HARVARD’S LOSS

The bare facts of the dispute are simple enough. Last fall, Harvard’s new president, Lawrence H. Summers, called in Cornel West, a professor of Afro-American studies, to try to get him to work more on serious scholarship and presumably less on such well-publicized activities as recording a rap CD and backing the political candidacies of Bill Bradley and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Professor West took offense, publicly, and threatened to accept an invitation to join Princeton’s black-studies program.

Efforts to patch up the quarrel failed, and now Mr. West is leaving for Princeton – with a bang. He complained that Mr. Summers had waited until just a few weeks ago to send him a get-well message after his surgery for prostate cancer, while Princeton’s president called him every week. He said: “Larry Summers strikes me as the Ariel Sharon of American higher education. He struck me very much as a bull in a china shop and as a bully, in a very delicate and dangerous situation.”

There has been more to it, of course. Professor West has been an enormously popular figure at Harvard, drawing more than 500 students to his courses each semester with his fiery speaking style and inspirational ideas. While his recent non-academic activities have attracted wide attention, in past years he has written or edited more than a dozen scholarly books. They include his two-volume 1993 book “Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism” and his 1995 “Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing begin.” As for the rap recording, he prefers to call the spoken-word CD an example of “danceable education.”

President Summers is a brilliant if sometimes abrasive former U.S. treasury secretary, after a long career as an economics professor at the MIT and Harvard. His meeting with Mr. West, one of Harvard’s 17 “university professors” who report directly to the president, was part of his effort to maintain and improve Harvard’s standing as a great university. Mr. West said Mr. Summers wanted to monitor Mr. West’s progress on his next scholarly work by meeting with him every two or three months.

Mr. West rejected the idea that Mr. Summers was his boss, saying, “Professors do not have supervisors, brother. Professors are free agents to do their work, because there is a trust in their judgment about how they go about doing their work.” In short, Mr. West felt he had been dissed.

Black studies, which grew out of the protests in the 1960s, have gone mainstream as established fields in 400 colleges and universities. Of that total, 140 offer degrees, 24 of them master’s and five Ph.D.’s. Another black scholar, John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, writes in The Wall Street Journal that Professor West seems to believe “that serious academic work is optional for black intellectuals, and that to require it of a black scholar beyond a certain point is a racist insult.” Mr. McWhorter goes on: “But can Professor West not see that this only reinforces the stereotype of black mental dimness that feeds the very racism he is so quick to sniff out. Visionary or not, rap is not scholarship. Nor is putting one’s arm around a hustler like the Rev. Sharpton ‘speaking truth to power.'”

Black studies are by their nature more contentious than most other fields of education. Feelings are easily bruised. If Princeton doesn’t treat its new professor with kid gloves, Harvard’s loss may turn out to be Princeton’s loss, too.