Larry Summers v Cornel West
Seeing crimson
From The Economist print edition
The folly of making famous professors write learned books
THESE days university presidents are a hopelessly anodyne bunch. They mouth politically-correct platitudes, make nice comments to potential benefactors and, in general, do their utmost to avoid saying anything that might be misconstrued as either interesting or original.
How refreshing then to deal with Larry Summers. Bill Clinton's erstwhile treasury secretary has always found it hard to suffer nonsense gladly. In Washington, DC, he was muzzled, at least in public. But since being named president of Harvard University six months ago he has reverted to type.
First, Mr Summers called for something to be done about grade inflation. This year more than half of all grades given at Harvard were As. Yet before Mr Summers appeared, most of the 2,000 strong faculty apparently regarded this as a testimony to their brilliant teaching, rather than anything to do with collapsing standards.
Then he praised patriotism, telling a meeting at the Kennedy School that “patriotism” is a word “used too infrequently in communities such as this”, and lamented that the Vietnam War had led to a disaffection “toward people who wear uniforms”. This too seems to have gone down badly.
Now he is at war with the university's Afro-American studies department. According to the Boston Globe, last October Mr Summers rebuked Cornel West, who holds one of Harvard's coveted university professorships. Mr West's alleged sins included recording a rap CD, leading a political committee for Al Sharpton's possible presidential campaign, writing books more likely to be reviewed in The New York Times than in academic journals and allowing grade inflation.
Since then the incident has spiralled into a full-blown academic tempest. The insulted Mr West is considering a rival offer from Princeton, his former employer. Henry Louis Gates, the department head, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, are thinking of going with him. Mr West has also announced that he intends to take a leave of absence.
It will get worse. Jesse Jackson, that well-known crusader for academic standards, has arranged a meeting with Mr Summers. “The tension at Harvard is having an impact across the country,” says Mr Jackson, whose last venture into politics was to try to broker a deal with the Taliban. Mr Sharpton also wants to meet Mr Summers. He is considering filing a lawsuit against Harvard as “an aggrieved party”.
If every professor who backed a lunatic politician were to be sacked, half the interesting minds in academia would be lost. Nobody denies that Mr West is talented. But is his work any good? He is the author of more than a dozen books, some of them serious contributions to his field. But lately he seems closer to becoming a performance artist—and a poor one at that.
His rap album (sample lyric: “No other people in the modern world have had such unprecedented levels of unregulated violence against them”) indicates that the medium is best left to the likes of Snoop Doggy Dogg rather than Harvard professors. His website is shot through with embarrassing boasts and grammatical errors. The section devoted to the rap album begins by stating that “In all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history” (what on earth would the immodest version be?). It describes Mr West as “one of the most preeminent minds of our time” and refers to somebody called “Nietzche”.
So Mr Summers clearly has a point. But that does not mean he will win. Minority groups are very powerful in academia, and Mr Gates has transformed Harvard's Afro-American studies department into one of the most successful in the country. In 1991, when he took over, it was a backwater consisting of one white professor and a handful of students. It now boasts some of the most distinguished black academics in the country, notably William Julius Wilson. Mr West's introductory course on Afro-American studies attracted more than 600 students this semester.
This week Mr Summers apologetically announced how proud he was of all the members of the department, and pledged to create an “attractive environment” for them (usually campus-speak for “more money for less work”). But before he records his next “watershed moment”, the talented Mr West might ponder whether Mr Summers had a point. Meanwhile, Tom Wolfe may just have found the subject of his next novel.