From [HERE] Cornel West, considered one of the most prominent Black philosophers and progressive activists in the country, announced Monday that he has resigned from his position at Harvard University’s Divinity School, saying the institution is in a state of “decline and decay” and “spiritual rot.”

In a resignation letter dated June 30 and posted to Twitter, West suggested that discrimination at the university drove him to leave the Divinity School. The 68-year-old scholar said in March that he was abandoning his quest for tenure at Harvard to return to the Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he first taught more than four decades earlier.

“How sad it is to see our beloved Harvard Divinity School in such decline and decay,” he wrote. “The disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students loom large.”

West, who added that Harvard has become “market-driven,” tweeted, “Let us bear witness against this spiritual rot!”

“The School has no comment on Dr. West’s letter,” Jonathan Beasley, a spokesman for the Divinity School, said Tuesday morning.

The release of what West described as his “candid” resignation letter came after journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones announced last week that she had accepted a faculty position at Howard University and turned down an offer to teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill because of a long and remarkably contentious back-and-forth over tenure. Although trustees for UNC-Chapel Hill voted to award tenure to Hannah-Jones, the vote came after the public university hired her as a professor without the job-protection status, which caused faculty members and students to protest that she had been mistreated.

At Harvard, many students were sharing West’s letter on social media, said Noah Harris, the student body president, “because it’s really bringing to light a lot of the treatment of professors of color. … We have to do a better job as a university, as a culture.”