Larry Summers once drove Cornel West out of Harvard in a very public fight. Now, Summers is back in the spotlight, and West can’t help but point out the irony.
“There’s a certain level of, not just hypocrisy, but a certain kind of chickens coming home to roost here,” West said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s just sad that [Summers] has been preoccupied with the 11th commandment, ‘Thou shalt not get caught,’ rather than the other 10.”
Last week, a tranche of newly released emails revealed that Summers had, over the course of a decade, corresponded with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including soliciting romantic advice as he pursued an extramarital affair. This week, Summers announced a retreat from public life, including stepping away from his teaching duties at Harvard.
Two decades ago, Summers chastised West for engaging in behavior that could be deemed “embarrassing” to the university or could interfere with his teaching, such as engaging in politics and recording a rap CD. The feud led to West’s resignation from Harvard.
Since leaving Harvard in 2002, West, a public intellectual and activist, has taken faculty positions at Princeton and Union Theological Seminary; he published eight books and recorded a pair of hip-hop albums; he ran for president in 2024.
West, reached by telephone, seemed unsurprised by the revelations that Epstein considered himself Summers’ “wing man.” (At the time of correspondence, Epstein had already been sent to prison on state charges of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18.)
“He’s a neoliberal gangster, the way Trump’s a neofascist gangster,” West said of Summers. “There’s not a lot of integrity, honesty and decency. There is a lot of cold-heartedness and mean-spiritedness in both of them, even though they come from different ideological camps.”
West, a devout Christian, quickly qualified his statement. “I don’t say that in order to trash them,” he said. “I think that they both could be better human beings, but they don’t seem to be interested in it too much.”
West’s much-publicized feud with Summers began shortly after Summers’ arrival to Cambridge in 2001. Per West’s account, chronicled in his 2004 book “Democracy Matters,” Summers, the newly installed Harvard president, summoned West — then a university professor in African American studies — to his office and chastised him for his political engagement, for recording a hip-hop CD, for contributing to grade inflation and for not producing philosophically rigorous academic work. He said West needed to “learn to be a good citizen at Harvard and focus on the academic needs of students, not the wages of workers,” per West’s account.
Summers “questioned my academic accomplishments and my political affiliations,” West later wrote, “without bothering either to read any of my work or to develop an understanding of how it has been regarded by the wider academic community.”
West claimed Summers apologized to him “more than once,” but Summers went on to tell The New York Times he had not apologized. “I then knew just what an unprincipled power player I was dealing with,” West wrote, calling him “a bull in a china shop, a bully in a difficult and delicate situation, an arrogant man, and an ineffective leader.”
Does that characterization still stand, two decades later? West thinks so. “The sad thing is that he, like Trump, has been able to get away with it for so long,” West said Wednesday. “Anytime you have that kind of gangsta behavior with impunity, no accountability, there’s no answerability. He doesn’t take responsibility up until now.”
That responsibility came by way of a terse statement, released Monday, in which Summers acknowledged he is “deeply ashamed” of his actions and decided he would “be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.” On Wednesday, he announced he would resign from OpenAI’s board.
When West spoke to POLITICO Wednesday evening, Summer’s resignation from his teaching duties at Harvard were not yet public, even though the university was facing increasing pressure — including from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a former Harvard Law professor — to dump him.
West wasn’t so convinced that Summers should have been ousted from Harvard.
“I think people should be able to teach at Harvard who have a variety of different degrees of moral character,” West said. “I don’t think you have to be St. Francis of Assisi or have the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer to teach at Harvard. … I always give Brother Summers, and anybody else, a chance to just choose to be a better person. He’s still alive. He can bounce back.”
It’s a “sad thing,” West continued, “when you have professors who are willing to hang out with gangsters like Epstein, and therefore, all of the criticism that’s moral and spiritual he deserves. I don’t know that the inference means that he can just no longer teach at Harvard or any other place. I’m a little reluctant to move in that direction. I tend to come out of the Black freedom struggle, which says, lift every voice, which makes me a very strong libertarian.”
Politics
