Criticizing Cornel

In The New Republic's Notebook last week, we find an entry called "Go West" --

It should be no surprise that Harvard's new president, Lawrence Summers, recently asked Professor Cornel West to get serious about his scholarship. Summers, after all, is the rare university president who cares more about academics than fund-raising; and West's activities of late -- spending more time recording a rap CD and stumping for Al Sharpton than doing academic work -- could not have sat well with him. But West has responded to Summers's reasonable request by raising the issue of race, privately questioning, according to The Boston Globe, Summers's support of affirmative action -- which in turn has led Jesse Jackson and others to question it publicly. West, of course, loves to mau-mau; and the confrontation with Summers was simply too good an opportunity to pass up. In an effort to raise the stakes, West is now threatening to leave Harvard for Princeton. So the question is: Will West continue to do nothing at Harvard? Or head south to do nothing at Princeton?

-- which contains several curious claims. First, it does come as a great surprise, to me at least, that Larry Summers (news - web sites) is claimed to be someone who prioritizes academics over economics; it would come as a great surprise to learn Summers prioritizes anything over economics, including human life. Summers was, after all, a Treasury bigwig when he wrote, infamously, in 1991, that

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the Less Developed Countries? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

Summers' memo goes on in an increasingly harsh and machiavellian vein for two more paragraphs, but that's enough to give you some idea of his priorities. His appointment to the Harvard presidency was bitterly protested by members of that community, but to no avail.

Second, and even more curious, TNR lauds Summers for valuing academics over economics while, in the next breath, lauding him for attacking Professor Cornel West (news - web sites) for not teaching often enough. Many institutional activities constitute the "academics" which, TNR claims, Summers values so highly, and explicit classroom instructional time is merely one such activity. But hectoring professors about the amount of time they spend on explicit classroom instruction is stereotypically a bottom-line kind of concern. While there seem to be other things going on here, TNR's laudate of Summers is incoherent.

Turning from Summers to his newest favorite target, Cornel West, philosopher and professor in Harvard's Afro-American Studies department, TNR bashes West for ganging up with Jesse Jackson (news - web sites) to harass poor, defenseless Harvard. What's curious though is the unusual verb "mau-mau" applied to West. West is perhaps the most well-known African American intellectual, and he's spent lots of his career engaged in real world political and social issues. Like other well-known academics, West is not afraid to take public stands on issues of importance to him.

TNR, however, following (or leading?) the shock troops at National Review describes West's political activity as "mau-mauing", which is the precise way National Review and Pat Buchanan characterized West, too. Though the word seems to have originated -- at least, if Thomas Wolfe's reportage on the subject can be trusted -- among African American activists of the 1960s, it's only used now by Whites to denigrate African Americans who struggle politically, in a transparently petty attempt to suggest that it's terroristic or extortionary or the like (which, I hasten to add, could only be derogatory if one thought throwing the British out of Kenya, as the original Mau Maus tried to do, was a bad thing). But why, one might ask TNR, does West "of course" love to "mau-mau"? Is it some essential part of his nature? Does he do it compulsively? Is he alone in this unquestionable behavior or do others, do other African Americans, also mau-mau as a matter of course? Is it, as TNR seems to have concluded, just a "black thing"?

Given that African American activists no longer speak this way about themselves, and given that the Right seeks to dismiss and belittle and mock them in this way, freely using the racialized "mau-mau" term, TNR is on very shaky ground. But perhaps it's less shaky if we give up the idea that being a TNR liberal means having any interest in or commitment to political and social equality for African Americans?

The entire passage stinks of racial implication.

As interesting as a racist alliance of National Review, Pat Buchanan, and TNR is the shocking ignorance of the modern American university evinced by TNR's attack on West. How can TNR not know that one of the goals of becoming an academic star is so that you can teach less and do other stuff more? Every academic star of West's caliber spends less time teaching than engaging in one or another of the many institutional activities that constitute the university as a social institution -- research, grant-seeking, program- or discipline-formation, interdisciplinary conferencing, book or journal editing and writing, dissertation supervising, administrative work, and so on.

All of which is a very ordinary expression of the existing university reward system. One of the ways universities lure academic stars is to promise lighter teaching loads. The number of hours one spends in the classroom is a perfectly ordinary bargaining chit in the reward system. Even non-star academics often negotiate for less time in the classroom in favor of doing some other kind of academic duty or task. Large private universities, and large public state systems, create university-affiliated institutions specifically for the purpose of relieving the stars of as much teaching obligation as possible. For example, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study has been home to many academic stars who thus avoided teaching: Einstein, Clifford Geertz, Michael Walzer, and others.

Perhaps the star patronage system is one of the things that's wrong with the university; I would be inclined to think so if I thought that it in any way contributed to the despicable use of graduate students as a kind of permanent academic-labor underclass -- which is one of the real issues Larry Summers ought to be addressing if, as TNR says, he values academics over economics. But the academic star system doesn't contribute directly to the state of grad student labor (currently very bad in most of the large state systems -- California, NY, Texas, Illinois -- and at most large private universities) since the numbers are all wrong. There are never that many star professors within a university at any one time, certainly not enough that their lightened teaching loads make any appreciable difference. Even at Harvard, less than 20 professors, including West, hold the distinction "university professor".

The degree to which West teaches or does other things is a function of his employment contract with Harvard, the extra-contractual perques West manages to secure (by negotiating with his department chair, relevant deans, and so on; very little of substance is done in the university by fiat, even the fiat of the stars). If he's violated that contract, or informal agreements surrounding his contract, the public hounding of West would be taking place in those terms. Whether West chooses to record a spoken word, hip-hop-esque CD during a year long medical leave from Harvard or not is, strictly speaking, an issue in which only Harvard and West have any real standing. But if doing so violated neither Harvard policy nor West's contract, why is Summers hounding him? Why is TNR joining the racist Right in amplifying that hounding?

One difference distinguishing West from other star professors seems to be his public criticism of the Democratic Party machine after Bill Bradley withdrew from the 2000 presidential race; criticism which included West speaking for both Al Sharpton and Ralph Nader. Apparently for the very conventionally-minded Larry Summers, having anything to do with Al Sharpton or Ralph Nader is a high crime. And if politics has nothing to do with Summers' public attack on West, why West and why now?

Further, criticizing West in terms that suggest he lacks scholarly seriousness is just silly. Whatever else one might say about his work, that it is wrong or misguided, to suggest it lacks seriousness or scholarly integrity is dumb. TNR clearly -- if Leon Wieseltier's attack in TNR on West is any indication -- hates West and his politics, just as clearly, in fact, as West is hated by the National Review and Pat Buchanan crowd. And yet making the case that he's not serious about scholarship is damnably hard.

What West has done a lot of at Harvard -- and it's hard to see how this is a bad thing -- is popularize his substantive work -- hard to see how this is bad unless you find the idea of a leftist African American professor reaching a larger audience with his critical ideas a bad thing. He hasn't published a book with a university press since 1989; his critics try to draw some sign of his lack of scholarly integrity from that fact. But no small number of his academic colleagues are likely envious. Non-university press books not only reach a bigger audience, they reach a different kind of audience, too. There are precious few academics who wouldn't like to see commercial publishers promote their work, no matter how technical or obscure, and West's popularizing books are neither technical nor obscure. They are, in fact, critical and accessible.

So to all those non-teaching institutional activities which academic stars are forever running after, we can add popularizing -- something for which West in particular has a certain kind of potent and unquestionable talent. The American university has always needed and found popularizers. And it's often rewarded the really good ones; and well it should. Choosing hip hop (or publishing with commercial presses) as a medium to spread critical ideas about race, politics, economy, and power seems like a very good thing, especially if that makes those ideas more likely to be considered by young people, those who lack the privilege of formal education, and so on. That the likes of Pat Buchanan, National Review, and Larry Summers attack West's kind of academic work is to be expected. It's another sign of how far rightward TNR has moved that it aids and abets them.