Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 reproached University President Lawrence H. Summers yesterday in the strongest language he has publicly used to date, just days after his decision to leave Harvard for Princeton was announced.

In interviews with Tavis Smiley, whose show is aired on National Public Radio, and with The New York Times, West said Summers’ treatment of him was highly offensive and heavy-handed.

“I think in one sense that Larry Summers is the Ariel Sharon of American higher education,” West said on Smiley’s show. “He acts like a bull in a china shop; he acts like a bully in a very delicate and dangerous situation.”

“Harvard deserves so much better, it seems to me, than this quality of leadership,” West added.

West also said DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., who is chair of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, is also leaning toward a move to Princeton.

In his radio interview, West lambasted Summers in particular for disrespecting him during an October conversation.

During that conversation, West alleged, Summers criticized his work without ever having read it.

“You have to do your homework and not be provocative,” West told Smiley. “You’re going to make judgments about someone’s scholarship, then you ought to read their work.”

As a University professor, West reports directly to Summers—and not to a department chair or dean, as do most professors at Harvard.

But West alleges that Summers went far beyond his authority by suggesting that they meet two months later to “see how my academic project was coming along.”

“I said, ‘My God, you don’t talk this way to an assistant professor...let alone a University professor,’” West said on the radio show.

West also alleged that during their October conversation, Summers accused him of missing three weeks of classes during the 1999-2000 academic year to work on Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign—an accusation that West said was completely false.

“He’s hanging out with the wrong crowd—they’re poisoning his mind and it results in the level of accusations that are not only unwarranted but they’re ugly,” West said to Smiley.

West said the character of the leaders of Princeton made his offer to return there—where he taught and directed the Program in African-American Studies before coming to Harvard—much more appealing.

West told Smiley that the “vision” and “atmosphere” promoted by Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman and Provost Amy Gutmann ’71 “pulled” him away from Harvard.