4 ms·
Yikes, the writing in that letter was not up to par for a professor who was seeking tenure at a prestigious university. The tone, word choice, layout, everythi
by eric_b 5y ago
Yikes, the writing in that letter was not up to par for a professor who was seeking tenure at a prestigious university. The tone, word choice, layout, everything felt amateur and overly emotional. I haven't read many resignation letters but I'd have expected more polish and professionalism.
- handrous 5y agoOne takes a rather different tone in a pointed and deliberate "fuck you; strong letter to follow" than in a resignation letter that's mostly polite BS, as is typical.
- cosmotic 5y agoI'm not sure the point was about tone. It was letter by an academic for an academic touting the former's intellectual contributions and apparently intended to be publicly displayed. I would have expected something more structured, easier to follow, and better targeted.
- handrous 5y agoIt does seem rather inside-baseball for something released publicly. Maybe the audience is only a subset of the public, though, and this was just the simplest way to get it to them.
- keel1o 5y agoHe's hardly a professor. He's contributed no meaningful research in his field and by my own recollection he only ever appears when he makes headlines for saving something extremely racist, or extremely harsh. He's a divisive figure and a celebrity "philosopher". A literal nobody. It comes to me, and anyone else with experience an academia, that such a washout would never make tenure. Even at a "woke" academic institution.
- endisneigh 5y agokind of ironic that cornel west releases his resignation letter and meanwhile we get some new account calling him a nobody. at least use your main account to say such things. anyway - addressing your comment itself. doesn't he now have tenure at UTS? Wasn't he also tenured previously at Princeton and Yale? hardly a nobody lmao
- keel1o 5y agoHe didn't hold tenure at any prestigious university he held professorship. There's a lot of nobodies who get associate at these institutions especially in the fields of philosophy and social science. UTS is an absolute nobody school. It's like graduating from ASU - no one will ever take you seriously. He's just an old bigot going home to roost.
- endisneigh 5y agoidk why I'm even wasting my time responding to obviously wrong things - just go look it up, he's been tenured before. he was actually offered tenure in 1993 but left because he disagreed with Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, at the time.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoYep. Sigh. Haters gonna... Sigh. He's done a lot of good as a civically-involved public intellectual and debater than most academics do writing research papers few people read to "move the needle" towards where many things need to go. I sometimes say about sales and influence: You can build a viable fusion reactor, but if no one knows about it, it may as well not even exist.
- sha256kira 5y agoPersonally Im into Cornel West but I do agree that the phenomena of celebrity academics / philosophers needs to be discussed more openly and critically.