The backlash against Princeton's luring of African-American studies professor Cornel West from Harvard has officially begun. In the last two weeks, The New Republic's editors strongly criticized West's scholarship and ridiculed Princeton's pursuit of him. Slate announced the start of a regular feature called the "Cornel West Whine Watch." John McWhorter of Berkeley pounded West in The Wall Street Journal. And my own magazine's glib reaction, as published in the "Tapped" section of our Web site the day West announced his departure from Cambridge, was that Harvard would "breathe easier tonight."
Observers have lambasted West for concentrating on popular pursuits -- such as recording a CD and advising the presidential campaigns of Bill Bradley and Al Sharpton -- to the exclusion of more serious academic work. They have criticized him for playing the race card in his dispute with Harvard President Larry Summers. And they have mocked Princeton for eagerly giving West a new platform that, in their view, he doesn't deserve.
Criticism of West's scholarship, politics, or recent conduct may or may not have merit. I am not qualified to judge his scholarship, I disagree with much of his politics, and I will concede that his departure from Harvard was messy at best. But in the end, none of these criticisms, true or false, is as relevant as West's detractors would have us believe. Tenure committees at Princeton and Harvard long ago determined that West's scholarship passed muster among the world's finest, his radical politics are protected by principles of academic freedom, and the debate over whether Harvard's new president behaved arrogantly toward West will likely remain forever in the eye of the beholder. The question now is whether Princeton did the right thing by courting West with abandon. And the answer to that is an unqualified yes.
That's because of, in a word, students -- yes, students. The professor's opponents have become so wrapped up in criticizing his scholarship that they haven't bothered to consider one of the primary reasons Princeton thought he was worth luring: the impact that someone of West's stature can have on a community of intellectuals -- particularly on its youngest members, undergraduates.
Just under three years ago, at the beginning of my junior year at Princeton, utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer -- intellectual father of the animal-rights movement, controversial advocate of parents' rights to kill severely disabled infants following birth, defender of, among other things, bestiality -- arrived on campus amid a storm of controversy. Soon after beginning his appointment, Singer made clear that he intended to use his notoriety to single-handedly spark debate about ethical issues among Princeton's undergraduates. Three weeks into the school year, when he debated a blind professor in one of the university's largest auditoriums, hundreds of students lined up for hours to get in; many were turned away. Singer was soon a forceful presence in campus life, dining frequently at Princeton's vegetarian co-op and lending support to students seeking to raise the wages of the university's lowest-paid workers. He authored a regular advice column in The Daily Princetonian's weekly magazine, addressing students on the ethics of everything from accepting Wall Street jobs to sex before marriage. (For the record, he was con and pro, respectively.) His introductory ethics course was extraordinarily popular, drawing hundreds of undergrads.
The effect on campus was powerful. The autumn of Singer's arrival, it wasn't unusual to walk into a dining hall and hear students debating whether a one-week-old baby was sentient, and whether that mattered. My roommate and I found ourselves arguing late into the night about bioethics (not a topic either of us would have been likely to think much about before). And we were hardly the only ones. Many students disagreed forcefully with Singer. But his ideas and opinions were everywhere, and Princeton was a profoundly better place -- a more intellectual place -- for having hired him. The episode was definitive proof that one larger-than-life professor, bent on grabbing a community of young scholars by its collective collar and shaking it out of complacency, can indeed refocus the attention of tomorrow's intellectuals and leaders on important issues. And all indications are that what Peter Singer did for bioethics at Princeton, Cornel West can do for race.
West is reputed to be a phenomenal teacher. His introductory level African-American studies courses at Harvard were extremely popular, as evidenced by the thousand or so students who signed petitions imploring him to stay in Cambridge. His lecturing style is dynamic and engaging. Like Singer, he is a public intellectual who appears to relish confrontation and to embrace his role as a cultivator of young minds. Any college would be crazy not to want him.
Princeton is a smaller, more intimate community than Harvard. It lacks the big-city distractions of Boston, the diffuse sprawl of graduate and professional schools, and the sheer size of its rival to the north. All of this means that it is perhaps easier at Princeton for public intellectuals -- like Singer and West -- to command the attention of an entire campus and to spur it to collective debate on topics from bioethics to race. Because of this, West may well find Princeton an ideal place to advance his ideas, and see them taken up and debated by students. And Princeton, like all elite schools, desperately needs a sustained, honest, intellectual conversation among its undergraduates about issues of race. If West becomes involved enough in undergraduate life to help to spur such a discussion -- advancing it beyond platitudes and engaging those on all ends of the political spectrum -- he will have made his presence felt before he ever even steps into a classroom.
Peter Singer didn't change many of my views, but he did make me and my peers think deeply about the way we understand the world. I'm glad I took his course. I doubt Cornel West would change my opinions on Al Sharpton or market economics, for instance, but I do know this: If I were still at Princeton, I would leave the judging of his scholarly qualifications to the scholars. And I would rush to the registrar to sign up for his class.
