Top-Dollar Prof.
Bucks over blackboards.

January 11, 2002 8:25 a.m.

ast Sunday, Harvard professor Cornel West took a call from a viewer watching his appearance on C-SPAN's live, three-hour call-in show. It was an innocent question asked by a worshipful fan, but West's answer cast harsh light on his indignant response to Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who recently asked West if his busy extracurricular life was getting in the way of his academic responsibilities.

The caller asked West if he would consider teaching at a historically black college. West said no, because those colleges are unlikely to be able to match his six-figure Harvard salary, and because he would be expected to teach three or four classes each semester — twice his teaching load at Harvard. The lighter schedule, said West, "gives you more time for reading, writing and lecturing, and reflecting, and so on."

West went on to say that he'd been giving over 120 lectures or speeches a year. Said West, "After this recent episode, I'm going to travel a lot less."

Think about that: West, by his own account, has been off campus giving talks an average of once every three days. According to comments his booking agent — who didn't return repeated phone calls seeking comment for this article — made in 1998 to a Florida paper, West has been doing over 150 appearances a year since 1993, the year his Race Matters became a best seller.

And think about this: West's official fee per lecture is $15,000, plus first-class traveling expenses, according to university sources in charge of booking guest speakers. Sources at three universities say that is in the top tier of speaking fees requested by academics, though one college official calls that "a bargain."

"We brought in Dr. Drew from MTV's Loveline, and he cost $17,000," she says. "I mean, Mr. T. will come speak for $30,000."

To be fair, West was on sabbatical leave last year, and had more free time to travel. But in a 1998 interview in the Tallahassee Democrat, West's agent said the professor has been keeping an even busier schedule than that since the 1993 publication of his Race Matters.

Nor does West make $15,000 every time he gives a talk. These fees are always negotiable. He has spoken in some churches for free, and has even been known to speak gratis as a favor to friends. West gave last year's spring commencement address at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College where he had spent some of his sabbatical year, for the school's standard $2,000 fee. (In the fifteen-paragraph address, the name-dropping West mentioned Plato, Socrates, Richard Hofstadter, Giambattista Vico, T. S. Eliot, Jesus, Sir Thomas More, St. Paul, Montaigne, Seneca, Nietzsche, Josiah Royce, and the prophets Elijah and Amos. "We're the Great Books school, so we liked that," said the college's publicist.).

Still, the $15,000 figure is a benchmark for estimating what this star professor's income might be on the lecture circuit. If West averaged only half that amount in his appearances last year, he raked in $900,000 from public speaking. If he averaged only $1,000 per appearance — one-fifteenth of his standard fee — he still took in an astonishing $120,000 without ever having to step inside a classroom.

West's salary as one of the 14 elite University Professors at Harvard is not known, but Stanley Fish, Dean of the University of Illinois — Chicago's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, says it is "not unusual now to find a professor of the humanities making between $130,000 and $170,000."

Whatever Harvard pays West, and whatever one's conjectures about his lecture-circuit income, it is hard to deny that a large portion of the professor's income comes from things he does outside the academy. Cornel West was not only protecting his reputation by mau-mauing Larry Summers into shutting up about West's off-campus activities; he was safeguarding his personal gold mine. This gives new meaning to black scholar Michael Eric Dyson's line about public intellectuals: "We profit while we prophet."

Judge Richard Posner uses the Dyson quote in his new book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, as a heading for his chapter on the market for public intellectuals.

Posner's chapter on the market for public intellectuals, says to a significant extent, "public intellectuality is a celebrity phenomenon." He further points out that books and lectures by public intellectuals are not only valued as information, "but also as entertainment and 'solidarity goods,' symbolic goods that provide a rallying point for like-minded people."

Thus West's frequent appearances in public forums and on television, where he advocates his left-wing racialist vision in a warm, lively style that makes him popular with audiences, only increase his market value as a public intellectual — which is not the same thing as his actual value as a scholar.

Posner's book argues that scholarly distinction and fame as a public intellectual tend to be inversely related because time spent doing the sorts of things that make one a celebrity intellectual in our media-driven culture take away from time that could be spent doing scholarship. But the judge tells NRO that the peripatetic West, whose work is frequently cited by other scholars, may be a highly energetic exception.

"West has a very impressive platform manner; that may be a factor in his prominence as a public intellectual. But judging from the number of scholarly citations to his work, he is by no means a negligible scholar," says Posner.

But 120 public appearances in one year is a staggering number, Posner agrees, and he says he has "no idea" if West's scholarly productivity is suffering.

David R. Shumway, an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an outspoken critic of the academic-star system, is nevertheless an admirer of West's. "He is an extraordinary speaker," Shumway says. "There are very few people in the academy that I've heard who are as effective at the podium as Cornel West."

Yet Shumway, while being careful not to condemn West, finds it hard to understand how any scholar could fulfill as many speaking engagements as West does and still keep up with his classes. Says Shumway, "It's certainly true that I don't know anyone else who has that schedule."

Fish, who is teaching a course this semester on the public-intellectual phenomenon, cites West, his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates, and Columbia's Edward Said, as "good examples of people who do serious work and who have managed to find public platforms, and use that platform to advocate.

If someone like West is fulfilling the terms of his university contract, says Fish, it's nobody's business how often they travel or what they make on the side from their lectures.

"It's something that redounds to the credit of the university," Fish says. "I don't go on the road that much — maybe 10 or 12 times a year — but I do find that when I do that, it always helps recruiting efforts or fundraising efforts for my university, if only down the road."

But Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who writes frequently for magazines and in non-academic forums, has questioned the corrupting influence of the lucrative media culture that cultivates celebrity intellectuals.

In a 1995 Dissent article, Wilentz observed that public intellectuals in past eras "did not have to contend with the mounting and corrupting temptations that beset today's aspiring intellectuals across the board — the jet-set lecture tours, the huge fees, the glare of glitzy publicity. In short, [they] did not have to confront today's cult of celebrity writerhood, a cult that has rewarded fakes, seduced honest but seducible writers, and garbled intelligent thought and debate."

Black intellectuals like West are particularly susceptible to this, wrote Wilentz, because of "liberal racialism," which tends to celebrate prominent black thinkers simply for existing. Furthermore, the media (and sometimes other blacks) expect black scholars, critics and artists to be spokesmen for their race, and only seem to want to hear from them when they have something to say about race relations.

There are, then, powerful incentives to fall into an intellectual rut. Cornel West is a philosopher of pragmatism, but nobody's going to put him pay him $15,000 to come speak about the influence of Richard Rorty on the American philosophical tradition. And he's not going to be invited on Charlie Rose to talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"Somebody like W.E.B. Du Bois or James Baldwin, for all the difficulties they faced, were at least spared the temptation of celebrity in the modern form, which is heavy on TV, heavy on personality, heavy on charisma," Wilentz tells NRO. "The best of someone, even as a public intellectual, is intensely private. It's not about being on the lecture tour."

The irony is that West's very public scrap with the Harvard president over his off-campus activities will likely make him even more in demand on the lecture circuit. As Posner notes, martyrdom has its rewards. Lani Guinier and Judge Robert Bork came out of their failed Senate confirmation battles much in demand as paid speakers. If he breaks his vow to travel less in the coming year, West, having loudly stood up to The Man, and in explicitly racial terms, stands to make more money than ever.