All points West

Until the spring of my Freshman Year, no one had ever called me “Brother Charlie” before. “Charles” I’d gotten, “Chuck” as well, and “CM” and “Chaz,” and once even “Chuck Finley” (hardcore fans of “Burn Notice” will appreciate that one). But “Brother Charlie” was entirely new, especially for a gangly white kid with no rhythm.

Last month, the professor who christened me “Brother Charlie,” Cornel West GS ’80, announced that he’d be leaving Princeton at the end of this academic year to take up a post at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The on-campus reaction to his decision has been decidedly mixed. Amateur public intellectuals on The Daily Princetonian comment boards have described Professor West variously as a “charlatan,” an “intellectual fraud” and a “moronic windbag.” Others have argued that his departure will be a public relations boon for the University, since his recent activities have included several arrests for civil disobedience and appearances at Occupy protests around the country.

Yet I doubt that many of the commenters on the ‘Prince’ website have had the opportunity to meet Professor West, or, as I have, to study with him. I've spent two semesters in the classroom with the Class of 1943 University Professor: studying great tragic and comic literature and, a year later, reception theory (in a seminar co-taught by equally outstanding classics professor Constanze Guthenke). Both were among the best intellectual experiences I’ve had in my three years so far as an undergraduate, and while I’m not at all qualified to comment on Professor West’s academic production or his political activities (with which I often disagree), I want to explain, based on personal experience, how his departure will be an extraordinary loss to the academic and public life of Princeton.

In both seminars I took with him, Dr. West showed a singular grasp of the material on the syllabus, as well as an amazing appreciation for how best to explain it to students. For the second week of FRS 166: The Tragic, the Comic, and the Political, we read Plato’s “The Republic,” one of the most complex works in the Western canon. Dr. West lectured for an hour and a half that day, without any notes at all, quoting the original Greek in which Plato wrote as well as Latin and German interpretations (in Latin and German). By the end of that hour, he’d masterfully dissected Plato into chunks that all of us could understand. And his enthusiasm was infectious: somehow a three-hour seminar would blow by each week in what felt like 15 minutes.

Class discussion in Professor West's seminars was dominated by students, but when he did interject with his own insights (frequently quoting entires pages of text from memory), he’d begin by expressing a point a student had made with far greater clarity and cogency than any of us could, and would then draw on all kinds of works: Kafka, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Chekhov. Each work, left, right or center, was afforded the same respect. Professor Robert George, who co-taught a seminar with Professor West for a number of years, described him this way: “One of many exemplary things about Professor West's teaching in our seminars together was his willingness to entertain seriously arguments offered by writers whose perspectives differed sharply from his own. He always approaches a classic text, whether its author is identified with the left or the right, with the assumption that he has something to learn from it.”

But what impressed me most about studying with Professor West, especially in light of frequent accusations that he treats teaching or academia as a “day job,” was his level of dedication to the students in his seminars. Both semesters I had him, he routinely stayed 30 or 40 minutes after class was supposed to end, unwilling to let us go until a concept, or a debate, had been fully hashed out. When I met with him at office hours at the end of my freshman spring, he could recall, with vivid accuracy, nearly everything I’d said in class that semester. And I wasn’t alone. At our final class meeting, before Professor West arrived, I compared notes with the girl sitting next to me. He’d done the same thing for her: repeated verbatim nearly everything she'd said over the course of 12 weeks in class. Professor West's dedication showed in his end of semester evaluation: 93 percent of the students in our class rated the experience “excellent” and the remaining 7 percent checked “very good.”

On the first day of FRS 166, Professor West spent a few minutes encouraging us all to go to as many art exhibits, plays and public lectures as we could that semester — part and parcel of an experience of paideia: the deep education that an institution like Princeton seeks to deliver. As we packed up to leave, he took out his wallet and threw it on the table. “If you ever can’t afford to go,” he said, “tell me. I’ll buy tickets for all of you.” That’s the Cornel West I’ll remember. And that’s the Cornel West that Princeton will miss.

Charlie Metzger is a Wilson School major from Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached at cmetzger@princeton.edu.