Harvard Rules (17 page)

Even as West's scholarship grew shallower, he broadened his political activities. In 1995 he supported and attended the “Million Man March” organized by Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan. In 2000 he campaigned for Bill Bradley, who was running for the Democratic nomination for president. After Bradley dropped out, West stumped for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. And in August 2001, the controversial New York activist Al Sharpton announced that West would be heading his presidential exploratory committee.

At the same time that West was involved with black political figures whom many critics considered anti-Semitic, he was vigorously speaking out against black ant-Semitism. If it wasn't a contradiction, it was certainly a gray area. But West argued that such moral absolutes were a luxury he could not afford. Like Skip Gates, he walked a tightrope between blacks and whites, albeit in a slightly different way. Gates liked high society, and it liked him; West felt out of place amid rich white people. He was oriented toward the streets, the neighborhoods. That was where he could make a difference. And sometimes that meant that you had to mix with flawed characters.

In 2001 West recorded a spoken-word CD called
Sketches of My Culture.
It sounded like a Beat poet riffing to a hip-hop soundtrack. Though the album would, in subsequent months, repeatedly be described as a “rap” record, with all that that label implied to many whites, its inspirational themes were intended as an unambiguous rebuke of the misogynistic, violent side of rap. “Since black musicians play such an important role in African-American life,” West argued, “they have a special mission and responsibility: to present beautiful music which both sustains and motivates black people and provides visions of what black people should aspire to.”

It was all about communication, West said, about teaching young people. If you were a black academic from the inner city, you couldn't just lecture to upper-crust kids at Harvard. You knew
they
were going to make it. You had to remember where
you
came from—and who was still back there. It was your responsibility to be an intellectual, a well-dressed black man who carried himself with dignity, because black youths needed to see the choices they had, that they were capable of becoming other than basketball players and hip-hop artists. But you also had to speak to them in a way that they could relate to. Maybe white professors didn't—couldn't—appreciate the position West was in.

And, yes, ego was a factor too. Cornel West was human. He liked being recognized on the street, liked the sight of a rapt audience. And, yes, West was making money. When he charged it, his fee for speaking at universities and conferences had risen to $10,000 an appearance. But would it make more sense to live in an ivory tower, to cede young black America to Suge Knight or other apparent apostles of the thug life? For West, that would have been an abdication of responsibility, a betrayal of self. After all, he was a man who had learned to read great books in a bookmobile, a traveling public library. That's what Cornel West wanted to be—a traveling public library that could change kids' lives the way that, decades before, a bus filled with books had changed his.

Depending on your point of view, that self-image was either imperative or egocentric—and, no question, West's persona and politics were making him enemies. Two of them were Martin Peretz, then a Harvard professor and owner of
The New Republic,
and Leon Wieseltier, the magazine's literary editor. Peretz had been a civil rights activist while earning his doctorate at Harvard in the 1960s, a true believer in the political solidarity of blacks and Jews. In the aftermath of that decade, he had grown markedly more conservative, somewhat disillusioned, generally distrustful of left-wing politics, and ever more deeply steeped in his Jewish faith and culture. In 1993 Peretz endowed a Harvard professorship, the Martin Peretz Chair in Yiddish Literature, with a gift of several million dollars. He is a force to be reckoned with around Harvard—wealthy, part-owner of one of the last mainstream journals in the country to review academic books, absolutely fearless and unafraid to make enemies, while at the same time socially active, throwing catered dinner parties at his tasteful home in an expensive neighborhood near campus. For many years he taught undergraduate seminars at Harvard, often taken by ambitious young men who wanted to work at
The New Republic.

Like Peretz, Leon Wieseltier takes faith seriously; a former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, he is a scholar of Jewish culture. Like West, Wieseltier has an attraction to the dramatic; West had bit parts in the second and third
Matrix
movies, while Wieseltier had a cameo on
The Sopranos.
He is a striking man, the Lou Reed of literary editors. Tall and so thin as to be almost gaunt, Wieseltier has long, flowing white hair and dresses in untucked shirts, black jeans, and cowboy boots. And, like Peretz, he uses his position at
The New Republic
to reward those writers and politicians of whom he approves and rebuke those who do not meet his standards.

Cornel West was a member of the latter group. In 1995, Wieseltier wrote a scathing essay, “All and Nothing at All,” portraying West as an incoherent thinker obsessed with his public persona—an essay that, by several accounts, greatly influenced Larry Summers. “Since there is no crisis in America more urgent than the crisis of race, and since there is no intellectual in America more celebrated for his consideration of the crisis of race, I turned to West, and read his books,” Wieseltier began. “They are almost completely worthless…monuments to the devastation of a mind by the squalls of [literary] theory.”

Wieseltier noted that many American writers had been lamenting a paucity of public intellectuals. They fretted that scholarship had grown too obtuse, too removed from public discourse. But, Wieseltier asked, was being a public intellectual mostly an excuse for avoiding the hard work of serious thinking? “Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question,” Wieseltier suggested. “Where are the
private
intellectuals? Philosophers have for too long been trying to change the world. Perhaps it is time to think about it.”

Wieseltier's essay was eagerly consumed in the halls of academe, where, as in all fields of human endeavor, a juicy takedown of a successful colleague appeals to people's baser instincts. And, to be sure, Wieseltier put into words what some academics already felt but did not care to state in public.

Yet even when they had their political differences, many of West's Harvard colleagues liked him. Alan Dershowitz, ever vigilant about anti-Semitism, didn't think much of his colleague's empathy for Al Sharpton, but he never believed that West was anti-Semitic and he considered West an inspiring teacher. Government professor Harvey Mansfield, a conservative, had known West since the latter was an undergraduate, when he'd taken courses taught by Mansfield. “I like Cornel,” Mansfield said. “The way that he presents himself to the world—his hairstyle, the black suit—doesn't offend me, as it does some.”

Nor did Wieseltier's attack hurt West among Harvard students; West remained one of the university's most popular professors. Behind a lectern, he was motion, energy, and intensity—the polar opposite of, say, Martin Feldstein. “He resonated with people,” said a student named Johanna Paretzky, who graduated in 2003. The daughter of a black father and white, Jewish mother, Paretzky emphasized that West's appeal wasn't just to African American students. “White, black, it didn't matter. He was just completely invested in what he had to say.”

West's primary course, African American Studies 10, was a survey of blacks in American history and literature. But “he would stand up there and say, ‘None of this is history, it's all
now,
'” Paretzky remembered. West's emphasis on the current-day relevance of his material made Paretzky feel greater enthusiasm for studying it; this wasn't just stuff you talked about in class and then discarded when you went out into the real world. The annual CUE Guide reviews showed that many students shared Paretsky's feelings: West consistently earned a 4.6 or4.7 out of a possible score of 5, significantly higher than Larry Summers had scored among his undergraduate students.

West's importance extended beyond the classroom. At an institution where students chronically complain that the faculty are too busy and self-important to care about them, West was one professor who would actually engage with undergraduates. “He was a pop star, but in the small ways of creating community, he was important,” said Krishnan Subrahmanian, the 2003 class marshall. “You'd see him walking down the street and he'd say, ‘What's up, brother?' He was inspirational, passionate. He made people care.” West seemed to know everyone—he'd call you “brother” or “sister”—and when he saw someone he knew, he'd give that person a warm hug, get immersed in an impromptu conversation about anything from a new translation of Virgil to the latest Prince CD. It could take Cornel West half an hour just to make the five-minute traverse across Harvard Yard, so many people wanted to talk to him—and he to them.

Harvard professors have a reputation for not being particularly grateful when students come to their office hours, the allotted time students can visit them to discuss material in person. Some professors make students call for appointments weeks in advance; students quickly get the message that they have to be crammed in amid higher priorities. But West's office hours frequently lasted as long as the students wanted to stay. He hosted reading groups with graduate students that went on until late in the night. “He'd talk about things you don't often hear on campus,” said John McMillian, a graduate student in American history, “like how to be a decent person.”

Despite all the diversity of its student body—and in terms of geography, ethnicity, religion, and culture, Harvard probably has the most diverse student body of any university in the world—the majority of Harvard professors are white men. And almost all of the people who run Harvard are white men. In 2001, every single dean of a Harvard school, with the almost mandatory exception of the Radcliffe Institute, was a white male. (The university does have several female vice-presidents of substantial power, but they are largely behind-the-scenes figures, unknown to students.) The men who run Harvard preach diversity among the students, but do not practice it within their own ranks. So Cornel West mattered.

“He's the kind of inspiring teacher that people have as a fantasy of the Ivy League,” said one Harvard professor. And in the fall of 2001, he was more popular than he had ever been. Af-Am 10 had some seven hundred students, making it the third most popular course at Harvard; in fact, West had clashed with university administrators who wanted him to cut the class size in half—they couldn't seem to find a classroom big enough to hold all those students. West had refused, and wound up teaching in the basement of St. Paul's, a local Catholic church.

Maybe, West thought later, that fight was a sign of things to come. Perhaps he was being paranoid, but it seemed that suddenly the powers-that-be wanted him to be a little less popular. He couldn't help but think that this would never have happened when Neil Rudenstine was president, and he wondered if Larry Summers was trying to show that he would use his power very differently than Rudenstine had.

 

Among the ranks of people who might be considered for the job of a university president, the presidency of Harvard has long been seen as a structurally weak position. Harvard's every-tub-on-its-own-bottom tradition makes its deans unusually powerful figures. But the powers of the presidency do create opportunities for a president with sufficient energy, determination, and diplomacy to change the institution in radical ways—especially if he focuses on Harvard College. After the Civil War, Charles William Eliot abolished the prescribed curriculum and introduced elective courses, probably the most crucial step in making Harvard a world-class university. In the 1910s and 1920s, Abbott Lawrence Lowell imposed a system of undergraduate concentrations and built the Harvard houses, which physically and psychologically transformed the campus by eliminating the “Gold Coast,” the luxurious private housing where rich students isolated themselves. And in the years before and during World War II, James Bryant Conant began the transformation of Harvard from a school for New England's social elite to an undergraduate meritocracy, with students from private and public schools all over the country.

Some of the powers of the Harvard president are tangible. He has the power to appoint university vice-presidents, the administrators who perform the corporate functions of the university—finance, community relations, real estate planning, and the like. Those are relatively anonymous positions within the university, but they are powerful ones, and the larger a university becomes, the more power accrues to the people who know how to administer its bureaucracy.

The president also appoints new deans when the old ones step down, another method of solidifying his power. For many academics, deanships are desired positions. They bring larger salaries than professorships, higher profiles, and power of their own; the deans set salaries, allocate office space, approve sabbaticals, raise money, and shape the academic agenda for their schools. Sometimes deans are visionary figures with concrete agendas and administrative skills; other times they are academics who've wearied of the hard, lonely life of a scholar.

Not surprisingly, the president can compel promises of allegiance in exchange for appointments. His challenge is to find people who will submit to such quid pro quos, but are nonetheless able enough to run their schools. If he desired, the president could appoint an obeisant hack to head, say, the Kennedy School, but the coherence and morale of the school would inevitably suffer, especially if the dean lost the confidence of his faculty. So the power to appoint deans is a substantial one, yet must be carefully wielded.