violette1984
Team Owner
I'm sitting here laughing. West is getting beat down for things that white professors do on the regular. It's common knowledge that white professors and some high up admins have relationships with students. It's been considered a "perk" of the job, and only got codified as being against policy within the past few years. Inside hiring of partners of academics happens all the time. That's how some folks get on campus in weird positions there's no way they should have. (That and nepotism hires!)Cornel West's story is not the case to illustrate the very real racial issues in academia. He brought this upon himself.
This is a man who has been tenured nearly his whole career. He had tenure at Harvard and he left...to move on to a tenured position at Princeton. Then he left tenure at Princeton (he had no real reason for either of these moves btw, and he even admits that he left Princeton amicably) and just assumed he would eventually get tenure back at Harvard when he decided to go back to Harvard, even though he was not hired with that understanding. If he wanted to stay in a tenured position he had that opportunity. Professors can't demand tenure at the institution of their choosing anytime they want. It's granted by one institution, and once you leave that institution it is gone and you are at step one. When you don't write scholarship, institutions of learning are not going to want to give you tenure.
This is not true. West has written just one scholarly book in his whole career. He deserved tenure when he earned it at Harvard the first time on the basis of that book. But his corpus as a scholar over his career doesn't compare the average professor at BU, much less Harvard, at this point. He has chosen to pursue fame primarily which was his choice, but its unwise to leave a tenured position if you know you don't consistently write. Tenure is given on the basis of scholarly work, not fame and if you haven't been writing you won't get tenured again.
Harvard denied West tenure for a reason this time around. When you take the time to look into the facts, you'll understand it's down to the fact that West simply doesn't produce academic work. It's not fair for everyone else up for tenure to be judged based on their scholarship but Cornel West to be handed tenure only on the basis of his name and the fact that he used to be famous. West is just delusional and should have stayed at Princeton or never left Harvard if he wanted to be sure to have tenure at a top school for the rest of his life.
I'll save my anger for black scholars who meet the standards for tenure and are denied unfairly, or face other real problems they didn't cause for themselves.
Switching jobs with tenure almost certainly guaranteed also happens. It's also known many professors plagerize the work of their grad students.
None of it's right. Just saying, there's a lot folks not getting caught up in "technicalities". Everything I know came from Ivy or top tier R1s. I'm not angry or anything either.