Yesterday's blog touched a chord with some readers. I post excerpts from their letters below.

On West's attitude:

"Loved blog. I have much nastier feelings about Cornel West and particularly his move to Princeton. First: How can anyone claim black studies is an academic topic when you can't criticize anything related to black culture from inside the 'discipline'? Second: Cornel West had maxed out his salary at Harvard (at least the exponential growth part) and had acquired a long list of perks (number of faculty positions, etc.) that he will no doubt use as a starting position with Princeton. They will have had to improve on his Harvard salary, faculty positions, titles, access to dean, etc. to get him to go there. Then he starts with more power than he had leaving Harvard to squeeze even more out of Princeton. How many full professors at Harvard go through much more serious illness or surgery than Cornel West without so much as a card from their department chairman let alone the university president? This guy wants to be pope. Sounds like he wrote his own music reviews, too."

"Cornel West comes across as a 4-star jerk, a petty prima donna who lusted after being center-stage. I was really disappointed by the capitulation of the Harvard President. Lucky Princeton. Not only do they have Peter Singer in their philosophy department, but they're about to get Cornel as well."

On the idea that there are some people and some points of view you just don't criticize:

"I'm amazed at how people accept this kind of crap without criticizing it. I think a feature of intellectual development that has been lost altogether is the willingness to criticize those with whom you share a common goal ... It's almost like you are a traitor if you are a democrat and criticize Clinton, or a Republican and criticize Bush. How sad that things have become so dichotomized ... it's almost like the people who do the recruiting and hiring are more interested in proving that their minds are open to anything than that they value quality. Seems to me like they see 'not making judgements' as the ultimate positive moral absolute."

Too true, all of it. I am well aware that in blogging about West's questionable motives and credentials, I'll be rewarded with the usual epithets from the usual quarters. But then, what's life if the people you work with--and for--aren't calling you a racist reactionary? I do apologize to them for not giving occasion yet to call me a homophobe, but I'm sure the opportunity will arise, if only in their mind's eye, eventually. Bitter? No, just alive to the way slander operates these days to silence and discredit dissent. Think I'm exaggerating? Look again at how West responded to leadership tactics that included holding him accountable: throwing public tantrums about the insensitivity and racism of Harvard's president while at the same time viciously slandering him in the press. West's behavior is not unique--which is one reason why more academics aren't expressing shock or outrage about it. It's become the way of a whiney academy, or at least a whiney humanities. And the nasty little two-step West has been dancing for the past six months gets danced by far lesser folk, for far smaller stakes, every day. Feel threatened? Don't like something? Find a way to describe yourself as a victim of some kind of insensitivity--some kind of abuse of power--and use the leverage that gives you to trash the person who is coming between you and your ego. The rewards for acting this way are tremendous. Just look at West. For a victim, he seems to be doing pretty well.

Some fine and provocative columns on West, from past and present:

Norah Vincent in yesterday's L. A. Times discusses the place of image, and star power, in academe: "Summers showed that he misunderstood the neat calculus of modern higher education. West has image. Image is money, and money is all that matters."

John McWhorter, a black Berkeley linguist and author of the recent Power of Babel, writes an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal decrying West for playing into racial stereotypes when he used the accusation of racism to deflect attention from his own responsibilities as a scholar. West, McWhorter writes, seems to be saying "that serious academic work is optional for black intellectuals, and that to require it of a black scholar beyond a certain point is a racist insult. But can Prof. West not see that this only reinforces the stereotype of black mental dimness that feeds the very racism he is so quick to sniff out? Visionary or not, rap is not scholarship. Nor is putting one's arm around a hustler like the Rev. Sharpton 'speaking truth to power.' ... Top black scholars smugly support Prof. West's decision, but I can't see them as role models. If in 10 years I had restricted my academic output to pop work, my department head would call me out on the mat, and the only thing that would make her a racist would be not doing so. Is it racist to hold black scholars to mainstream standards of evaluation? Prof. West's muse, W.E.B. Du Bois, is turning in his grave."

Rod Dreher of The National Review calculates in dollars what West's non-academic activities are worth to him. West's speaking fee is $15,000. He lectures on average 120 times a year. Do the math, and then ask yourself: Is it any wonder West would fight tooth and nail to protect his lucrative extra-curricular schedule? And is it any wonder Lawrence Summers might suspect that such a schedule would impair West's ability to attend to his primary responsibilities of teaching and research? (Note to self: charge more for public appearances! My usual fee, of whatever they offer plus bus fare, or failing that, of a thank you and a sandwich, is too low!)

Finally, for those who just have to see what Cornel West looks like through the lens of David Horowitz's finely tuned racial shit detector, here's the classic he wrote for Salon.com in 1999: Cornel West: No Light in His Attic.

West continues his self-aggrandizing smear campaign in the May issue of Vanity Fair.