Cornel West, one of the nation’s most prominent and outspoken public intellectuals, is leaving Princeton University to return to the institution where he began his career.
West will be returning to the Union Theological Seminary In the City Of New York, which is one of the premier theological institutions in the country. He has headed up Princeton’s African-American studies department since 2002.
West arrived at Princeton after a stint at Harvard that ended when he and Harvard’s then-president, Lawrence Summers, clashed over West’s workload. Summers, who served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton and was later a top adviser to President Obama, accused West of not attending to his duties as a Harvard University Professor, a title reserved for the university’s most distinguished academics, in order to be a celebrity. (West had released a hip-hop CD, and would later go on to appear in both sequels of The Matrix.) The feud would become very public, and West continued to criticize summers even after he decamped for Princeton.
Source: The Huffington Post
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