From The Village Voice:
Three years ago, Princeton University appointed Harvard professor Cornel West as the school’s newest professor of religion. This came after Harvard president Lawrence Summers questioned the quality of West’s “scholarship” to colleagues and the press. Amid the furor over West’s departure from Harvard’s celebrated department of African and African American studies came a much quieter yet no less disturbing contretemps. That June, a group of conservative scholars withdrew from a panel on the prominent philosopher Sidney Hook that featured West as a discussant. Asked to explain the boycott, CUNY’s John Patrick Diggins told The New York Times, “I’m concerned about whether [West] has any point of view in matters of philosophy,” despite the fact that West holds a Princeton Ph.D. in the discipline and devoted some of his 1989 book The American Evasion of Philosoph y to Hook.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education this April, Robin Wilson portrayed African American studies programs as fighting against irrelevance—and for their very survival.
More here.
