So Cornel West posted his response to Michael Eric Dyson’s 10,000-word New Republic essay, "The Ghost of Cornel West," on his Facebook page. An excerpt:

The escalating deaths and sufferings in Black and poor America and the marvelous new militancy in our Ferguson moment should compel us to focus on what really matters: The life and death issues of police murders, poverty, mass incarceration, drones, TPP (unjust trade policies), vast surveillance, decrepit schools, unemployment, Wall Street power, Israeli occupation of Palestinians, Dalit resistance in India, and ecological catastrophe.

Character assassination is the refuge of those who hide and conceal these issues in order to rationalize their own allegiance to the status quo. …I am not beholden to any administration, political party, TV channel or financial sponsor because loving suffering and struggling peoples is my point of reference. 

Plus, on The Revolution, the news site of the U.S. Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), author and activist Lenny Wolff wrote a rebuttal on behalf of himself and RCP-founder Carl Dix. A chunk with emphasis theirs:

You have to wonder at the timing of this compendium of cheap shots, rank distortions and half-truths, right when we are beginning what promises to be a long hot summer, to invoke that 60’s term—a time when the police have been emboldened by the Justice Department’s whitewash of Darren Wilson’s murder of Michael Brown but when masses of people are increasingly refusing to take this, and not so persuaded by those who would want them to work within the system, and when the Obama administration that Dyson so cherishes has no real answers to this horror. 

Stay tuned for scenes from the next episode of "As the Professors Turn."