P U L S E

Al Jazeera’s Avi Lewis interviews Cornel West, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton who has been the focus of controversy throughout his career due to his unconventional opinions and creative approach to the world of US academia.  West discusses the current state of democracy for African-Americans, US foreign policy, the global recession, and his famous dispute with Lawrence Summers.

He was the first African-American to get a PhD in philosophy at Princeton.

He went on to write more than 20 books, receive more than 20 honourary degrees, to teach at Harvard and Yale, and hold classes at universities from Paris to Addis Abeba.

With his latest hip hop CD he was named “MTV’s artist of the week”, and he has provided futuristic philosophical commentary on all three Matrix movies.

In a famous spat with the then president of Harvard University he called Lawrence Summers “the Ariel Sharon of higher education.”