Scott McLemee has some harsh words for Princeton’s Cornel West. In reviewing West’s new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, McLemee dissects West as a celebrity academic whose emphasis has long since shifted to the “celebrity” and not the “academic”.

McLemee dredges up all the lowlights of West’s recent career—(the spoken-word album, the Matrix cameos—almost unsportsmanlike, by the second paragraph

West described his projects as “bold,” “challenging” and “exciting.” These are adjectives, it must be said, better left in someone else’s hands…

Cornel West’s work was once bold, challenging, exciting. The past tense here is unavoidable.

West’s memoir sound like a bizarre piece of work, for sure. McLemee looks at one section on marriage terrifying to any and all students with crushes on Prof. West:

I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!

One of the critic’s main grievances with the work itself: West’s choice to work with a coauthor in crafting what West calls a “‘conversational’ voice.” (Oh snap!) McLemee devotes an entire paragraph of his review to a strangely drawn-out comparison of West to David Hume, who “published numerous very popular essays with the help of a writer from Entertainment Weekly.”

After the jump, deep analysis and videos of insane professors.

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Associate professor Lionel McIntyre of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation gave a female colleague a black eye at a bar on Sunday. According to the New York Post:

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about “white privilege” with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said…

“The punch was so loud, the kitchen workers in the back heard it over all the noise,” bar back Richie Velez, 28, told The Post. “I was on my way over when he punched Camille and she fell on top of me.”

Just when Morningside Heights was starting to look moderately safe, the Columbia faculty is gonna start race wars?

(ASIDE: Smarties who clicked through the link above now know that there were shots fired in Morningside Heights in July. But it’s fine. Our Ivy undergrads weren’t present to catch the bullets. That’s for international summer school students.)

Details of McIntyre’s regrets and the victim’s black eye after the jump.

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