OUT OF MY HEAD: Loving his way out...

Funny story. The day Dr. Cornel West spoke at UNCG last week I wandered into a University office and found a group of staff members taking bets on how many people would show for the talk. The Cone Ballroom seats about 700 people - so based on the turnout for New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd last semester I said they'd probably have to turn people away. No way, someone said - unless I was willing to go round up a few hundred people and bring them with me. A few hours later my girlfriend and I headed down to the Cone Ballroom - about half an hour before the man himself was supposed to arrive. There were already nearly 1000 people - and no seats anywhere. I saw some people I knew from UNC A&T and a small delegation from Guilford College. Clearly someone had underestimated West's drawing power. West is a towering if controversial figure in many circles - Philosophy, Sociology, Religion, African American Studies. He's an academic firebrand who's gone head to head with Harvard's embattled president Lawrence Summers (a feud that lead West to leave Harvard for Princeton), publicly criticized both Democrats and Republicans for failing the middle class and black community and, at every turn, defied expectatons. He's the rare academic who's on the ground and in it constantly - his hands in the guts of the culture. He's made rap albums, participated in youth gang summits toward non-violence and even had a cameo in two of the Matrix films as "Councilor West," a futuristic elder. But this week I heard a lot of conservative noise about West's speaking at the school. Not people who'd read any of West's work, mind you - just people who were put off by his liberal reputation and his following in the black community, had heard conservative radio hosts savaging him and had decided that was good enough for them. "How do you think someone like Cornel West felt when he had to walk past that College Republican Ten Commandments monument in the EUC?" a conservative guy in my dorm asked me. "I'm guessing he felt fine," I told him. "He's a professor of Religion at Princeton. He could probably teach a class on the Commandments in the original Hebrew." "Oh," the guy said a little sheepishly. "I didn't know that." This is all very ironic - because during the College Republicans' "Morals Week" the American Democracy Project, the same group that helped bring West, shelled out $1,000 toward bringing conservative UNC-W professor Mike Adams to our school for the third time. Adams' talk touched on how conservative voices on campus have been silenced by liberals for too long and that a real dialogue can't be had without all sorts of voices being represented. This is the same guy who, last year, did everything he could to prevent Village Voice sex columnist Tristan Taormino returning to UNCG and all but called her a filthy whore in print and on television - but never mind that. The point is that speech, texts, ideas - from the right or the left - shouldn't be dismissed out of hand before we take a good look, hear what people have to say, and decide for ourselves. I've read Mike Adams' book and dozens of his columns, even heard him speak - so I feel completely justified in calling him a graceless hack and an insecure homophobe who is lucky to have a job at a third rate university and scribble his little treatises on how mean the liberals are to him and everyone who loves Jesus. But if anyone who wasn't familiar with Adams said that to me I'd ask how they knew and tell them to shut up until they'd had a proper look. Anyone who came out to hear West would have found a patriotic and deeply religious man talking about democracy as a spiritual imperative in a way that is refreshingly - at times even jarringly - inclusive. As one of the audience members pointed out, he may criticize the philosophies of those with whom he disagrees, but he even makes a point of saying "Our brothers in the Ku Klux Klan" when discussing hate groups. "I'm a Christian," West told the audience at one point in his talk. "I'm going to love my way out of the darkness, no matter what." With more professors - and more students - as soulful and open to true dialog as West, we'd be well on our way. Let's hope some of the more than 1,000 people in attendance took something away with them.