American history, “like how to be a decent person.”

  Despite all the diversity of its student body—and in terms of geography, ethnicity, religion, and culture, Harvard probably has the most diverse student body of any university in the world—the majority of Harvard professors are white men. And almost all of the people who run Harvard are white men. In 2001, every single dean of a Harvard school, with the almost mandatory exception of the Radcliffe Institute, was a white male. (The university does have several female vice-presidents of substantial power, but they are largely behind-the-scenes figures, unknown to students.) The men who run Harvard preach diversity among the students, but do not practice it within their own ranks. So Cornel West mattered.