Dr. Cornel West, the renowned and outspoken social critic and political activist, on Monday posted online his resignation letter to Harvard University after four years as a professor, ripping the Ivy League school for its “superficial diversity” and “spiritual bankruptcy.”
West, 67, who announced in March that he was leaving the Harvard Divinity School over a tenure dispute, said in his letter that he was exiting his post with “absolutely no regrets.”
“This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. I try to tell the unvarnished truth about the decadence in our market-driven universities! Let us bear witness against this spiritual rot!” West wrote in a tweet accompanying the letter.
He called out the school for stringing him along in his quest for tenure while simultaneously marginalizing his work as a professor of African American studies.
“With a few glorious and glaring exceptions, the shadow of Jim Crow was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity,” he wrote in the letter.
He also railed against the university’s “anti-Palestinian prejudices” — which he said was partly the reason his tenure candidacy was rejected — and what he said was indifference to his mother’s death.
