Tipsheet

'Intellectual and Spiritual Bankruptcy': Harvard Professor Slams School in Resignation Letter

Spencer Brown
Spencer Brown  |  July 14, 2021 11:00 AM

In a letter posted to his Twitter account, leftist philosopher, activist, and professor Cornel West announced his resignation from the Harvard University Divinity School. It's not the fact that he's resigning that's making waves, though — it's the reasons he cites in the letter attacking his now-former employer. "I try to tell the unvarnished truth about the decadence in our market-driven universities!" he tweeted with his letter.

"How sad it is to see our beloved Harvard Divinity School in such decline and decay," West laments. "The disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students loom large."

West's left-wing ideology includes claims that America is a racist, white supremacist nation, which came through in his resignation.

"With a few glorious and glaring exceptions, the shadow of Jim Crow was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity," West said of the environment at Harvard. "All my courses were subsumed under Afro-American Religious Studies, including those on Existentialism, American Democracy and The Conduct of Life," he noted. 

The self-proclaimed "non-Marxist socialist" says that he delivered two convocation addresses and one commencement speech in four years yet there was "no possible summer salary alongside the lowest increase possible every year."

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Among his complaints, West says he "was promised a year sabbatical but could only take one semester in practice" and watched "a faculty enthusiastically support a candidate for tenure then timidly defer to a rejection based on the Harvard administration's hostility to the Palestinian cause."

Calling the administration's behavior "disgusting," West claims his "academic achievements and student teaching meant far less than [Harvard's] political prejudices" when he was recommended for a tenure review that ended up rejected by the Harvard administration.

"Even my good friends in the Afro-American and African Studies Department were paralyzed, given their close relations to the administration," West continues before providing an anecdote he says illustrates the "narcissistic academic professionalism" at Harvard.

"When the announcement of the death of my beloved Mother appeared in the regular newsletter, I received two public replies" while "any ordinary announcement about a lecture, award or professional advancement receives about twenty replies!"

West says this episode, combined with the "cowardly deference to the anti-Palestinian prejudices of the Harvard administration ... constitute an intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths."

"A serious commitment to Veritas requires resignation," West concludes, "with precious memories but absolutely no regrets."

There are few bastions of illiberal leftism stronger than America's prestigious universities — including Harvard — and yet now even its administration is not woke enough to keep criticism from the Left at bay. 

Those who share West's leftist ideology mourned his departure, with many attacking Harvard in another example of the Left turning on its own. Some critics even accused Harvard of supporting war crimes in the wake of West's letter.