I don't know Cornel West, but I often find academia and some who inhabit it ... sort of impenetrable to understand.
My theory:
Many of them are passionate, and it makes them good at their job, but their personalities and their job and the relationships with their peers seem almost inseparable... resulting in the sort of mish mash of professional and personal life that seem inseparable. For some almost everything can be personal to some extent... and in some cases I would find it inappropriate to mix all that up in the way some (not all) of them do at times.
It doesn't make them wrong, but it makes it really hard to understand. Such things happen outside of academia too, but it seems particularly prevalent there in my experience.
At least that's how I explain it to myself when I bump into such things.
My theory:
Many of them are passionate, and it makes them good at their job, but their personalities and their job and the relationships with their peers seem almost inseparable... resulting in the sort of mish mash of professional and personal life that seem inseparable. For some almost everything can be personal to some extent... and in some cases I would find it inappropriate to mix all that up in the way some (not all) of them do at times.
It doesn't make them wrong, but it makes it really hard to understand. Such things happen outside of academia too, but it seems particularly prevalent there in my experience.
At least that's how I explain it to myself when I bump into such things.