In a story that made national headlines earlier this year, Harvard University professor Cornel West publicly threatened to leave Harvard for Princeton after claiming he had been “disrespected” by incoming Harvard President Lawrence Summers. It was a surprising accusation: whatever else they do, university presidents are not known for “dissing” senior faculty members. Nor is it usual for high-powered professors such as West to air private grievances before the national media. Something was clearly very wrong at Harvard.

Long a prominent figure in Harvard’s African-American Studies Department, West is one of only 14 Harvard faculty to hold the distinguished title (and even more distinguished salary, reportedly in excess of $300,000) of “University Professor.” Best known for his 1993 book Race Matters, West has in recent years kept himself busy churning out a steady stream of nonacademic books and articles on racial issues and contemporary African-American culture. Along the way, he has become something of a celebrity. Between regular speeches, interviews and radio appearances, West has found time to advise Al Sharpton on his 2004 presidential ambitions; release a rap CD, Sketches of My People; and befriend Shaquille O´Neal. Not bad for a one-time philosophy professor.

And yet, for West, fame and fortune have come at a price. Preoccupied with his various duties as public intellectual, it has been over a decade since West last published recognizably academic work. It was on this point that Summers and West apparently clashed. According to West, the trouble began when Summers cast doubt on the quality and seriousness of his recent work in a private meeting (one of many scheduled by Summers with prominent faculty) late last fall.

Outraged by Summers’ suggestion that he should make time for more properly academic research, West ran to the press. Over a series of interviews, West variously charged that he had been “disrespected” and “dishonored” by Summers, that Summers was the agent of an “old-boy network” at Harvard fearful “the Negroes are taking over,” and that Summers was not adequately committed to recruiting black faculty and students. As West well knew, the obvious inference was more powerful if not stated explicitly: Summers’ criticism of West was in fact nothing less than a racist-elitist challenge to the legitimacy of African-American Studies.

Nothing could be more absurd. Though it may flatter him to pretend otherwise, the career of Cornel West and the interests of African-American academia are not identical. What´s more, Summers is in no respect an opponent of African-American Studies (though perhaps he will reconsider this position). Harvard´s Department of African-American Studies is the best funded and most renowned in the nation and Summers has said nothing to suggest that he wishes that to change. What seems to have riled West and his supporters at Harvard is Summers´ supposed equivocation on the issue of racial preferences and affirmative action.

In his inaugural address as president at Harvard, Summers praised the university´s diversity but also committed himself to a policy that rewards excellence. For West and his colleagues in the African-American Studies Department, however, the idea of “excellence” is anathema. Convinced that black students can´t succeed without a leg up on students of other races, West and company reacted angrily to Summers´ appointment, calling a meeting in which they insisted that Summers clarify his position on affirmative action. They left the meeting unhappy with what they heard.

It was in this context that West opened his campaign against Summers. Summers´ very innocence worked against him. Desperate to avoid scandal and unprepared for West´s assault, Summers immediately issued a public apology to West and has since made numerous attempts to patch up their relationship. West, however, is having none of it. Indeed, he recently announced that he is leaving Harvard for Princeton after all, where he will join K. Anthony Appiah, another Harvard Professor of African-American Studies recently lured away by Princeton. For Harvard, West´s defection promises to turn into a rout. As Henry Louis Gates Jr., long a stalwart of Harvard´s Af-Am Department, recently put it, “It´s the end of an era: You can´t lose Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, or Kobe and Shaq, and no one notices.”

Clearly, if anyone has been “dissed” in this affair, it is Summers. And yet Harvard’s new president remains polite, telling The New York Times (shortly after West’s announcement that he was jumping ship for Princeton) that “all of us in the Harvard community are grateful to Cornel West for his significant contribution to Harvard academic life, as well as the great inspiration he provided Harvard students. We will miss him, and I wish him every success at Princeton.”

As Berkeley linguist and accomplished black scholar John McWhorter recently pointed out in an article for City Journal, the West-Summers imbroglio makes sense only as “a scripted routine.” According to McWhorter, the response of Harvard´s African-American Studies Department to Summers´ criticism of West was part of a well-coordinated and deeply cynical strategy to raise the Department´s profile while stamping out any and all criticism. “Making Summers do the ´I´m not a racist´ shuffle not only serves to deflect criticism and ensure that there´s no backtracking on racial preferences; it also scares the university into keeping up its generous level of support for Af-Am studies or even increasing it. And who knows, maybe it´ll get Princeton officials to come up with an even better deal if they think we´re really serious about quitting Harvard.”

To McWhorter, this strategy is not only dishonest; it is positively dangerous. By excepting themselves from normal standards of academic achievement, West and other big players in the academic grievance industry threaten to revive long discredited stereotypes of black intellectual incapacity. Not so, argue West´s supporters at Harvard, for whom West´s work represents a new, more “engaged” type of scholarship. As McWhorter points out, however, while West is free to write where and how he likes, “to pretend that West’s puff pieces and coffee-table books are real scholarship is not only disingenuous, it verges on reviving racist stereotypes . . . the implication is that, for blacks, motivational musings qualify as deep thought.” Alone among his “university professor” colleagues, West has been permitted to set the bar of academic achievement to his own level. By demanding West be judged by different (and lower) standards than his colleagues, Harvard´s African-American Studies Department is asking for nothing less than the reimposition of a racist double standard in academic life.

It is not an attractive irony. Fifty years ago, the de facto exclusion of blacks from the American university system was justified on the grounds that blacks were somehow inherently “less intelligent” than whites and so could not be expected to live up to high academic standards. As the recent Harvard scandal shows, today it is precisely black scholars such as West who work to keep alive this racial double standard. And for good reason: In today’s university environment, crying racism pays. As McWhorter put it, “because real racist bigotry is vanishingly rare on campuses, where the race police are out in almost totalitarian force, black academics have become talented at manufacturing racist insult out of encounters innocent of racism . . . nervous white administrators usually play along.” In this respect, the West-Summers fiasco is of interest only by virtue of its prominence, an Ivy League production of a comedy that plays itself out on an almost daily basis at campuses across the country.

And yet there is another, even more worrisome side to the story  Cornel West’s side. It is telling that the chief rebuttal of West and his supporters to Summers’ criticism should have been an appeal to the idea of the “activist scholar.” For self-proclaimed “activist scholars” such as West, academics can and should use their position to further particular political interests. Indeed, according to the latest version of the “activist scholar” idea, heavily influenced by postmodern assaults on the idea of truth and objectivity, there is no genuine distinction to be made between scholarship and politics; the production of knowledge and the production of power are one and the same.

It is in this sense that West can spend 10 years writing op-ed pieces and still claim in good faith to be engaged in scholarly production. The same goes for West’s participation in the Sharpton campaign. If academic scholarship really is just one more road to collective power, then there is no fundamental difference to be made between writing hefty theoretical treatises, recording rap CDs and marching with a racist demagogue and inveterate liar like the Reverend Al. It’s all just another day on the quads.

Seen from this perspective, West’s overblown response to Summers’ criticism makes a certain perverse sense. By calling West out, Summers sought to enforce what is, in West’s view, an entirely artificial distinction between scholarship and political engagement. By appealing to traditional boundaries between activism and the academy, Summers called into question in a rather basic way the legitimacy of West’s recent career choices. Once this had happened, there was no question of West staying at Harvard, no matter how often Summers apologized.

And yet despite its apparent coherence, there is a problem with West’s position. While the activist scholar denies any meaningful distinction between academic work and political engagement, his success depends on the maintenance of this very distinction. After all, people take the pronouncements of Harvard professors seriously because they are, well, the pronouncements of Harvard professors and, as such, are supposed to be disinterested and objective. That, and not the quality of his rap performances, is why West is accepted as an authority worth listening to by so many people.

In this respect, activist scholarship is dishonest at its core. At identity-political departments around the country – gay studies, African-American Studies, Asian Studies, and so on – you can find faculty who think like West. For them, scholarship is just politics by other means. At the same time, they are perfectly content to take advantage of the still-widespread belief that scholarship is first and foremost concerned with discovering the truth, independent of its political cast.

The collision between West and Summers was thus about much more than the troubles of one African-American Studies department. It was in fact a collision between two radically different understandings of the role of the university in a democracy. Summers´ criticism of West implied a clear distinction between scholarly endeavor and political engagement. By recalling West to his academic obligations, Summers was reminding West that, whatever his political commitments, he was first and foremost a servant of truth.

Like so many contemporary academics, however, West finds the idea of “truth” and the traditional scholarly apparatus that goes along with it to be little more than a useful conceit. By rejecting Summers´ suggestion that he get down to more properly academic work, West was not only responding to a perceived challenge to his recent career moves; he was in fact rejecting the very idea that truth as traditionally defined should be the guiding value of academic endeavor. Princeton may congratulate itself on having picked a winner but, in truth, Harvard’s loss is Harvard’s gain.