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Member Number: 9301
(born June 2, 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma) is a prominent African-American scholar and public intellectual. Formerly at Harvard University, West is currently a professor of Religion at Princeton. West says his intellectual contributions draw from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, Marxism, pragmatism, and transcendentalism.
The grandson of a preacher, West marched as a young man in civil rights demonstrations and organized protests demanding black studies courses at his high school. West later wrote that, in his youth, he admired "the sincere black militancy of Malcolm X, the defiant rage of the Black Panther Party [...] and the livid black theology of James Cone".
After graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in Sacramento, California, where he served as president of his high-school class, he enrolled at Harvard University at age 17. He took classes from philosophers Robert Nozick and Stanley Cavell and graduated in three years, magna cum laude in Near Eastern languages and civilization in 1973. He was determined, as he informs us, to press the university and its intellectual traditions into the service of his political agendas and not the other way around: to have its educational agendas imposed on him. "Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s," he says, "I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms, and viewpoints, my Christian values of service, love, humility, and struggle, and my anti-colonial sense of self-determination for oppressed people and nations around the world."
He earned a Ph.D. in 1980 from Princeton, where he was influenced by Richard Rorty's pragmatism. He later published his dissertation (completed in 1980) as The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought.
In his mid-twenties, he returned to Harvard as a Du Bois fellow before becoming an assistant professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1985, he went to Yale Divinity School in what eventually became a joint appointment in American studies. While at Yale, he participated in campus protests for a clerical union and divestment from apartheid South Africa, one of which resulted in his being arrested and jailed. As punishment, the university administration cancelled his leave for Spring 1987, leading him to commute between Yale (where he was teaching two classes) and the University of Paris (where he was teaching three).
He then returned to Union and taught at Haverford College for one year before going to Princeton to become a professor of religion and director of the Program in African American Studies, which he revitalized in cooperation with such scholars as novelist Toni Morrison. He served as director of the program from 1988 to 1994.
He then accepted an appointment as professor of African-American studies at Harvard University, with a joint appointment at the Divinity School. West taught one of the university's most popular courses, an introductory class on African-American studies. In 1998 he was appointed the first Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, a position that placed him among the top two dozen professors at the university and freed him from departmental boundaries. West used this freedom to teach not only in African-American studies but in divinity, religion, and in philosophy (where he co-taught a course on American pragmatism with Hilary Putnam).
In 2001, after a public row with Harvard president Lawrence Summers, West returned to Princeton, where he has taught since.
The recipient of more than 20 honorary degrees and a National Book Award, he is a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America, for which he now serves as Honorary Chair. He is also a co-chair of the Tikkun Community and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. West is also much sought-after as a speaker, blurb-writer, and honorary chair.
He is, however, not without detractors. Critics, most notably The New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, have charged him with opportunism, crass showmanship and lack of scholarly seriousness. Hoover Institute research fellow Peter Schweizer wrote in his book Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy that West lives in a mostly white neighborhood and earns over $300,000 per year as a professor.
West remains a widely cited scholar in the popular press, in African-American studies and in studies of black theology, although his work as an academic philosopher has been almost completely ignored (with the exception of his early history of American pragmatism, The American Evasion of Philosophy).
- West on the Eighties
- Cornel West page at Pragmatism.org
- CNN Article - "Who is Cornel West?"
- Cornel West at the Internet Movie Database
- Martin & Malcolm: Implications of their Legacies for the Future
- Cornel West writes to Yum!Brands
- CSPAN 3 hour InDepth Interview, 1/1/02
- Cornel West speaks at the National Constitution Center, 9/12/05, 1 hr 45 min
- CSPAN Booknotes The Cornel West Reader, 2/22/00
- "Cornel West Gives Black Scholars a Bad Rap" By John McWhorter
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