Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester

Recounting a protest at Harvard that cost him his tenured position, the author tells moving stories of others who have challenged authority, questions the system, and examines the value of protest in protecting one's sense of self-worth. 25,000 first printing. Tour.

The first black professor tenured at Harvard Law School, Bell (Faces at the Bottom of the Well) lost his job in 1992 after protesting-by taking an unpaid leave of absence-the school's failure to hire and tenure a woman of color. Reflecting first on his youth and career as a civil rights laywer, Bell offers a candid tale of infighting at Harvard Law. The school, he argues persuasively, places more emphasis on paper credentials than proven skills, thus limiting faculty diversity of race, sex and class. During his first year of protest, Bell agreed to teach a seminar at Harvard for free; in his second year, he was a visiting teacher at New York University Law School, where he remains. He describes how warring ideological factions defeated the appointment of a black woman candidate at Harvard Law. The officials there refused to waive a rule limiting faculty leaves to two years, and Bell was fired as he began his third year of protest. While a few observations here ring false-do students really not protest poor teaching by white professors?-Bell raises important questions about institutional racism and offers resonant thoughts on the tradition of protest and its importance to self-esteem. 25,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A leading African-American scholar of the law, known for decrying the underrepresentation of minorities in the academy, reflects on protest and race in America. Four years ago, Bell (Law/New York Univ.; Faces at the Bottom of the Well, 1992, etc.), then at Harvard, protested the absence of black women from that university's law faculty by taking an unpaid leave of absence. After much dithering, Harvard failed to hire a black woman law professor; once Bell had taken the two years of leave allowed him by its rules, Harvard fired him, refusing to make an exception for his principled stand. Affecting vignettes reveal how Bell's family inspired and sustained his protest. Accounts of faculty politics, in contrast, find Bell pulling his punches. Rather than settle scores, he seeks to knit his personal and professional experiences into a broad exploration of protest and the responses that it provokes. Alongside of his confrontation with the authorities at Harvard, Bell examines protests by such figures as Paul Robeson, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King while weaving into his book--in a manner familiar to readers of his previous work and to those acquainted with the techniques of ``critical race studies''--an allegorical fable in which citizens of a ruling citadel argue over how to treat the downtrodden outside of their walls. Bell illuminates an ugly picture: Protesters become pariahs, true reform may be impossible to achieve, yet struggle is necessary to preserve dignity and self-esteem. If Bell's pessimism seems a bit hyperbolic, his argument lends moral authority to those who exhort us toward social reform--those such as Bell himself, whose perhaps overdue disillusion with Harvard enables him to forcefully pose questions of how and why the institutional imperatives of power and prestige compromise moral vision. Bell's clearly written jeremiad, with its moving portrait of the author as exemplary protester, will inspire new examinations of struggles in our citadels of power--perhaps even new protests there. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Bell provides a detailed account of the events that led him to give up his position as a Harvard Law School professor to protest the school's never having granted tenure to a minority woman.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Bell, the first tenured black in Harvard history, protested Harvard Law School's hiring policies and was fired for his pains. But those expecting either recrimination or a mercilessly logical legal brief from him may be surprised and perhaps puzzled. Bell prefaces each chapter with an episode in the conflict between the Citadel and the lowlanders--a fable of race relations in America, to be sure, but also something more, as is the nonfictional body of the book. To some extent, Bell's protest is an excuse to disclose behind-the-scenes social relations at Harvard Law, and the thematic sections are more literary meditation on protest than an exhortation to take sides. For Bell, protest means solitary action closer to ethics than the committee meetings and chains of command of political organizations, and the moral ambivalence involved in protest is a theme to which he always returns. Bell urges us to follow his lead but reminds us that good guys find themselves unemployed and that when virtue is its own reward, it may be no reward at all. Roland Wulbert