With Larry Summers Gone, Will Cornel West Return to Harvard?

The Boston Globe reports that efforts are under way to recruit Cornel West back to Harvard. West left Harvard in 2002 to join the Princeton faculty after a much publicized controversy with then Harvard president Lawrence Summers.

Now that Summers has stepped down, several faculty members at Harvard are floating the idea that West should be encouraged to return to Cambridge.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the outgoing chair of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard, says that no talks are under way but, he told the Globe, “Nothing could please me more. Cornel West is the man.”

But Charles Ogletree, a close friend of Cornel West and a professor at Harvard Law School, said in the same article, “He loves Princeton. He’s got wonderful colleagues, a supportive president, and an environment where his teaching and his scholarship are consistently respected.”

Copyright © 2006. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.