Part 2: Dr. Cornel West Opening Session 2010

Title: Part 2: Dr. Cornel West Opening Session 2010

Added: Nov 9, 2010

Author: aphadc

Duration: 9:55

Description:
Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, and civil rights activist and currently serves as the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University where he teaches in the Center for African American Studies and in the department of Religion. He is known for his combination of political and moral insight and criticism, and his contribution to the post-1960s civil rights movement. The bulk of his work focuses upon the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness."Born in Tulsa Oklahoma, West enrolled at Harvard University at age 17 and graduated magna cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization. He earned a Ph.D. in 1980 from Princeton. In his mid-twenties, he returned to Harvard as a Du Bois Fellow before becoming an assistant professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In 1985 he went to Yale Divinity School. While at Yale, he participated in campus protests for a clerical union and divestment from apartheid in South Africa which resulted in his being arrested and jailed.He then returned to Union and taught at Haverford College for one year before going to Princeton to become a professor of religion and director of the Program in African American Studies which he revitalized in cooperation with such scholars as novelist Toni Morrison. In 1994 he accepted an appointment as professor of African-American studies at Harvard University with a joint appointment at the Harvard Divinity School. West used this freedom to teach not only in African-American studies but in divinity, religion, and in philosophy. In 2001, after an argument with Harvard president Lawrence Summers, West returned to Princeton, where he has taught since.West has written several books that analyze issues of race, class, and social justice or traces the history of philosophy typically combined with a political perspective based on social democracy, a Christian moral sensibility, and a philosophical orientation informed by the tradition of American pragmatism. His best-known work, Race Matters, a collection of essays, discusses African Americans in poverty and criticizes African American leaders for pursuing strategies that West believed were shortsighted, narrow-minded or self-serving. West remains a widely cited scholar in the popular press, in African-American studies, and in studies of black theology.

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