One of the professors profiled in my recent book of that title is Cornel West, a man confuses attitudinizing with thought, whose intellectual output the liberal New Republic assessed and found “worthless,” who is one of the academic world’s most honored and distinguished figures and yet hasn’t written a scholarly paper or book in twenty years (if ever).The leftwing journal Alternet is outraged by these facts. Here is its entire argument against my description of the unbearable lightness of Cornel West's being: “In the nation's top universities, African-American representation goes from offensive to paltry. Anywhere from less than 1% of tenured faculty are black to a high of 4.3%. In other words, you'd need to go out of your way to pluck a black professor for your rant about the nature of academia.”
In other words, Cornel West is a black airhead so donÂ’t hurt his feelings by pointing this out. Actually, my book The Professors features portraits of several bloviating dummies like West who are white. Professors Michael Vocino and Grover Furr for example. However, neither Vocino nor Furr have 20 honorary degress, a professorship at Princeton, a $35,000 academic speaking fee, a several hundred thousand dollar academic salary, or a lucrative book racket for appending their signatures to encyclopedic publications of the Harvard press.
Cornel West is blessed with these unearned and undeserved perks solely because heÂ’s black -- there is no other explanation (but donÂ’t hurt his feelings by pointing this out).
---David Horowitz