Controversial Princeton African-American Studies professor Cornel West argued that the "corporatization" of the American university is obstructing freedom of thought last Friday in a conference which addressed concerns that too many colleges are giving mere lip service to issues of diversity.
Peppering his speech with humor and speaking in forceful oratory style, the animated West chronicled the public debacle between himself and Harvard President Larry Summers to a crowd spilling out of Collis Commonground. The debate, which recently prompted a media barrage, raised questions about the place of non-white scholars within the academy.
In response to Summers' accusation that West was neglecting his scholarly duties in order to campaign for presidential hopeful Bill Bradley and associate with political radicals, West pointed out that he has only missed two classes in 26 years of teaching and that he has twice as many academic citations as Summers himself.
Not only the tragedy of Sept. 11, but also the increasing "corporatization" of the American university has prompted "the specter of a new McCarthyism," according to West. Summers' distaste for him, West said, had at least in part to do with his closeness to many figures on the left who, according to West, are unpopular with powerful alumni donors.
Conference participants used the word "corporatization" to refer to a perceived increasing influence of finances and assembly-line mentality on the academic agenda at the expense of intellectual freedom.
West spoke as part of the College's highly anticipated "Race Matters in the University in the 21st Century" conference, a two-day look at how issues of race and white privilege affect American colleges and universities.
"Dartmouth is so ready for this conference," Dean of the College James Larimore said in his introductory remarks Friday morning.
Indeed, the conference fits with the administration's recent emphasis on making Dartmouth a more intellectually representative institution.
The introduction of the Korean Studies Department in 2001 and this year's matriculation of the most diverse freshman class in Dartmouth history set the backdrop for conference panels which raised issues regarding the place of ethnic studies in the "corporatized" university and that of minority scholars in the academy.
At the same time, however, concurrent events -- such as the drawing of a swastika on a Jewish student's door and the Princeton Review's mention of Dartmouth as a college where students of different races don't mix -- point to Dartmouth's struggle with its own history as a predominantly white institution, a theme that was repeatedly addressed at the conference.
Several speakers raised concerns that institutions such as Dartmouth may be making superficial changes to create a facade of campus diversity while doing little to chip away at a hierarchical structure that universalizes whiteness and is fraught with tacit inequality.
Evelyn Hu Dehart, professor of history at Brown University, spoke out against what she saw as watered-down diversity programs and criticized Dartmouth for making students who had originally campaigned for an ethnic studies department accept the much broader "Culture and Identity" distributive requirement that was approved by the faculty last year.
But Paul Lauter, professor of literature at Trinity College, suggested that some ethnic studies classes further polarize ethnic groups by reducing the study of the foreign cultures to "cultural tourism."
Joseph Francisco, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, noted that only 18 out of 1,638 chemistry faculty at the top 50 American universities are African-American.
According to Dehart, minority faculty are often pigeonholed into ethnic studies departments and barred from traditional fields such as philosophy and math, which are dominated by white faculty.
"More is at stake than just representation," she said. Lack of minority faculty "limits the extent of curricular transformation."
Carol Boyce Davies, professor of English and African New World Studies at Florida International University, noted that ethnic studies departments often get second billing in terms of financial support and faculty resources in the world of the "corporatized" university.
"What we have is the academic equivalent of black studies sitting at the back of the bus," she said.
In a throwback to the feminist slogan "the personal is political," Provost Barry Scherr cited his personal experience riding in the front of buses while blacks sat in the back during the 1950s as an example of how individual actions have broader implications. He said he didn't realize it at the time, but his front seat illustrated his privileged status as a white male.
Yet some participants would have liked to see the discussion of white privilege go farther. Moderator and English professor Donald Pease felt the issue was "conflated and obscured," perhaps because of "a wish not to produce polarization."
However, despite this criticism, Pease described the conference as "a successful beginning" while emphasizing that it was "only a beginning."
