Tenure Troubles Extend to Harvard, Cornel West | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Mitch Kokai.

    Battles over tenure are not unique to UNC-Chapel Hill and controversial journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Aron Ravin writes at National Review Online about another case of a high-profile African-American lodging a complaint against a prestigious school.

• Cornel West is an esteemed leftist academic who has taught at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. He's a prolific Christian author and a socialist who has rejected Marxism. He's willing to appear on Fox News and debate the Right. West backed Senator Bernie Sanders (D., Vt.) in the 2020 race, hoping to bring his racial and religious knowledge to the Sanders campaign. While he's certainly a progressive, to West's credit, he's avoided the frothing-at-the-mouth activism that much of the Left has descended to. He's willing to have his ideas challenged and refuses to blindly get behind whatever new bit of insanity critical theorists endorse.
• It's a shame that he was revealed to be so utterly entitled.
• At the end of June, West submitted a rambling, raving resignation letter to Harvard University. Peppered with exclamation points and various accusations, the letter declared that Harvard as an institution is deplorable, to the extent that he could no longer work there in good conscience. At the outset, this shouldn't be particularly objectionable. Harvard, much like many other elite universities, is "spiritually bankrupt," he wrote. West's reasoning, however, is in desperate need of critique.
• The true root of West's indignation lies in Harvard's refusal to grant him tenure. Bafflingly, he has convinced himself that the reason for this lies in the "shadow of Jim Crow" that engulfs the school. For the record, he held tenure at Harvard before, but he quit in 2002 after feeling insulted by then-president Lawrence Summers. Does he honestly mean to suggest that Harvard has grown more prone to discriminate against black people over the past two decades?