West Blasts Summers, Says Gates Likely To Go

Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 reproached University President Lawrence H. Summers yesterday in the strongest language he has publicly used to date, just days after his decision to leave Harvard for Princeton was announced.

In interviews with Tavis Smiley, whose show is aired on National Public Radio, and with The New York Times, West said Summers’ treatment of him was highly offensive and heavy-handed.

“I think in one sense that Larry Summers is the Ariel Sharon of American higher education,” West said on Smiley’s show. “He acts like a bull in a china shop; he acts like a bully in a very delicate and dangerous situation.”

“Harvard deserves so much better, it seems to me, than this quality of leadership,” West added.

West also said DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., who is chair of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, is also leaning toward a move to Princeton.

In his radio interview, West lambasted Summers in particular for disrespecting him during an October conversation.

During that conversation, West alleged, Summers criticized his work without ever having read it.

“You have to do your homework and not be provocative,” West told Smiley. “You’re going to make judgments about someone’s scholarship, then you ought to read their work.”

As a University professor, West reports directly to Summers—and not to a department chair or dean, as do most professors at Harvard.

But West alleges that Summers went far beyond his authority by suggesting that they meet two months later to “see how my academic project was coming along.”

“I said, ‘My God, you don’t talk this way to an assistant professor...let alone a University professor,’” West said on the radio show.

West also alleged that during their October conversation, Summers accused him of missing three weeks of classes during the 1999-2000 academic year to work on Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign—an accusation that West said was completely false.

“He’s hanging out with the wrong crowd—they’re poisoning his mind and it results in the level of accusations that are not only unwarranted but they’re ugly,” West said to Smiley.

West said the character of the leaders of Princeton made his offer to return there—where he taught and directed the Program in African-American Studies before coming to Harvard—much more appealing.

West told Smiley that the “vision” and “atmosphere” promoted by Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman and Provost Amy Gutmann ’71 “pulled” him away from Harvard.

So did the overwhelming support offered by Tilghman and Gutmann following his prostate cancer surgery at the end of January.

West said he received nearly weekly calls from Tilghman and Gutmann during his recovery from the surgery.

“I didn’t receive any telephone calls from President Summers,” West said to Smiley. “I did receive one note.”

And though Summers recently made several attempts to reach out to West through Gates and Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree—both close friends and colleagues of West—those efforts proved too little, too late for West.

“To say that somehow he worked so hard to keep me is simply false, just another example, I think, of the pattern of mendacity that I’ve seen over the past few months,” West said.

The University had no response yesterday to West’s comments except to reiterate that Summers had attempted—though unsuccessfully—to contact West.

“Over the past several weeks, Professor West did not respond to repeated overtures from President Summers for conversation. It doesn’t seem fruitful now to have that conversation in the press,” said Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Alan J. Stone.

West’s comments yesterday delivered one of the harshest critiques yet of Summers’ young presidency.

Though some Faculty and students suggested yesterday that the comparison to the Israeli prime minister may have been too strong, they said the general criticism behind the metaphor was on the mark.

“I think Professor West had a good point in that both Sharon and Summers seem to have come into a new situation and have been the ‘bull in the china shop,’” said Charles M.G. Moore ’04, vice president of the Black Men’s Forum.

“However, I think Professor West probably used that as part of his…political leanings right now, and I don’t think the comparisons really work well—it could have been any bull in a china shop and not just Ariel Sharon,” Moore said.

Ogletree, who has spoken on West’s behalf in recent months, was hopeful that Summers would learn from West’s departure.

“Every Harvard president has stumbled early in his tenure and found ways to improve,” Ogletree said. “I’m hopeful that President Summers will be able to do the same.”

But not all professors said they felt the spat with West should lead Summers to change his ways.

“I hope that President Summers will not yield to his critics, because if he does they will only multiply,” said Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse.

—David H. Gellis contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Kate L. Rakoczy can be reached at rakoczy@fas.harvard.edu.