Not Getting Tenure at Harvard Sun Feb 21, 2021 Cornel West shouldn't have had an academic career, let alone tenure at more Ivy League schools than you can shake a graduate degree at. Cornel West is the author of “The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought” and got a doctorate in philosophy for his aforementioned dissertation on the ethical dimensions of an ideology that killed millions of people in which he mentioned “the profound tragedy of the epochal change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe” and argued that, “Marxist thought becomes even more relevant after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union.”