West: The *Lazy* Academic?

From http://www.thenewrepublic.com/011402/notebook011402_west.html

   "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?"

Now this is really strange. First, "West, of course, loves to
mau-mau"... Uh, hello? *Of course*? Why is it beyond question that
West loves to "mau-mau"? He loves to *mau-mau*? Does, say, Peter
Singer's combativeness -- which West shares, certainly -- get
described as mau-mauing? That stinks of racial implication.

Even more interesting is that someone, whether Larry Summers (who, I'm
sorry, is a really disgusting corporate toadie) or the morons at the
The New Republic, fails to realize that precisely one of the points of
being an academic star is so that you can teach less and do other
stuff more! 

*Every* huge academic star of West's caliber spends *way* less time
teaching than doing almost anything else. This is just standard
university reward system. Let's take an example: Clifford Geertz, dean
of relativist cultural anthropology, has spent almost his entire
career, post-fieldwork, at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study,
the whole *point* of which is to let stars avoid teaching, as
Einstein, Michael Walzer, and countless others have done and are still
doing.

Now, maybe this is one of the things that's wrong with the university;
at least, if it in any way contributes to the really despicable use of
graduate students as a kind of academic underclass, that's bad. But I
suspect the star system doesn't contribute to the plight of grad
students (which is in fact very bad at almost all of the large state
systems: California, NY, Texas, and so on) at all since the numbers
are all wrong. There aren't *that* many stars throughout most large
state systems. Maybe at Harvard where they like to employ mostly
stars, but even there I doubt it.

However, Summers and TNR's criticisms of West in particular are
especially galling (and, I suspect, not a little bit racially
motivated) since 

1) The degree to which West teaches or is off doing
other stuff is a matter of his employment contract with Harvard, and
if he's violated that contract, the debate would be, I suspect, in
those terms, but it's not; so what, pray tell, is Summers' point?

In fact, one of the ways universities lure stars is, besides paying
more and giving freedom to start programs and the like, to promise
lighter teaching loads! It's a perfectly ordinary chit in the reward
system.

2) West is no different (well, save for that he *did* visibly trash
the Democratic party very visibly after Bradley got knocked out) than
any other star academic, so why is his president picking on him a
national news story? Or, better yet: Why is Summers picking on West? I
suspect there are at least 50 other academics at Harvard who have been
doing precisely what West has been doing. I can think of 10 or so off
the top of my head.

3) Putting the criticisms of West in terms that suggest he *lacks*
scholarly seriousness is just silly: whatever else one might say (and
I think Bijan doesn't like much of West's "real" philosophy, perhaps
with good reason) about West's work, to suggest it's lacking in
seriousness or scholarly integrity is just retarded. You may not like
his work or his politics, but making the case that he's not serious
about scholarship is going to be damnably hard.

One thing he's been doing a lot of -- and it's hard to see how *this*
is a bad thing -- is popularizing; the university has always needed
and found popularizers. And choosing rap as a medium to spread
critical ideas about race, politics, economy, and power seems like a
very good thing to me, especially if that makes those ideas more
likely to be considered by young people who like rap.

Curious stuff. Makes you wonder who's going to fill this void now that
Lingua Franca is gone...

Kendall Clark