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 t is a truth universally
acknowledged that one pre-condition for being appointed president
of a U.S. college or university is that you first submit to an operation
to have your spine surgically removed. Anyone who doubts this fact
is invited to read the January 2nd statement
by Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University. In Summers's
case the initial operation seems not to have been very well done;
but this has now been corrected, and he looks set fair to make a
very fine president indeed.
In case you
haven't been keeping up with this sorry tale (and if you haven't,
I don't blame you a bit), here is what happened. Summers, who served
as U.S. Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, took over as president
of Harvard last fall. Now, Harvard has an Afro-American Studies
department. You can get a list of that department's faculty from
its website;
and you can get an idea of the kind of work they do by clicking
on "Research Projects" on that same page. Well, one of
the luminaries of the department is Professor Cornel West, and in
October last year, soon after assuming his responsibilities, President
Summers called Prof. West in for a little chat. What was actually
said is the subject of some controversy, but it seems that the professor
was rebuked for a number of shortcomings: egregious grade inflation,
failing to publish anything much of academic value, recording a
rap CD, and possibly also (though Summers has denied rebuking West
on this one) for leading a political committee to support a run
at the U.S. presidency by Al Sharpton. One thing led to another,
and pretty soon there were reports in the newspapers that three
stars of the Harvard faculty were thinking of decamping to Princeton.
By this time
the issue had morphed into the allegation that Summers was insufficiently
committed to affirmative action — a grave charge indeed in
Academe. (Er, well: As a matter of fact, Harvard officially denies
that affirmative action is practiced at the university. However,
as the Duke said in Huckleberry Finn, when the King protested
that his bald head and white whiskers made him a poor choice for
the role of Shakespeare's Juliet: "These country jakes won't
ever think of that.") Pretty soon the whole thing had reached
the proportions of a Major Racial Crisis, signified by the presence
on campus of Jesse Jackson, who held a finger-wagging press conference
January 1 taking Summers to task on precisely the affirmative action
issue. "Harvard must be a beacon of light for the nation, not
a shadow of doubt," intoned the Reverend Jackson, in one of
his less felicitous little antitheses. I suppose we should just
be glad he didn't say: "A light unto the Gentiles..."
That was enough
for Summers. He caved, issued the groveling January 2 statement,
and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. The guardians of Correct Thinking,
once they had examined him carefully to make sure no trace of spinal
tissue remained, rallied to his support. William Julius Wilson,
another professor on the Af-Am Studies faculty, delivered the Good
Housekeeping seal of approval: "The new president is clearly
reaching out... He is trying to correct a previous mistake and misjudgment
and thereby affirm a strong commitment to issues relating to diversity
and affirmative action..." Translation: He loves Big Brother.
I can speak
with some modest authority on this subject, since I once read a
book by Cornel West. The book had the title Race
Matters, and I read it six or seven years ago, standing
in the aisle in one of the bookstores on midtown Fifth Avenue in
New York. It was either in the beautiful, elegant old Scribners
bookstore, which has since been turned into a crack den, or else
in the Barnes & Noble across the street. Race Matters
was a small book, I am a fast reader, and I won't swear that I read
every word. I read enough, though, to know that the book was irredeemably
awful. Not that it told lies, or promoted a wrong-headed point of
view (though it was probably attempting to do both); it was just
so badly written and constructed that you couldn't tell what
it was trying to say. You could have scissored that book up into
its constituent words, rearranged them in random order, printed
the result as another book, and not been able to tell the difference.
I start out,
therefore, inclined to have a low opinion of the department in which
Prof. West is considered such a shining talent. Like most nonblacks,
I guess, I have, anyway, always thought that "Afro-American
Studies" is a pseudo-discipline, invented by guilty white liberals
as a way of keeping black intellectuals out of trouble, and giving
them a shot at holding professorships at elite institutions without
having to prove themselves in anything really difficult, like math.
[Just a word
about that rather unattractive adjective "nonblack". One
thing I have learned, I think, in fifteen years in the U.S.A. is
that there are actually only two races here: black, and nonblack.
All issues to do with race, including the Harvard one, are about
this. Sure, I know people raise the "race" issue in other
contexts — as a matter of fact, Larry Summers's next order
of business, after putting out the Af-Am fire, is to deal with a
group clamoring for a "Latino Studies" department. Yeah,
yeah, but this is a bagatelle, and other "race" issues
that don't involve blacks — the Wen Ho Lee case, for example
— have a similarly forced, derivative quality to them and soon
fade from the public consciousness. When Americans discuss race,
they are talking about blacks and nonblacks. ("African-American,"
whatever. I have never met a black person, nor even been e-mailed
by one, who objected to being called "black," so that's
the term I use. If anyone does mind, please let me know. Way I look
at it, one syllable trumps seven.) I used to try to pull rank in
such discussions by throwing in a sentence that started: "Speaking
as one half of a mixed-race marriage..." Among the people in
the room who weren't familiar with my domestic arrangements, throats
were cleared and fingernails examined; from those who were, there
were irritated little "tsk tsk" noises. Come on, Derb.
THAT'S not what we're talking about, and you know it. ]
Well, in a
spirit of earnest inquiry and self-improvement, I went to the Af-Am
department's website, the one I linked you to up there above, and
did a browse. I actually had two questions in mind: (1) Are there
any nonblack members of the faculty of this department? (2) What
contributions has the department made recently to human knowledge
— to our understanding of the world, and of ourselves?
On the first
question, I still don't have much idea. Of the eleven faculty members
listed on the web page, only four give a photograph. One of these
four, Werner Sollors, is obviously German, and fairly obviously
nonblack. The presence of Prof. Sollors is encouraging, suggesting
that this is not entirely a boondoggle for otherwise-unemployable
black intellectuals, in spite of the tendency of several faculty
members to talk, in their on-site résumés, about "African
American literary criticism" and "Black critical thought".
("Jewish science," anybody?)
As to the second
point, there do seem to be some worthwhile research projects going
on at Harvard Af-Am, though of course there is no way to judge the
quality of their execution from a cursory description. The "Black
Periodical Literature Project" sounds particularly interesting.
I'm not quite clear as to why this, and the other projects listed,
need to be all in the one department. Periodical literature, of
any color, could be collected and analyzed in a department of, well,
literature; or in a department of journalism, or of librarianship...
But universities are funny places, and I suppose they have the right
to divvy up their research into whatever categories they like. What
really caught my eye was the heading on the website: "The W.E.B.
Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research". How many other
departments are there at elite American colleges that are named
after a communist? But, as I said, universities are funny places.
I'm still not
convinced that Afro-American Studies is a legitimate discipline,
though. What's the international angle, for example? Do these professors
go off to scholarly conferences in Belgrade, Beijing, Blagovaschensk,
Brisbane and Bombay to compare notes with Afro-American Studies
experts in those countries? I suspect not. And some of the stuff
they are researching is just African. One of my own old almae
matres, London's School of Oriental and African Studies, used
to do that perfectly well without feeling the need to stick any
hyphenated prefixes on the front of "African".
And on the
question of why an obvious mountebank like Cornel West is regarded
as a glittering presence on the faculty of one of America's elite
universities, I know the answer, and so do you. "Of that of
which we cannot speak, we must perforce be silent." A friend
who is better acquainted with these things than I am tells me that
in fact West is a very bright guy, who arrived for his undergraduate
course in religious studies already able to read Greek, Hebrew and
Aramaic. So why is he writing gibberish books, making rap CDs, and
pimping for the thuggish Al Sharpton? I know the answer to that
one, too.
I know the
answer because I know something about intellectual work. One thing
I know is that all work of this kind is honed and tempered by criticism,
and that without criticism your work gets sloppy, lazy, and solipsistic.
This is true even at the lowest level of brainwork — writing
web opinion columns, say. One reason I keep an e-mail button at
the top of my column is to hear what people think about what I write.
Of course, a lot of silly people write in, a lot of illiterate people,
and a lot of rude people; but I get a surprising amount of thoughtful
criticism, from people who've read what I've said with attention,
rolled it around in their minds some, and come to a clear, intelligent
opinion about it. To me, as a writer (I don't mean just as a web
bloviator: I am currently engaged in writing a serious nonfiction
book, on commission to a respectable publisher) this is gold dust.
It makes me think about what I've said, look at it through other
people's eyes, weigh it and judge it.
Cornel West
doesn't get too much of that. The process I just described has an
equivalent in the academic world. It's called "peer review".
You publish a paper in a learned journal, or read it out at a scholarly
conference, and scholars in your field then scrutinize it. Does
this actually happen in "Afro-American Studies"? My guess
is that it doesn't. There aren't that many departments in this "discipline,"
anyway, even in the U.S.A. For such academics as there are laboring
in this field, the main interest is in promoting its validity, knowing
(as they surely must) how many people, like me, doubt it. Under
these circumstances, it doesn't seem likely to me that they are
going to engage in much scholarly controversy. And even if peer
review does go on, Cornel West isn't exposing himself to it much,
because he doesn't publish much — at any rate, this was said
to be one of the beefs that Larry Summers had at that October meeting.
As to criticism from outside the field... Well, nobody's going to
do that. That would be "racist," wouldn't it?
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