West never directly mentions his ugly break with his alma mater during his Saturday evening book discussion, but he does not completely ignore what for Harvard faculty and students is the elephant in the room.
“I am blessed to be back in Cambridge” to engage in critical and open discussion, West says, because “that is what Harvard is about—at it’s best.” As the crowd laughs, he repeats “at it’s best” once more to drive the point home.
But Democracy Matters is not one for glancing blows.
West goes into great detail recounting how, soon after Summers took over as University President in Oct. 2001, he requested a meeting with West in which he allegedly criticized the then-University Professor’s academic integrity and told him to make better use of his time than making a rap CD and working on Bill Bradley’s 2000 Presidential campaign. Summers also allegedly criticized West for allowing grade inflation in his class which, the New York Times would later report, gave A or A- grades to 50% of students.
West minces few words when using his book to respond to Summers’ charges. He repeats past charges that the president is “a bull in a china shop…an arrogant man, an ineffective leader,” adding that his “vision puts a premium on accumulating academic trophies and generating sizable income in the form of government contracts, foundation grants, and business partnerships” on an insular campus that does not reach out to the larger democratic society.
He also accuses Summers of trying to conspire with West in “bringing Professor Mansfield down,” referring to Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, though he does not elaborate further.
West, who elsewhere in the book criticizes “aggressive militarism” as one of three major threats to contemporary democracy, goes as far as to proclaim that “President Summers had messed with the wrong Negro.”
Summers has repeatedly refused to comment on what transpired between him and West on the grounds that he does not discuss the content of any meeting with Faculty members.
“I have not talked about the content of that meeting and certainly do not intend to start now,” Summers said in Oct. 2002. But he has said that he made efforts to broker peace with West before his departure and convince him to stay at Harvard.
West addresses the Summers dispute within the larger context of the obligation of intellectuals and professors to go beyond the ivory tower and engage with the democratic community as a whole. His critique of Summers is framed within a larger criticism of “the technocratic management culture on the rise in our universities today [that] offers few…democratic rewards.”
West’s discussion of his dispute with Summers is particularly timely because tensions between Summers and the African and African-American Studies Department resurfaced recently when two Harvard Af-Am professors, Lawrence Bobo and his wife Marcyliena Morgan, announced they will leave Harvard at the end of the fall semester to take up tenured positions at Stanford. Their departure has been attributed by colleagues to the fact that Summers denied Morgan tenure at Harvard this past summer.
West says this incident is part of a larger conspiracy by Summers and others at the University to diminish the standing of black professors at Harvard.
“Summers and others were deeply upset that black professors were becoming the public face of Harvard…and so we’ve seen a set of actions that at this point are pretty undeniable that ensure that those black public officials are put in their place,” West says in an interview the day after his speech.
But W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities and Af-Am Department Chair Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says that significant tension between the department and Summers are non-existent.
“We have a wonderfully warm, direct and honest relationship,” Gates said in September after Morgan and Bobo announced their imminent departure. “While we do not always agree, I believe that we respect each other’s opinions.”
It seems as if West may forever be associated with his row with Summers, just as that row at times distracts from his scholarship in Democracy Matters.
But for West, no matter what his relations with the President, they will not cloud his feelings for his alma mater.
“Cambridge is a home among other homes,” he says. “I wish the school well, I wish the Harvard tradition well.”
—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.