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August 13, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
West of Everything
A professor’s approach to disagreement.

By Matt Feeney

ommentary on last fall's fateful encounter between black-studies honcho Cornel West and new Harvard president Lawrence Summers poured in torrents through all media, but details of the actual meeting remain skimpy to this day. A few small, imprecise snippets of West's account have emerged in interviews and through third parties (such as novelist Toni Morrison). Summers has been even more reticent. West has claimed that he was the victim of "disrespect" from the notoriously bumptious Summers. Summers characterized the angry confrontation as a "misunderstanding" and later publicly apologized. In interviews, West said that Summers wrongly accused him of skipping three weeks of class in order to act as an adviser to Al Sharpton's exploratory presidential campaign, and that Summers roughed him up in various other ways regarding his lack of scholarly production and his supposedly easy grading in his huge introductory Afro-American-studies class. But a puff piece on West in Sunday's Washington Post provides evidence that West was directly responsible for the escalation of hostilities that turned the meeting into a national incident. And this evidence comes from West himself.

West apparently took the gravest offense at the charge that he had skipped so much class. The Post article echoes a view that emerged in Sam Tanenhaus's piece on West in the June issue of Vanity Fair, that West is a very generous teacher and would never shortchange his students in that way. Assuming that Summers really did level this accusation, and assuming that it really is incorrect (no evidence I'm aware of has emerged to corroborate the charge Summers supposedly made), West's anger is understandable. Nobody likes to be wrongly accused, and especially to be wrongly accused of shirking a duty that he performs with rare devotion. Unlike most other star academics, West is known to be an energetic and generous teacher, often holding marathon office-hours sessions. West could have gotten over the initial anger and given Summers the benefit of the doubt. He might have assumed that somehow, somewhere, Summers had be given wrong information that he innocently, if hastily, assumed to be true.

But it appears that West did something quite different. According to his own account, quoted in the Post, he responded, "So already, I knew you had what I call an a priori approach to 'the Negro.' You don't need evidence. You just accuse." By "an a priori approach to 'the Negro,'" West meant that, in dealing with black people, Summers uses a set of racially grounded guiding assumptions that help him stamp unambiguous, invidious meaning on ambiguous scraps of evidence. In other words, West accused Summers of being a racist. Indeed, he suggests that he "knew" ahead of time that Summers was a racist. The Post then notes, "The meeting went downhill from there...." As well it might have! Imagine standing before the intellectual and emotional fury that is Lawrence Summers and accusing him of being a racist. It's surprising that the room didn't, at that moment, just burst into flames.

Since not even West has claimed that there was anything racial in the specifics of Summer's initial fusillade, it is fairly obvious which of the two was employing "an a priori approach." After all, Summers was making people squirm all over campus. In one meeting, he asked the head of Harvard's School of Education to justify the very existence of his program! (A university president able even to imagine scuttling his ed school? Be still my heart.) He told a Harvard Law professor that a question she posed to him was "stupid." He met individually with all of Harvard's University Professors (West was a University Professor before he left for Princeton), who answer only to the school's president. Reports of these meetings suggested an in-your-face style unheard of among university presidents. Neither the Post nor Vanity Fair apparently asked West to interpret his conflict with Summers in light of the Harvard president's broader reputation for lacking the very rudiments of tact.

Summers, in other words, was well known for offending people based on (a perhaps hasty assessment of) the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. So there was no warrant to call him a racist just because he was being unpleasant, confrontational, and even inquisitorial in a single meeting. Unless, that is, you take an a priori approach to racism.