CORNEL WEST UPDATE: Via Bill Quick, I found this Harvard Crimson piece from Friday:

Is Cornel West a bigot? Depends on whose standards you’re using. A professional victimologist would immediately red-pencil a statement like this one: “I think in one sense that Larry Summers is the Ariel Sharon of American higher education.” After all, Summers is Harvard’s first Jewish president, and the metaphor seems to hint at Jewish collusion and conspiracy, a lurid pact by powerful Jews to oppress minorities.

Or, you might just say it was Cornel West mouthing off again. There isn’t a whit of evidence West is an anti-Semite; he even coauthored a book entitled Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin with his good friend Rabbi Michael Lerner. A reasonable person would give him the benefit of the doubt.

The point, of course, is not that the former Fletcher University Professor is a closet racist, but rather that when one goes looking for racism, it seems to pop up everywhere. Better to reserve condemnation for those who truly merit it—“racist” is too serious an epithet to be tossed about offhandedly.

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop West from doing just that to his erstwhile boss. When National Public Radio’s Tavis Smiley asked him whether he thought Summers’ criticism was motivated by race, West declared primly, “Of course, I have not invoked this particular factor as an explanatory one”—then immediately added, “But at a certain point you say to yourself, Good God, if it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck, there’s a very good chance that it is a duck, and so there could be actually some unconscious or conscious elements at work here, and I would leave that up to the soul of Summers himself.” At another point he said, “His attack on me was the wrong person, the wrong professor and the wrong Negro.” While he never outright called Summers a Klansman, the message was perfectly clear.

West is playing an ugly game. He would prefer that the petty bickering of two headstrong academics be seen as a parable about a white power structure uniting to silence a noble black truth-teller. That might satisfy some of his apparently endless penchant for self-pity, but it threatens to poison legitimate racial progress at a university he claims to love.

Yep. The evidence would indicate that West is a selfish, race-baiting narcissist, but of course, I have not invoked this particular factor as an explanatory one. But at a certain point you say to yourself. . . .

May Princeton have joy of his company.