Cornel Ronald West (placeholder)

The grandson of a preacher, West was shaped from a young age by religious tradition and political struggle. As a young man, he marched in civil rights demonstrations and organized to demand black studies courses at his high school. West later wrote that in his youth he admired “the sincere black militancy of Malcolm X, the defiant rage of the Black Panther Party, and the livid black theology of James Cone.”

After graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in Sacramento, California, he enrolled at Harvard University at age 17, and graduated in three years, magna cum laude in Near Eastern languages and literature. He went to Princeton to complete his graduate education, where he was influenced by professor Richard Rorty, and specifically his dedication to the pragmatist school of philosophy. His dissertation, completed in 1980, was later revised and published as The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. In his mid-twenties he returned to Harvard as a Du Bois fellow before becoming an assistant professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

In 1984, he went to Yale Divinity School, in what eventually became a joint appointment in American studies. While at Yale he participated in campus protests for a clerical union and divestment from apartheid South Africa, one of which resulted in his being arrested and jailed. As punishment, the university administration cancelled his leave for Spring 1987, leading him to commute between Yale (where he was teaching two classes) and the University of Paris (where he was teaching three).

He then returned to Union for a year before going to Princeton to become a professor of religion and director of the the Program in African American Studies, which he revitalized in cooperation with such scholars as novelist Toni Morrison. He served as director of the program from 1988 to 1994.

1993 saw the publication of Race Matters, a bestselling collection of essays, as well as his departure from Princeton to join the Afro-American studies program at Harvard, chaired by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (who called West “the preeminent African-American intellectual of our generation”). In 1998, he received the prestigious appointment of University Professor.

West’s popularity was not, however, universal. Critics, most notably The New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, charged him with opportunism, crass showmanship, and lack of scholarly seriousness. After Race Matters, he failed to produce any significant solo scholarship for several years and instead focused on slight, co-authored and edited volumes and on popularizations. Nevertheless, West remains a widely cited scholar.

In 2001, West became involved in a very public dispute with newly appointed Harvard president and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. (West was one of the 17 faculty members with the distinguished rank of University Professor. University Professor rank faculty report directly to the president on their research agendas.) Summers, in one of his meetings with West, allegedly accused West of devoting too much time and attention to political activities and less traditionally academic pursuits, such as producing a hip hop album (the critically-panned Sketches of my Culture) at the expense of his teaching and academic responsibilities. In 2002, West left Harvard to return to Princeton.

In 2003 West appeared as Councillor West in the science fiction films Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, and recorded commentaries on philosophy for all three films in the Matrix trilogy for their DVD release, along with Ken Wilber.

In 2004 West’s follow-up to Race Matters, entitled Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, was published. In the book, West calls on Americans to “forge a mature hope that fortifies us on the slippery tightrope of Socratic questioning and prophetic witness in imperial America.”

The introduction to The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, entitled “The Making of an American Democratic Socialist of African Descent” is an autobiographical essay.

West is a prominent member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans.