Cornel West: Speaking Truth to Power, 2018
Cornel West at MIT giving a talk, “Speaking Truth to Power!” 7 February 2018.
"Speaking Truth to Power: A discussion on Institutional Provincialism" by Dr. Cornel West
Hosted by Mr. Ty Austin, SA+P, GSC DIS Chair
Panelists:
Professor Jennifer Light, SA+P Professor
Renee Gosline, Sloan Professor
Sasha Costanza-Chock, HASS Professor
Duane Lee, 2017-18 MLK Visiting Scholar in Physics
Dr. Helen Lee, HASS Professor
Ceasar McDowell, DUSP
Dr. Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Paris. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton.
He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.
How can universities be a force for social good in turbulent times? At an MIT talk...the prominent philosopher Cornel West had a clear answer: painful self-reflection.
More precisely, West suggested, the individuals who populate institutions of higher education should rigorously reexamine the consensus beliefs they encounter and, ideally, develop an “aversion to conformity” that will help bring vitality and diversity to academic life.
“The unexamined life is not worth living,” West said, alluding to the ideas of Socrates. “The examined life is painful.”
Higher education, West added, should be about not “information,” but “transformation” — a process of questioning assumptions and refining habits of critical thinking that can be applied to any issue.