Cornel West to Take a Job in New York

Cornel West, the peripatetic public intellectual and political activist, plans to finish out a teaching career that has taken him from Yale to Harvard to Princeton by moving back this coming summer to Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, where he began as an assistant professor in 1977.

Dr. West, the author of 19 books, including “Race Matters,” and a ubiquitous television and radio commentator, said he was taking a significant pay cut to become a professor of philosophy and Christian practices at Union.

The school, where the eminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, is also known as the birthplace of black theology. James H. Cone, a foremost scholar in that tradition, is still on the faculty.

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In an interview from Seattle, on his way to visit Occupy protesters there, Dr. West said that his liberal politics were formed in Progressive Baptist churches, and that Union was “the institutional expression of my core identity as a prophetic Christian.”

“I don’t have that much time, and I want to be able to do precisely what I’m called to do,” Dr. West, 58, said. It will also be nice, he said, to be within walking distance of the Apollo Theater.

Unlike his departure from Harvard in 2002 after a dispute with the then-president, Lawrence H. Summers, Dr. West’s departure from Princeton is on good terms. He will remain an emeritus professor there.

Princeton’s president, Shirley Tilghman, said that Dr. West had helped create “one of the world’s leading centers for African-American studies” at Princeton.

The Rev. Serene Jones, the president of Union and a former student of Dr. West, said: “In coming here, Cornel comes to a place where his scholarly commitments and his activism don’t live in two different worlds. As you get older, the more integrated your life is, the healthier it feels and the less time you have to spend waking up deciding who you’re going to be that day. At Union, he just has to be Cornel.”