Monkeyfist.com: Criticizing Cornel

Jan. 14, 2002 2:13 pm




                                Monkeyfist.com
                                       
                              Criticizing Cornel
                                       
   by [1]Kendall CLARK
   
   Monday, 14 January 2002
   
   .....
   
   In [2]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?
     
   There are several curious claims here. First, it does come as a great
   surprise, to me at least, that Larry Summers is taken 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 [3]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.
   
   What's even more curious is the TNR lauding Summers for valuing
   academics over economics while, in the next breath, it lauds him for
   attacking Professor Cornel West for not teaching often enough. Many
   institutional activities constitute the "academics" which, it's
   claimed, Summers values so highly, and explicit classroom
   instructional time is merely one such activity. But hectoring
   well-paid 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 of African American Studies, TNR bashes West
   for ganging up, with Jesse Jackson, 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 academic
   in the country, and he's spent the bulk 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 shocktroops at [4]National
   Review describes West's political activity as "mau-mauing", which is
   the way National Review and [5]Pat Buchanan characterize 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. 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 it, 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 far right dismisses and belittles and
   mocks them in exactly this way, freely using the racialized "mau-mau"
   term, TNR is on very shaky ground. But maybe it's not so 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 the racial alliance between National Review, Pat
   Buchanan, and TNR is the shocking ignorance of the modern American
   university displayed 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 an ordinary expression of the standard 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 chit in the reward system. Even
   non-star academics 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 a
   great many academic stars who thus avoided teaching: Einstein,
   Clifford Geertz, Michael Walzer, and countless 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 issue 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 plight of grad students (currently
   very bad most of the large state systems -- California, NY, Texas,
   Illinois -- and at many of the most prestigious private schools) since
   the numbers are all wrong. There are never that many star professors
   within most universities at any one time, certainly not enough that
   their lightened teaching loads make any appreciable difference. Even
   at Harvard, only 14 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, the
   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 debate
   would be taking place in those terms. Whether West chooses to record a
   hip hop 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
   National Review in amplifying that hounding?
   
   One difference separating 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,
   to suggest it lacks seriousness or scholarly integrity is dumb. TNR
   clearly -- if Leon Wieseltier's attack in the early 90s 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.
   However, 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 popularizing -- 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 his academic colleagues are likely very 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 in addition to all those other non-teaching institutional
   activities which academic stars are forever running after, we can add
   popularizing. 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 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.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   This is Criticizing Cornel <[6]http://monkeyfist.com/articles/805>
   
   © Copyright 1999-2001 The Monkeyfist Collective

References

   1. mailto:kendall-4GNy1lrxftmrG/[email protected]?subject=Criticizing%20Cornel
   2. http://www.thenewrepublic.com/011402/notebook011402_west.html
   3. http://www.converge.org.nz/lac/articles/news990613a.htm
   4. http://www.nationalreview.com/dreher/dreher011102.shtml
   5. http://www.theamericancause.org/pathowtoprint.htm
   6. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/805