Harvard exodus

The Ivy League campus shuffle has raised issues of race and respect and fueled the ongoing Black studies debate

By now the story is familiar. The debacle in Cambridge involved enough pithy elements - respect, honor, academic independence and the most strident issue, race - that the story grew beyond Harvard Yard. Reports of Cornel West's disaffection with new Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers landed in the national media, chronicled like a standoff between two warring factions in an otherwise genial country. At its core, the showdown at Harvard raised issues of perception, which often greatly differs among Blacks and whites. West's perception of the whole thing certainly differed from Summers'.

The controversy has also presented a mixed picture of the Black intellectual teaching Afro studies at a predominantly white institution. On the one hand, it portrayed the Black scholar as confident, at times powerful and successful. But it also tapped into deep insecurities of Black scholars and their nagging concerns about whether their peers and their university administrations saw the field they chose as legitimate or not.

It all unfolded in a sort of "getting to know you" meeting.

Summers, a Harvard-trained economist, had barely given himself enough time to unpack his bags when he began meeting with professors. West, the prodigious philosopher and professor of Afro-American Studies, was one of the first to be called to the new president's office last October.

West, 48, was a popular professor who had become a familiar sight striding around campus in his signature three-piece suit and large Afro. He has written 19 books of serious academics and held the title of "university" professor, an exclusive status given to only 17 of Harvard's nearly 2,200 faculty members. At the time of the meeting, West was receiving public attention not for his body of scholarly work, but rather for his rap-inspired CD released one month earlier. Summers, 47, indicated that he had heard rumblings that West was not performing up to his potential and brought his concerns to Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Afro-American Studies program at Harvard. Gates told Summers that there was no truth to the rumors and urged Summers to talk with West face to face.

Summers, who is known to be blunt, criticized West's recent lack of scholarship. He chided his recording of the CD Sketches of My Culture, and he questioned West's history of grading in light of a grade inflation controversy at the university. He also accused him of being absent from classes to assist Bill Bradley in his presidential campaign in 2000.

According to an article in the forthcoming June issue of Vanity Fair, Summers told West that he wanted to review personally his work every few months to ensure he was keeping up. Such aproposal is virtually unheard of for a seasoned veteran in the autonomous culture of the academy.

After the meeting, West walked out of the office fuming and ready to "resign on the spot, he said in a New York Times article. He later publicly and vehemently denied Summers' claims and told a National Public Radio reporter after the meeting became public that he was deeply offended. He said that not in his 26 years of teaching had he ever been so disrespected.

"I do not tolerate disrespect, being dishonored and being devalued," he said during the broadcast.

It took six months from the time Summers and West met in the fall for West to make his decision to leave. On April 13, Princeton approved his appointment to the Program in African American Studies as a professor of religion, and West announced he is returning to the school where he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy (1980) and worked from 1988 to 1994. He is scheduled to begin at Princeton in July. "I am excited to return to the greatest center for humanistic studies in the country," West said in a statement. "I look forward to being a part of (Princeton) President (Shirley) Tilghman's vision that promotes high-quality intellectual conversation mediated with respect."

He later said in a separate interview with reporters that "Larry Summers strikes me as the Ariel Sharon of higher education," referring to the Israeli prime minister who is being criticized by much of the world for the massacre of Palestinians. A few days earlier, West had been arrested with his friend Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, a Jewish American magazine, during a peaceful protest in Washington, D.C., calling for US military intervention in the Middle East.

Although Harvard officials wouldn't comment on West's Sharon remark, Summers, in a statement, expressed remorse over West's resignation and wished him well at Princeton.

West's departure, and the storm surrounding it, begs the question of what it all means for Princeton, for Harvard and for Afro-American studies in general. In late January, while West was still stewing over the Summers meeting, Kwame Anthony Appiah, 48, a philosopher and another member of Harvard's prestigious Black studies department, submitted his resignation, announcing he was leaving to teach at Princeton, where he will be a full-time professor of philosophy, effective Sept. 1. And now West is headed to Princeton, too.

Princeton has big plans for its 33-year-old program in African American studies and hopes to turn it into a degree program.

"We hope it will happen next year," says Colin Palmer, Dodge professor of history and the Princeton program's acting director. Palmer says the department is especially looking for young energetic professors from other disciplines, and adds that the department has proposed a pre-doctorate fellow program that would allow students to study at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

"The whole field of African American studies is important to us and has been for a very long time," says Robert Durkee, vice president of public affairs at Princeton.

"We are happy to have Cornel West. He knows the terrain. He is really coming home, and he is sure to contribute to the further evolution of the program," says Palmer. "But he is not the biggest name we have, that's Nell Painter," the historian and author of the recently published Southern History Across the Color Line.

The program also boasts Pulitzer prize-winning author Toni Morrison, who sits on its interdeparmental committee; Howard Taylor, whose current focus is African American leadership and elitism; and the program's incoming director, Valerie Smith, a professor of English whose specialties include Black feminist theory and film studies.

Still, Princeton wants to recruit Gates, who, in addition to chairing the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, is director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. Princeton has made him an offer, but Gates, who didn't return repeated requests for an interview, has said publicly that he is still trying to decide whether he will remain or leave for Princeton.

In bookstore appearances to promote The Bondwoman's Narrative, the rediscovered novel he recently edited, Gates has continually emphasized that he will miss West and notes that Appiah, his longtime friend, has followed him from Yale to Cornell to Duke to Harvard and perhaps it is time he returned the favor. Gates has said he will make a decision in June.

The departures would certainly knock the department down a notch, but with the limelight shifted, Harvard's substantial remaining pool of scholars could buckle down and get back to academics. Harvard won't experience a true crisis unless the exits keep coming, which is apparently a possibility.

Charles Ogletree, the Harvard law professor who has served as West's spokesman during the ordeal, says Afro-American Studies professors at Harvard are still weighing other options and opportunities. Early on, West told reporters that if he left Harvard, there was a good chance that other Black scholars beyond Gates and Appiah, including historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, sociologist William Julius Wilson and even Ogletree could leave, too.

"That would be devastating," Ogletree says. "I do not want to see that happen." The entire saga recalls an ongoing debate around Black studies programs at Harvard and on campuses throughout the country.

As the events in Cambridge unfolded, a growing chorus of critics began to speak out: Some of the critics were Black scholars who argued that Harvard's Afro-American Studies professors were staying dangerously away from the field's roots of social activism and community outreach. Others were conservative commentators who launched sharp verbal assaults against West's scholarship. They questioned the wealth West accumulated through speeches and from his 1993 bestseller Race Matters and also challenged the legitimacy of Black studies departments across the nation.

"Many people in the public world found pieces of the story to use in their own agenda," says Joe Wrinn, director of news and public affairs at Harvard.

"Most of those people [doing the] criticizing never read anything we have written," says Appiah. "That is the prejudice."

Still, the pundits continue to debate whether white guilt forced Summers, who served as treasury secretary at the end of the Clinton administration, to back down.

In December, a constellation of African American stars encircled West. Even the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton made statements against Summers. Appiah, who insists he is leaving Harvard because he has grown tired of commuting back and forth from his home in Boston to New York, where his partner lives, concedes that he and other Black Harvard professors supported West. Appiah also complains that Summers didn't show sufficient support for affirmative action.

On Jan. 2, Summers said in a statement that he didn't want to see West or any other professor in the Black studies department leave and that he "[takes] pride in Harvard's longstanding commitment to diversity."

Before West's resignation, Higginbotham, professor of history and Afro-American Studies at Harvard, told The Crisis that the Afro-studies department believed Summers and considers the rift resolved. She cites the department's recent hiring of the University of Chicago's Michael Dawson, a wellregarded scholar of Black politics, as proof that the department is moving on despite continued publicity over the discord between Summers and West.

"We are not all putting threats out there. We have a department, and it's very important to show stability," Higginbotham says.

While the dust is just beginning to settle at Harvard, the controversy has revealed long-simmering tensions over the direction and future of Afro-American studies nationwide, and it has set off debates on whether the field is a true scholarly discipline.

Black studies programs began springing up in the late 1960s, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination.

"What happened in the mid 1960s [is that] African Americans entered predominantly white institutions, but what they found there was virtually nothing in the curriculum that reflected their experiences," says James Stewart, president of the National Council for Black Studies and professor of African and African American studies at Pennsylvania State University.

African American students demanded the hiring of Black professors and the creation of Black studies classes. But from the beginning, says Ron Richardson, director of African American studies program at Boston University, the discipline was seen as suspect by other scholars. Many of those scholars believed African American history is part of American history and therefore should not exist as a separate discipline. Others saw Black studies as merely a product of white guilt used since the 1960s as a tool to appease angry African Americans.

John Derbyshire, a contributing editor to the National Review online, commented on Jan. 11: "Like most non-Blacks, I guess, I have anyway, always thought that Afro-American Studies is a pseudo-- discipline, invented by guilty white liberals as a way of keeping Black intellectuals out of trouble and giving them a shot at holding professorships at elite institutions without having to prove themselves in anything really difficult, like math."

Gerald Early, professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, says many white scholars would agree with Derbyshire, but he says it would be a mistake to say that only whites feel that way.

"Blacks also express that it's a waste of time and that Black students shouldn't major in it," says Early.

In the Jan. 8 edition of The Wall Street Journal, West was called an "academic lightweight," by Shelby Steele, a conservative Black scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He also claimed Harvard's Black professors, like African American scholars across the nation, have used white guilt to fight off criticism for their mediocre work.

"The mediocrity of Mr. West is visible everywhere across the landscape of black academia, where so much deference corrupts black talent," Steele wrote.

An argument can be made that West has not produced serious scholarship as of late, Early says, but he adds academic jealousy is often at the heart of criticism of West, Gates and other members of Harvard's "Dream Team." So-called stars in academia are usually read only be peers, but few academics have the charisma or skill to grab the public's attention and gain the celebrity status of members of Harvard's Black studies program, Early says.

David Shumway, professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon, agrees. Shumway, who is white and has been critical of academic stardom, calls scholars like West and to some degree Gates "public intellecutals," and he commends them for reaching out to non-academics.

"From my perspective, we in academia need to speak to the general public," says Shumway. "The Harvard program has done a great deal of good for Black studies. West and Gates are really significant scholars, and by being at Harvard they have brought credibility to the subject."

Still, Early says, white administrators never understood Black scholars' focus on community activism. Some scholars say West's CD and his work with Sharpton's possible presidential campaign was a way of reaching out to the people he studies.

"Scholars as a group are kind of alienated to some degree from non-academic folks. What academics do is kind of refined, and you are away from ordinary folks. I think that really becomes an issue for the Black scholar hoping to speak for the Black people," says Early.

Black studies has its roots in community struggle, not from on high in the Ivory Tower.

San Francisco State University launched the first Black studies department in 1969. Initially, Richardson, of Boston University, says, the programs helped retell history from the African American perspective and continued to record the Black experience in America and beyond.

Some departments failed through the years, but others grew. Harvard's program, hailed as the most prestigious of the Black studies programs, struggled during its earlier years. In 1980, there was only one professor and no students.

Now, according to the Harvard officials, the department has 50 undergraduates, 16 professors and six graduate students. Four other graduate students are arriving next academic year. The Ph.D. program is new, so officials say there are no numbers to report. Gates has been at Harvard since 1991 and has developed the Afro-American Studies department, which today has an endowment of more than $400 million. The resources at Harvard dwarf those on other campuses. There are 225 academic departments and programs in Black studies across the nation offering bachelor's degrees; some offer only a minor or a certificate.

Through the years, Black studies programs have branched out to other disciplines, such as Afro-American literature, African American women's studies and Latin and African relations. Some Black studies programs, like Harvard, have a strong humanities focus. Boston University, which offers a master's and Ph.D. (a joint degree with its American studies department), focuses on global issues. Richardson, who is leading the university's effort to revive and expand its program after years of dormancy, recently hired a professor who speaks Russian, Dutch, German and French and uses those language skills to research the Black presence in Europe. Richardson's specialty is Black and Asian relations.

"This is an example of how some programs are pushing the envelope," says Richardson.

But as the field evolves, Stewart, of the Council for Black Studies, worries that too many programs are moving away from the social and political science focus that were the core principles of the field early on. He points to Harvard as the main culprit.

"So we defend those principles, but we reject the elitism that is reflected in the emphasis on Ivy League institutions as the prime movers. If you look at Harvard, what is going on around there is [the program] is centered around humanities. But again, Black studies was the way of trying to change the community."

Stewart says there is thoughtful scholarship going on in Black studies programs across the country, but rarely do those scholars get the deserved attention and credit.

"My point is that the Ivy Leaguers don't ever come to the conferences or engagements. There are 225 Black studies departments in the country, and everyone wants to write about one. The truth is most people involved in Black studies are in the midwest or they are in smaller institutions."

Perhaps Gates' entrepreneurial spirit and talent of discovering ways to bring Africana studies to the limelight, a fact some believe speaks to the heart of the current discourse, can be traced to a moment back in 1973: Gates, who had just graduated summa cum laude from Yale, won a fellowship to Cambridge University in England. There, he met Nigerian novelist and professor Wole Soyinka, who would later become the 1986 Nobel laureate for literature and Gates' mentor. Appiah, a young biracial student from Ghana at the time, also became a close friend of Gates.

Disciples of W.E.B. Du Bois, the three promised over many drinks that night, as the story goes, to one day complete Du Bois' dream of creating a Pan-African encyclopedia that would include the history and culture of Blacks from across the globe.

"I guess we wanted to finish what Du Bois started," says Appiah. He laughs as he recalls the pact, but years later few can deny that it was a defining moment for Gates and the beginning of what became his Dream Team, which included Appiah and West and other prominent Black scholars such as Wilson, the former University of Chicago sociologist, and law professor Lani Guinier. All prominent professors were lured to Harvard by Gates in the 1990s.

In 1999, Appiah and Gates, partnering with Microsoft, released Encarta Africana, an interactive CD-ROM that chronicles the African diaspora. A hefty book version - Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience followed. Now, 25 years after the two students and their professor sat in a restaurant in England promising to fulfill Du Bois' dream, they also have fulfilled their own.

But success in the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard is always a mixed bag. The project received rave reviews from the public, it achieved awards and additional fame and fortune for Appiah and Gates, but it also sparked criticism from their peers.

Whether Gates decides to follow West and Appiah remains to be seen. But a move to Princeton won't silence the detractors. Building a department there to rival Harvard's, however, might.

Tatsha Robertson is a national correspondent for the Boston Globe.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2002
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