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Cornel West Whine WatchWherein the celebrity professor maps the frontiers of self-pity.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 11:26 AM ET

In January, Chatterbox awarded a special "Whine of the Week" citation to Cornel West's complaint that Harvard President Lawrence Summers "hadn't listened to a note of my CD." Continuing in that line of attack, West, who last Friday made his long-anticipated jump to Princeton, today tells Pam Belluck and Jacques Steinberg of the New York Times that Summers didn't send him a get-well card until two months after his recent surgery for prostate cancer, whereas that nice Princeton provost, Amy Gutmann, called him almost every week. From this, Chatterbox concludes that the surgeons removed whatever remained of West's superego.

The tone of today's Times piece is very close to outright mockery. (Note, for instance, the sentence, "While the recording has often been described as rap, Dr. West said he preferred the Nietzschean phrase 'danceable education.' ") When the ordinarily race-sensitive New York Times feels free to guffaw at a respected black scholar, you know he's behaving like an ass. (For further evidence, click here to listen to West's pouty appearance yesterday on NPR's Tavis Smiley Show.) In response, Chatterbox hereby inaugurates a new feature, the Cornel West Whine Watch, to be discontinued if and when Princeton's new Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion regains his senses.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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Reader Comment From The Fray:


The "Chatterbox" column has started a Cornel West Whine Watch. This is a promising start, but it confines nominations to one egotist's small world. Why not generalize the Whine Watch to self-absorbed narcissists more broadly? So many await recognition: worthies with egos so galaxy-sized they risk gravitational self-collapse into neutron stars. Any Sunday morning's television offers up a journalissimo or two who fits the bill. And don't get me started on failed presidential candidates.

--David

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


What's really pathetic is the way Princeton slobbered all over this guy to get him to move there. Someone…wrote yesterday that Summers comes out way ahead on this one, having lost Gates in the twilight of his distinguished career and freed up one of Harvard's most attractive professorial slots from the useless and annoying West. Now, he and his deans and faculty can replace them with scholars who can contribute something significant to Harvard and to African-American Studies for the next 20-30 years.

P.S.--I'd pay good money to hear the conversations between West and Princeton's Amy Gutmann about his prostate.

--Publius

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(4/19)

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