Cornel West’s resignation and neoliberalism’s pernicious influence on academia

benfell

There is much in Cornel West’s resignation from faculty at Harvard Divinity School to unpack here:


Perhaps it is that I am old and that my eyes now make reading fine print difficult, so with assistance from Google’s magic, I will render the text from that image:

June 30th, 2021

I hope and pray you and your family are well! This summer is a scorcher! Here is my brief and candid letter of resignation: “How sad it is to see our beloved Harvard Divinity School in such decline and decay. The disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students loom large. When I arrived four years ago – with a salary less than what I received 15 years earlier and with no tenure status after being a University Professor at Harvard and Princeton – I hoped and prayed I could still end my career with some semblance of intellectual intensity and personal respect. How wrong I was! With a few glorious and glaring exceptions, the shadow of Jim Crow was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity: all my courses were subsumed under Afro-American Religious Studies, including those on Existentialism, American Democracy and The Conduct of Life, no possible summer salary alongside the lowest increase possible every year. Yet I delivered two convocation addresses and one commencement speech in four years. I was promised a year sabbatical but could only take one semester in practice. And to witness a faculty enthusiastically support a candidate for tenure then timidly defer to a rejection based on the Harvard administration’s hostility to the Palestinian cause was disgusting. We all knew the mendacious reasons given had nothing to do with academic standards. When my committee recommended a tenure review – also rejected by the Harvard administration – I knew my academic achievements and student teaching meant far less than their political prejudices. Even my good friends in the Afro-American and African Studies Department were paralyzed, given their close relations to the administration. And after teaching extra courses, including five courses in one year, this silence continued. When the announcement of the death of my beloved Mother appeared in the regular newsletter, I received two public replies (just as that of my colleague Dr. Jacqueline Olga Cooke-Rivers who received none when her blessed Mother died). Any ordinary announcement about a lecture, award or professional advancement receives about twenty replies! This kind of narcissistic academic professionalism, cowardly deference to the anti-Palestinian prejudices of the Harvard administration, and indifference to my Mother’s death constitute an intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths. In my case, a serious commitment to Veritas requires resignation – with precious memories but absolutely no regrets!”

Cornel West[1]

First, perhaps most strikingly, is an appearance that fellow scholars in his department were so intimidated—or at least so complicit—in a repression of a political viewpoint that only two (publicly) expressed condolences when Cornel West’s mother died.[2] I have never met West, but I see in his memoir[3] and in all I have read of him that he infuses heart in everything he does. This is a divinity school, a seminary, which one might expect should shift an emphasis toward compassion, a compassion that seems here nearly absent.

It did not matter what West taught; he and it were essentialized as “African American Religious Studies,”[4] reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s lament, nearly forty years ago, that the concerns of “poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians” had been reduced to a single panel at an allegedly feminist but decidedly not intersectional conference.[5] It would seem that Harvard University has learned nothing in all those decades.

West, it would appear, was on track for tenure, but otherwise treated much like an adjunct,[6] albeit likely with better pay in what John Asimakopoulos calls the “homeless existence in a McDonaldized contingent academia,”[7] yet he hoped to “end [his] career with some semblance of intellectual intensity and personal respect.” Instead, he realizes he was put on display at convocations and commencements.[8]

West’s denial of tenure is even more egregious than that in the case of Nikole Hannah-Jones, who holds only a Master’s degree,[9] for there can be no excuse of absence of “traditional academic background.”[10] West has that background in spades at multiple elite universities.[11]

Lookie here, says the principally wealthy (of course) white male administration,[12] and see our Black radical! See how cool we are! Admire our coolness! But not his or her ideas and work.

Both West and Hannah-Jones were offered tenure after respective mealy-mouthed university administrations first refused it and then succumbed to resulting uproars.[13]

West calls Harvard “market driven”[14] and of course he is far from the first to observe the pernicious influence of neoliberalism on universities generally, an influence that increasingly reduces education to job training, an influence that likely spelled doom for my Human Science program at Saybrook University, an influence that reduces the university to a colonizer.

I mourn the university as an ideal, a place foundationally for inquiry, both for students and faculty. Paulo Freire thought that teachers should be co-learners with students,[15] a concept that sounds somewhat less radical when one understands that universities are homes for research as well as education; critical theory thus intentionally conflates pedagogy with inquiry.[16] The course load that West describes having taken on[17] forecloses entirely that possibility and this plight is common to many adjuncts. While I’ve never seen Freire’s pedagogy in practice, a university that fails to foster inquiry among all present is an arrogant place, a place that does not understand its own limitations, a place that lacks humility before the unknown.

I mourn the university also for its failure to decolonize, for a pretense of “critical thinking” that in fact reduces to conformity and compliance with the political and economic status quo,[18] not merely in stark and stunning contrast to Freire’s conscientização,[19] but such that even a call to action in the Chronicle of Higher Education is addressed to the very sycophants in administration[20] who are themselves the problem.[21]

And so I desperately wonder how to resurrect the university, not for the shortcomings it has always had, but for indispensable ideals it must achieve, even when costs under capitalism are obscene; when it must serve as a refuge for inquirers, whether as students or faculty, who must be supported in their work; where the exploration even of unpopular ideas, whether in the end, we discard those ideas, embrace them, or leave them for further inquiry, is understood to be crucial to progress. In such a light, “job training” is impoverishment, for money is but a small part of wealth, the much larger and unquantifiable part being that which neoliberalism not merely disdains but relentlessly punishes.

  1. [1]Cornel West, “This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. . . .” Twitter, July 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1414765668222869508↩
  2. [2]Cornel West, “This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. . . .” Twitter, July 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1414765668222869508↩
  3. [3]Cornel West, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (Carlsbad, CA: SmileyBooks, 2009).↩
  4. [4]Cornel West, “This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. . . .” Twitter, July 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1414765668222869508↩
  5. [5]Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Social Theory, ed. Charles Lemert, 6th ed. (Philadelphia: Westview, 2017), 340-342.↩
  6. [6]Cornel West, “This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. . . .” Twitter, July 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1414765668222869508↩
  7. [7]John Asimakopoulos, Acknowledgements in The Political Economy of the Spectacle and Postmodern Caste (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2020), xiv.↩
  8. [8]Cornel West, “This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. . . .” Twitter, July 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1414765668222869508↩
  9. [9]While rules may vary from institution to institution, normally, tenure at universities requires a terminal degree. That said, my recent thinking is that, as in the case of Nikole Hannah-Jones, I see high caliber work from journalists at the Master’s level, that they have no need for a higher degree, and that perhaps, for journalists, a Master’s should be the terminal degree much as it is in Fine Arts.↩
  10. [10]Jon Allsop, “On NHJ, UNC, and CRT,” Columbia Journalism Review, June 25, 2021, https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/nikole_hannah_jones_unc_tenure.php; Timothy Bella, “Cornel West says in resignation letter over tenure dispute that Harvard is in ‘decline and decay,’” Washington Post, July 13, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/07/13/cornel-west-harvard-tenure-resignation/; Sarah Brown, “Race on Campus: The Racial Climate at UNC,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 6, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/race-on-campus/2021-07-06; Brendan Cantwell, “The Culture War Has Come for Higher Ed,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 12, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-culture-war-has-come-for-higher-ed; Lauren Lumpkin and Nick Anderson, “Nikole Hannah-Jones to join Howard faculty after UNC tenure controversy,” Washington Post, July 6, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/07/06/howard-nikole-hannah-jones-tanehisi-coates/; Jack Stripling, “‘What the Hell Happened?,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-the-hell-happened; Jack Stripling, “‘Look Us in the Eye,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 1, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/look-us-in-the-eye; Megan Zahneis, “Cornel West’s Resignation Letter Cites ‘Decline and Decay’ at Harvard Divinity School,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 13, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/cornel-wests-resignation-letter-cites-decline-and-decay-at-harvard-divinity-school↩
  11. [11]Megan Zahneis, “Cornel West’s Resignation Letter Cites ‘Decline and Decay’ at Harvard Divinity School,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 13, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/cornel-wests-resignation-letter-cites-decline-and-decay-at-harvard-divinity-school↩
  12. [12]Harvard University, “Officers and Deans,” 2021, https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/leadership-and-governance/officers-and-deans/; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “University Administrative Structure,” 2021, https://facultyhandbook.unc.edu/administration-and-governance/university-administrative-structure/↩
  13. [13]Timothy Bella, “Cornel West says in resignation letter over tenure dispute that Harvard is in ‘decline and decay,’” Washington Post, July 13, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/07/13/cornel-west-harvard-tenure-resignation/; Lauren Lumpkin and Nick Anderson, “Nikole Hannah-Jones to join Howard faculty after UNC tenure controversy,” Washington Post, July 6, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/07/06/howard-nikole-hannah-jones-tanehisi-coates/; Megan Zahneis, “Cornel West’s Resignation Letter Cites ‘Decline and Decay’ at Harvard Divinity School,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 13, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/cornel-wests-resignation-letter-cites-decline-and-decay-at-harvard-divinity-school↩
  14. [14]Cornel West, “This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. . . .” Twitter, July 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1414765668222869508↩
  15. [15]Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th ann. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2008).↩
  16. [16]Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds., Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008); Raymond A. Morrow with David D. Brown, Critical Theory and Methodology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994).↩
  17. [17]Cornel West, “This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. . . .” Twitter, July 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1414765668222869508↩
  18. [18]Brendan Cantwell, “The Culture War Has Come for Higher Ed,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 12, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-culture-war-has-come-for-higher-ed↩
  19. [19]Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th ann. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2008).↩
  20. [20]Brendan Cantwell, “The Culture War Has Come for Higher Ed,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 12, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-culture-war-has-come-for-higher-ed↩
  21. [21]Tahirah Walker, “Higher education and I are going through a break-up, a conscious uncoupling, a disentanglement,” Public Source, July 8, 2021, https://www.publicsource.org/higher-education-pittsburgh-perspective/↩

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