Open letter to Cornel West:

Dear Professor West,

I write in the hope that you can answer some questions that have been weighing on my mind of late. I know you are busy with your public speaking schedule, and your protesting, and your work with the reparations law team, and your plans to move to Princeton. But I hope you can spare the time to respond. It would mean a lot to me, and, I am sure, to many confused and concerned Americans.

My confusion has to do with an apparent contradiction in your recent actions. On the one hand, you are leaving Harvard for Princeton because of the "disrespect" you allege was shown to you by President Lawrence Summers, who, you have publicly declared, "picked on the wrong Negro." Princeton, your actions and words indicate, is a very different sort of place. You did your graduate work there and you once directed its Afro-American Studies program. You have praised Princeton's leadership as "positive and visionary," and you have expressed your pleasure at returning in the highest possible terms, calling Princeton "the greatest center for humanistic studies in the country." But, on the other hand, you are a member of the reparations legal team, which is planning to file suit against corporations and universities that once had ties to slavery. As The Daily Princetonian itself pointed out last March, Princeton has been named as one of those universities. It seems that way back in 1768, when Princeton was not Princeton yet, but the College of New Jersey, it appointed a president who was a slave owner. At the time of his death thirty years later, he had two slaves in his possession, each listed as worth $100. For having once been led by a smalltime slaveholder, Princeton now faces a financial shakedown (so do Harvard, Yale, Brown, and the University of Virginia).

My questions for you, Professor West, are these: How do you reconcile your high opinion of Princeton with your low opinion of Princeton? How can Princeton be at once the finest center for humanistic study in the nation, and a scene of racist legacy so despicable that it must be singled out, sued, and forced to pay a high and lasting price for its supposed historical misdeeds? How can you be the repeated beneficiary of Princeton's intellectual and financial largesse (as a student, as a young and coming faculty member, and now as returning star), and yet be its victim? Inquiring minds want to know, Professor West. Now is your opportunity to educate us in the fine moral distinctions that allow you to laud what you plan to sue, to profit mightily from an institution that you say is in your debt, to make your intellectual home in what your legal behavior suggests is a hostile environment. Will Princeton quietly drop off the list of reparations defendants, now that you and several other prominent African-American scholars will be going to work there? Or will you expect Princeton to welcome a lawsuit as part of the price of having the famed Cornel West belong to its faculty? I hope you can help me understand your reasoning here, Professor West. I would like very much to be able to believe that you have not sold your soul.

Sincerely yours,

Erin, a member of your public

P.S. I hear that your students say your "class is so deep that most of the time [they] don't even understand what's going on." If you do decide to explain your rationale to your public, please do so in plain, clear language. It's time we all understood what's going on.