Cornel West’s Resignation Letter Cites ‘Decline and Decay’ at Harvard Divinity School

In a letter posted on Twitter on Monday, the philosopher and activist Cornel West announced his resignation from Harvard Divinity School, concluding a public dispute with the institution after it declined his bid for tenure.

In the letter, dated June 30, West laments the “decline and decay” at the school, and cites discrimination he describes as “the shadow of Jim Crow … expressed in the language of superficial diversity” among the reasons for his departure.

Noting “the disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students” at the Divinity School, West in his letter describes a botched tenure process, a heavy teaching load, and an “intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths.”

Jonathan G. Beasley, a Divinity School spokesman, said in an email that the school had no comment on the letter. Multiple attempts to reach West were unsuccessful.

The letter’s release comes after West announced in March that he’d be leaving Harvard, which he said had denied him tenure against the recommendation of a faculty committee. Though Harvard later offered to consider him for tenure, West told The Harvard Crimson, the fact that that reversal came only after weeks of public outcry cemented his decision to leave.

West has had a long and tumultuous history with Harvard, of which he is an alumnus. After a public dispute with Lawrence Summers, then the university’s president, West left his tenured position in Cambridge in 2002. He rejoined Harvard as a nontenured professor of the practice of public philosophy in 2017.
Now, he said in an interview with The Boycott Times in March, he’ll return to the faculty at Union Theological Seminary, where he began his teaching career, from 1977 to 1984.

West’s resignation letter comes amid a broader conversation about race and tenure in academe. Last week, the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones announced that she’d join Howard University, after a protracted tenure battle at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hannah-Jones had been set to join the journalism faculty at Chapel Hill, but the campus’s Board of Trustees refused to consider her for tenure, and she was offered a fixed-term contract. Though the board ultimately voted to grant Hannah-Jones tenure, she opted instead to become the Knight chair in race and journalism at Howard — a similar position to the one she would have held in Chapel Hill.

At Harvard, West’s tenure case was similarly fraught. A three-member committee’s recommendation to grant tenure, he wrote, was ignored due to “political prejudices,” and a number of petitions and statements urging Harvard to offer him tenure were circulated. But the university’s change of heart, and the possibility of being considered for tenure, he said, came too late.

Walter Johnson, a professor of history and African and African American studies who chaired the committee that recommended tenure for West, said in an email to The Chronicle that West’s departure was “both tragic and sad.”

“Because there is no question but that Cornel West meets the requirements for tenure at Harvard (and every other university in the world), his departure under such circumstances obviously raises a lot of other questions,” Johnson wrote.

Jacob K. Olupona, another member of the tenure committee and a professor of Indigenous religions, called West “irreplaceable” and said “his departure has left a vacuum in our community and institution.”

Olupona and Johnson have demonstrated public support for West in the past. They signed a statement to The Harvard Crimson criticizing the university’s characterization of West’s tenure bid. (A Harvard spokesman had said that the committee did not have the authority to conduct a tenure review, but was charged only with reviewing West’s appointment as professor of the practice, which it recommended the university renew. In their statement, Olupona, Johnson, and Davíd L. Carrasco, a professor of anthropology and at the Divinity School, said that was “neither a full nor a forthright characterization” of the report their committee produced.)

Also coming to West’s defense was Jeffrey L. Stout, a professor emeritus of religion at Princeton, who served as an external reviewer for West’s Harvard tenure dossiers in both 2016 and 2020. That West found himself carrying a workload in his second stint at Harvard similar to the one he’d held in his first term there, without tenure protections, could have “seemed tolerable if he weren’t repeatedly being used to make the school seem more dedicated to diversity than it is,” Stout wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “A protest against deceptive exploitation is the resignation letter’s moral core.”

For West, tensions at Harvard began when he arrived for his second stint in 2017, “with a salary less than what I received 15 years earlier,” despite previously having held tenured positions at both Harvard and Princeton. “I hoped and prayed I could still end my career with some semblance of intellectual intensity and personal respect” at Harvard, West wrote. “How wrong I was!”

His classes at Harvard had been “subsumed under Afro-American Religious Studies,” despite their broader applicability, he wrote, and he’d been shafted on a sabbatical arrangement and offered only the minimum salary increases, he said. West also took issue with Harvard’s “hostility to the Palestinian cause” and with a lack of condolences after his mother’s death.

To Shaun R. Harper, a professor of business and education at the University of Southern California and executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center, West’s experience points to deeper issues at Harvard.

“I did not read this letter as just a personal one-off situation between Cornel West and Harvard University,” Harper said, adding that West was “unlikely to be the only Black professor there who is having these same experiences.”

Harvard’s treatment of West, coupled with Hannah-Jones’s case, Harper said, is an affront to Black faculty members across the nation.

“‘Your Black life does not matter, your Black intellectual contribution does not matter.’ That’s what it says,” Harper said. “It signals to every Black scholar that if this kind of disrespect and these miscarriages of justice can be done to Cornel West and Nikole Hannah-Jones, certainly you are not exempt from also experiencing similar miscarriages of justice, no matter how accomplished you are, no matter how productive and prolific you are.”

Harper was glad to see West and Hannah-Jones decamp to Union and to Howard, respectively, saying their decisions were “about dignity.”

“There are nearly 5,000 colleges and universities in the United States. You’re not trapped at a place,” Harper said. “We have to liberate folks by helping them understand that the place where they are that’s disrespecting them, that that’s not their only option.”