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by
Dan Curry
02.21.02
Academia offers refuge and research dollars for the shining stars of African American Studies, but conditions apply.
into
the shadows at a packed conference on Black public intellectualism in
Chicago last month, his peers roundly condemned, with varying inflections
of rage, Harvard’s treatment of famed scholar and social activist Cornel
West. Asked to speak, Dawson, the Chair of the Department of Political
Science at the University of Chicago, critiqued the rightward drift of
the academy in a soft, lisping voice, then assumed a look of bespectacled
bemusement for the remainder of the night.
 |
|
Additional
streaming media clips from the Campus Greens "Rally for Radical
Change" in Chicago, 08.10.01: |
The conference took shape a month after news broke that Harvard president Larry Summers had called Cornel West into his office. Summers reputedly told West to clamp down on grade inflation, stay out of Al Sharpton’s presidential dreams, and then called his hip hop experiment, Sketches of my Culture, an embarrassment. He urged the author of twenty-odd books to focus on "real" academic research.
Pissed-off, West and a host of other dignitaries in the Harvard African American Studies department threatened to defect to Princeton. Dawson, author of 1994’s Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics, entered the fray when he announced in January that he was leaving the University of Chicago to join Harvard’s faculty in the fall. Although he made his decision before West’s confrontation with Summers became known, Dawson still intends to follow through with his decision, he told LiP Magazine. Though recent events "have called it into question," Dawson said he still believes Harvard to be the university that offers the most freedom to work closely with the public.
Dawson’s active departure to Harvard accounts for his quiet demeanor at the conference. Cathy Cohen of Yale University, Phillip Brian Harper of New York University, and Salim Muwakkil, a Chicago Tribune columnist and senior editor at In These Times, have attacked the actions of Harvard’s president, but have also pointed out that media attention to the event misdirects attention from the real problems plaguing the African-American community.
Harvard had acted against the interests of black studies and black intellectualism. But they were silent on the well-fed, poker-faced paradox sitting among them: Dawson, with his even-tempered persona and his quantitatively grounded, highly regarded research into black political behavior was still going to Boston. By then even the rumblings of Cornel West and others had subsided, and the defection of Harvard’s dream team seemed less likely.
Nowhere to Turn
The truth of the matter is that Cornel and his professional peers have nowhere to turn. Harvard has the most money, the most prestige, and even now, the most academic freedom: everywhere else, one might argue, is downhill from here. And outside of the academy, options and outlets for the radical social critique that comes from Black Studies program just isn’t available.
Cornel West pointed this out in his 1993 bestseller Race Matters: "The major intellectual alternatives to the Academy are journalism, self-support communities (Bohemian and feminist groups), or self-supporting writers." Even with these outlets, "the infrastructures for black intellectual activity are feeble," he wrote.
The questions raised then are these: How long can truly radical Black intellectual activity exist when universities, including Harvard, are facing pressure from corporate management models? And how truly "public," or accessible by a general population, can Black intellectual activists in academia really be?
The legitimacy of West’s album has been defended too often on the wrong grounds. The situation cannot be white-washed: Regardless of its didactic merit, or its communicative reach, West’s "Sketches of my Culture" isn’t good hip hop. Critical reception of the CD, which features West sermonizing over pedestrian beats, has been lukewarm, and even West’s most rabid proponents strain for praise—the best songs, they claim, achieve a modicum of listenability.
But the mission of education has a way of ruining music, and top-notch singers struggle with it. The value of West’s album lies mainly in the academic realm, where it presents a model for black public intellectualism and expresses the general drift of West’s scholarship since the publication of Race Matters in 1993. He suggests in this book that black music redirects the rage embodied in Malcolm X to "where it belongs: on any form of racism, sexism, homophobia, or economic injustice that impedes the opportunities of everyday people."
West’s lyrics reflect some of these aims: "Without self-respect, you certainly self-destruct. Be true to your history. Therein lies your possibility."
In late December, Summers, an economist and not a musicologist, told West it was time to mend his rhyme-dropping ways. In effect, Summers wanted West to ease off the public part of public intellectualism. West took it personally. "The one thing I do not tolerate is disrespect, being dishonored, and being devalued," West said in an interview with National Public Radio talk-show host Tavis Smiley.
Not only was this former U.S. Treasury Secretary criticizing his academic project, but he might as well have told West to stop being black. "For African Americans, the term ‘public intellectual’ is redundant," said Muwakkil.
Since the days of W.E.B. DuBois, Black scholars individually and African American Studies programs collectively have preserved a deep commitment, even a moral imperative, to improve the lot of the disadvantaged. "Much of the best scholarship in Black studies is relevant to Black communities," Dawson said.
West’s CD is unpalatable for Harvard’s president because it seriously attempts to educate outside the ivy-league’s wealthy, predominantly white audience. Here’s evidence: Take another big-name Harvard professor masquerading in the hip hop world at about the same time as West: Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
You’ve got to evolve
Kanter, a Harvard Business School faculty member, released a rap video to accompany her anachronistic book about the Internet, Evolve: Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow. The rap video features her chanting the lyrics she composed to celebrate the interconnectivity of the Internet, while the camera shots swing from her rapping to a local hip-hop artist providing back up.
Her lyrics? Judge for yourself.
Y’all get ready for the next step,
Select the best step.
It’s a leap in evolution,
From the Internet revolution.
Just pick a direction,
In this world of connection.
So many problems to solve
You’ve got to evolve.
The whole video is bizarre: Kanter, a middle-aged white woman, appears overly enthusiastic about the enterprise and only dimly aware of what’s expected from her. In interviews, Kanter has said she wanted to elevate an art form stuck in the gutter. In a press release, she says her rap is an appropriate medium for her ideas because the "turf battles" of the street are comparable to what happens in corporate boardrooms.
If West’s CD was an embarrassment for the Harvard president, then Kanter’s project should have mortified him. The difference between the Kanter video and the West album is that Kanter’s was an artistic joke, a trivial attempt at marketing, and was circulated mainly among the business elites who buy her books. West’s album was a thoughtful, calculated production, aimed at a population unlikely to take one of his Harvard classes.
West, Dawson, and other Black intellectuals are searching for the academic freedom promised by Ivy League institutions, yet such freedom has been in decline for quite some time.
If the freedom ever existed, it began to thin first during the 1990s, in the public universities. Corporate officials began filling university boards of trustees, and chancellors were being tapped from the Forbes 500 companies. Deals between universities with companies like Coke and Nike were only the most visible, outward sign of the corporate model already entrenched inside many university governance bodies.
The corporate model of higher education ushers in the partnering of research with the private sector, and introduces a murky sort of accountability into scholarly output. On another level, it means redesigning curriculums so that students who take math and science are better prepared to take jobs in the medical or high-tech sectors that every state in the union hopes to attract.
Ironically, this development has left the Ivy League in a lurch. Among the power lunch crowd, it’s been known for a long time that the best students from public universities can go toe-to-toe with any Ivy Leaguer; even George W. Bush can buy a degree from Yale. But more dangerous to the elite institutions is the reality that while public schools have long since accepted their roles as corporate training yards, the Ivy Leagues have been slow on the uptake and now are perceived as breeding grounds for expensive, cocksure graduates that aren’t worth a dot.com damn.
Harvard President Summers knows this, and has introduced a plan to overhaul Harvard. He wants to forge research alliances with business, stiffen Harvard undergraduate requirements in math and science, and change the current grading culture at the university and redesign reward systems for faculty.
In the end, Cornel West won his battle with Summers. The Harvard president has called the entire affair a "misunderstanding" and has offered concessions. But as long as Black intellectuals remained tied to institutions of higher learning, any agitation on the behalf of the public will be jeopardized. At the Chicago conference, a member in the audience asked the panel, "How does your work help the problems I see everywhere?"
Professor
Harper answered with academic jargon. Professor Cohen belittled the questioner.
Professor Dawson said nothing, lost in the fantasy of Harvard. 
Reproduction of material from any LiP pages without written permission is strictly prohibited | Copyright 2002 LiPmagazine.org | info@lipmagazine.org
