US academic blames Israel for his job failure
CORNEL WEST is one of America’s most prominent black thinkers. Harvard University has just turned him down for tenure. West detects what his fellow left-wing intellectual Jeremy Corbyn calls “the hand of Israel”.
We can understand why West is upset. Tenure is the academic equivalent of working for British Rail in the Seventies: a job for life, no matter how badly you do it. But blaming the Jews for your failure to secure tenure is like blaming Zionism when the 4:15 from Waterloo to Surbiton is delayed by leaves on the line.
This is the second time West has fallen off a plush perch at Harvard, and the second time he has blamed the Jews. In 2002, West stormed out after Harvard’s new president, the economist Lawrence Summers, asked him to concentrate on teaching and writing rather than political activism and making hip-hop albums. Summers, West said, was “the Ariel Sharon of academia”.
West fell upwards and landed a chair at Princeton. From this eminence, he augmented the sum of human knowledge by appearing in Matrix spinoffs, insulting Barack Obama as a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface”, and calling Israel an “apartheid” state.
West, a professor of religion, has dismissed the Jews’ historical connection to the Land of Israel and is an enthusiast of BDS. In 2014, he called Operation Protective Edge “Israeli state terrorism in action” and “Jewish racism in motion”. Benjamin Netanyahu,
West claimed, is “a war criminal not because he is Jewish but because he has chosen to promote occupation and annihilation”
None of this stopped Harvard from giving West a five-year contract in 2017 to teach in the Divinity School and the Department of African and African American Studies. West’s slanders against Israel might even have recommended him to these departments. The position was non-tenuretrack, but when West’s contract came up for renewal, he applied for tenure. The university authorities refused on procedural grounds.
So West applied his massive and subtle powers of reason.
“In my case,” he told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “my controversial and outspoken views about and critiques of empire, capitalism, white supremacy, male supremacy, and homophobia are tolerated, but any serious engagement around the issues of the Israeli occupation are rendered highly suspect and reduced to anti-Jewish hatred or prejudice.” West gave no evidence for his belief that “the powers that be at Harvard” were rejecting him for criticizing the “ugly Israeli occupation of precious Palestinians”.
The obvious black, left-wing and Muslim student groups rallied to defend Harvard from the Jews. So did the Asian American Womxn’s Association, the staff of the mental health magazine Harvard Under the Surface and — a group surely containing a high proportion of Under the Surface’s subscribers — Jews for Palestinian Right of Return.
Harvard, caught in the media spotlight, did the noble thing. It tried to pay West off. The university responded to his paranoid incitement by, he claims, offering him a ten-year contract that would have kept him at Harvard until his 79th birthday, as well as the usual Zionist emoluments, “more money and a prestigious chair”.
West refused and has retreated to one of his lesser powerbases, the Union Theological Seminary in New York. As nothing boosts an academic career like sticking it to the Zionists, expect West to float up to another Ivy League chair soon.
Naturally, Prospect magazine included West among last July’s list of “the world’s top 50 thinkers”. Tom Clark, Prospect’s editor, praised West for having “things to say about the many warped consequences that can result from one culture subjugating another”. Clark’s subject was West’s speciality, race relations in America. But you have to wonder.
Dominic Green is deputy editor of the Spectator’s US edition