Cornel West, a prominent professor of African-American studies at Harvard University, is leaving for Princeton, nearly four months after he began sparring publicly with Harvard president Lawrence Summers over the quality of his scholarship and the college’s commitment to affirmative action.
Princeton’s announcement Friday that it was hiring West, a popular religion professor, caps a protracted drama that had pitted one of the world’s foremost academic institutions against one of its best-known professors, in a dispute that was unusually raw and sometimes racially charged.
Among West’s assertions had been that Summers, a former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, was not fully committed to the aggressive recruitment of black scholars and students to Harvard, a charge Summers has denied.
By most accounts, though, the disagreement was largely personal.
Tension between the two men had first flared in a private meeting in the fall at which Summers encouraged West to embark on a new work of serious scholarship that would befit his stature at Harvard. West had recorded a rap album and supported the political campaigns of Bill Bradley and Al Sharpton.
West took offense at what he perceived as Summers’ disrespect, and never fully got over the slight, several friends and colleagues said Friday.
“It’s clear there’s only one reason he’s going to Princeton. It’s Larry,” a close associate of West’s said Friday. West had no immediate comment.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., who had built the Afro-American studies department at Harvard into an academic powerhouse throughout the 1990s by hiring West away from Princeton and by recruiting others, said Friday that West’s departure was a blow to black studies at Harvard, particularly when coupled with the defection to Princeton in January of philosopher Anthony Appiah.
“It’s the end of an era,” said Gates, who also is considering an offer from Princeton. “You can’t lose Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, or Kobe and Shaq, and no one notices.”
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In a phone interview Friday, Summers said: “All of us in the Harvard community are grateful to Cornel West for his significant contribution to Harvard academic life. . . . We will miss him, and I wish him every success at Princeton.”
West’s appointment to a senior position in Princeton’s religion department is contingent upon a trustees vote Saturday.