Two decades later, Cornel West’s critique of Larry Summers hits differently
Larry Summers once drove Cornel West out of Harvard in a very public fight. Now, Summers is back in the spotlight, and West can’t help but point out the irony.
“There’s a certain level of, not just hypocrisy, but a certain kind of chickens coming home to roost here,” West said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s just sad that [Summers] has been preoccupied with the 11th commandment, ‘Thou shalt not get caught,’ rather than the other 10.”
Last week, a tranche of newly released emails revealed that Summers had, over the course of a decade, corresponded with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including soliciting romantic advice as he pursued an extramarital affair. This week, Summers announced a retreat from public life, including stepping away from his teaching duties at Harvard.
Two decades ago, Summers chastised West for engaging in behavior that could be deemed “embarrassing” to the university or could interfere with his teaching, such as engaging in politics and recording a rap CD. The feud led to West’s resignation from Harvard.
Since leaving Harvard in 2,002, West, a public intellectual and activist, has taken faculty positions at Princeton and Union Theological Seminary; he published eight books and recorded a pair of hip-hop albums; he ran for president in 2024.
West, reached by telephone, seemed unsurprised by the revelations that Epstein considered himself Summers’ “wing man.” (At the time of correspondence, Epstein had already been sent to prison on state charges of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18.)
“He’s a neoliberal gangster, the way Trump’s a neofascist gangster,” West said of Summers. “There’s not a lot of integrity, honesty and decency. There is a lot of cold-heartedness and mean-spiritedness in both of them, even though they come from different ideological camps.”
West, a devout Christian, quickly qualified his statement. “I don’t say that in order to trash them,” he said. “I think that they both could be better human beings, but they don’t seem to be interested in it too much.”
West’s much-publicized feud with Summers began shortly after Summers’ arrival to Cambridge in 2001. Per West’s account, chronicled in his 2004 book