Westward Bound:

Cornel R. West '74 is a man of his word. A devout believer in the academic as activist, he has taken his "variety of African ways of being" around the country.

Harvard has been the latest receipent of his special brand of scholarship.

With his rumbling cadence and a minister's appreciation of the power of the spoken word, West delivered this year's W.E.B. Du Bois lectures, in which he focused on "Being in Blackness: The Struggle Against Nobodiness."

The scholar took as his mantle the "Black Freedom Struggle," calling on people to take up the "bloodstained banner" of "radical democratic activism" and preserve this struggle for freedom.

He says that this movement is being lost due to a lack of "nuanced historicism" among today's generation of scholars and students.

For West, however, philosophy is not confined to the abstract but is a practical touchstone for life. Using his own life as an example, West urged Tuesday's audience "bridge the gap between one's rhetoric and reality, one's promise and performance."

West is a man who sees no division between activism and academia; a man who believes in amalgam and has adopted this "multi-contextuality" as a means of defining himself.

The scholar said, in an interview with The Crimson yesterday, that he is distressed that academics have not transmitted the best of the Black freedom movement--this empowering multi-contexuality--to younger generations.

Therefore, academics, he says, have contributed to the loss of hope among the youth.

West gives the example of rapper Willie D, whose heart he says has been "colonized by rage," due to this lack of hope.

This dereliction of intellectual duty has made the academic ground fertile for the growth of a "sentimental and non-critical nostalgia for the past," he says. In addition, "moral vision has been replaced with narrow and naked group interest" among the youth.

Today's young Black intellectuals are grappling with a guilt resulting from being afforded opportunities many of their "brothers and sisters" do not have. For this reason, West is greatly concerned about upcoming generations of Black students and scholars.

West said that the elimination of this class guilt can be achieved only by maintaining links with the larger Black community.

Citing his work with the Black Panther's prison program while an undergraduate, West emphasized the necessity of both types of "cultural work."

West, who grew up in Sacramento, Calif., entered Harvard at 17 after attending all-Black public schools. While at the College, a place he says "equipped and empowered him to be a Black freedom fighter cutting against the grain," West began his career as an academic activist.

He ran a prison program at Norfolk State Prison as a member of the Black Panther Party and worked with Phillips Brooks House.

But was more startling was his decision to take 16 courses in his junior year. Due to financial reasons, he was forced to graduate a year early.

Such academic feats didn't go unnoticed by his professors. Thomson Professor of Government Martin L. Kilson--whom West credits with helping shape his intellectual development--says West took to his studies with "easy and early clairvoyance."

After graduating magna cum laude in Near Eastern languages, West went on to receive his masters and doctorate degrees in philosophy at Princeton University.

Since graduating from Princeton in 1980, he has taught at Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, Barnard College, Williams College.

West returned to Princeton in 1988, and currently holds joint appointments in religion and philosophy. In addition, the scholar serves as the director of Princeton's Afro-American Studies Program, which some consider to be the best in the country.

He joined the Princeton faculty at the same time his friend and colleague Toni Morrison--whom he once described as following only Herman Melville and William Faulkner in depth and sophistication in writing--accepted a position there.

West's appointment provided him with the opportunity to make his unique vision a reality and provided Princeton with the brio and brilliance of a man who has been characterized as the preeminent African-American intellectual of this generation.

West says Afro-American studies tend to be "ghettoized." To prevent this, he believes a three-tiered approach to Afro-American life and culture--in which history, anthropology and English are given primacy--will give the discipline a "larger scope for intellectual interaction" and make it peculiarly attuned to academia.

West's own work reflects this "multicontexuality." His major works include Black Theology and Marxist Thought, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism and Post-Analytic Philosophy. In addition he has written extensively on hip-hop and urban culture for the New York Times, the Boston Globe and other national journals.

Princeton vice-provost Ruth Simmons says West "has brought an interdisciplinary voice to Princeton hardly imagined possible at the time of his appointment."

"He has great vision, he is and extraordinary intellect and an extraordinary teacher," she says. "Only the capacity of the halls limit the enrollment in his classes."

West is not lacking in admirers from Harvard. The Black Students Association President Zaheer R. Ali '94 calls him "one of the very few Black intellectuals who can maintain their intellectual integrity while remaining grounded in the Black community."

"Cornel has emerged as a master of pedagogy and intellectualism, harnessing the Black ministerial demeanor reminiscent of Martin Luther King, Jr. but with the added intellectual panache," says Kilson, who was one of West's teachers.

Before Henry Louis Gates, Jr., West was asked to direct Harvard's Afro-Am Department. But West says he refused for a variety of reasons.

The position Harvard offered West several years ago, he says, had fewer bureaucratic duties than the position Gates occupies today. West would not, for example, have served as director of the Du Bois center, saying "I would never take on that kind of administrative task."

Building an Afro-Am program, West says, is hard, especially in an old institution whose students and faculty have traditionally been overwhelmingly white.

"You've got to ensure that your Black voices are integral to the larger conversation in the community," West says.

In Princeton, he says, the Afro-Am department works closely with the English, history and anthropology departments.

"You actively invite and solicit a number of persons from those departments to be a part of your conversations," he says.

Although Harvard is the "great national center of higher education," West says that would still not be enough to lure him to here.

"I need a place where there's a real Black cultural center, and Boston just doesn't have that," he says.

Princeton, which is 45 minutes away from New York City, allows him to shuttle back and forth to the city he loves.

"I don't like to get too far away from New York," West says. "I'm very much a New Yorker."

Boston is four hours from Manhattan--too far for West both physically and spiritually.

In addition, Boston has a historical reputation as a city inhospitable to African-Americans. Two years ago, the Boston Globe did a study on the dearth of Black faces at Fenway Park. And some Black Harvard professors have noted that there are some areas in Boston where Blacks shouldn't go.

West complains that Boston lacks the cultural institutions of a thriving Black community: an active nightclub life, church life and intellectual life.

"It's very difficult to imagine myself living in Boston," West says.

If Harvard were to offer West a position, right now, West says, he would be unlikely to accept. Unless, perhaps, Princeton lost West's good friend and closest colleague.

"If Toni Morrison ever left Princeton, I'm sure I'd definitely reconsider," West says.