I'm not a fan of West's politics (look up my comment history, because it's pretty clear what my politics are), but the comments here making light of West's objections seem completely off the mark.<p>Reading the letter I see a few extremely salient complaints:<p>1. His first complaint is that he was a token diversity hire. Instead of his courses being placed in the general coursework section, his courses were put under 'African American' religious studies. As many minorities know, this is a way of discounting minority viewpoints. No one would dare dream put a history class taught by a white professor under the 'European American studies' portion. If he's teaching a course supposedly on American democracy, then surely it should go under history or social sciences, not 'black people social sciences'.<p>2. Failure to compensate an appropriate amount given West's celebrity status. Again, I don't particularly like West's politics, but he is clearly quite the celebrity. It seems he was not compensated appropriately, despite Harvard being happy to use his celebrity status to further their own reputation. Pretty standard employee complaint.<p>3. His tenure application was denied despite Harvard asking him to leave an existing tenured professorship. He believes his application was denied not due to his teaching but because Harvard disagreed with one of his political views. Again, as much as I disagree with West's politics, it seems incredibly disingenuous to profit off of a new employee's celebrit, tempt him to join you from a stable job with promises of future stability, and then to deny him tenureship because he has differing opinions on some random issue.<p>4. Despite supposedly wanting a close faculty, no one in the faculty would stand up for him when his tenure was denied. The fact of his mother's death not soliciting any response was not brought up in isolation as other comments claim (current top comment does). It was brought up in reference to the fact that no one on faculty would dare speak up to the administration on his behalf and it seemed like, after tenure was denied for his beliefs on Palestine, he was ostracized from his department. Many academics know that being ostracized in your department is not good.<p>5. Furthermore, it seemed that Harvard has a problem in not focusing on the whole person. Instead, it's developed into a technocratic institution (which I know from personal knowledge, West decries).<p>So yeah, all the people saying this is only about his mother or because of palestine are either being incredibly dense or purposely deceitful.<p>Again, I disagree with basically everything West stands for, but I agree with him that he shouldn't essentially be exploited and then canceled. That goes against every shred of common decency.