Cornel West hasn’t forgiven Harvard’s president, Lawrence Summers. Not by a long shot.

At a Harlem bookstore last night, the celebrity black scholar, whose nasty public confrontation with Mr. Summers led to his departure to Princeton and augured a wider faculty revolt against the Harvard leader, delivered a scathing assessment of his dealings with his former boss. Mr. West called the former Clinton administration Cabinet member a “professional thug.”

More than three years has passed since Mr. Summers summoned the faculty star to his office and, according to Mr. West’s telling of the story, admonished the professor for shirking his academic responsibilities.

Providing an account of his last days as a professor at Harvard University’s Department of Afro-American Studies, Mr. West, 51, said Mr. Summers was “indifferent to fairness across the board.”

That echoed one criticism that some Harvard professors leveled against Mr. Summers before the Faculty of Arts and Sciences approved a secret-ballot motion March 15 declaring a lack of confidence in their leader. That vote capped a battle dozens of Harvard faculty members have waged against the university president since, in a lecture in January, he questioned whether innate differences in aptitude between men and women may explain why men outnumber women in the fields of mathematics and science.

Summers supporters at Harvard have praised the president for demanding higher economic standards of the university’s students and faculty members, for challenging opponents of Israel in academia, and for demonstrating talent as a fund-raiser.

Last night, Mr. West said Mr. Summers “was messing with the wrong Negro.”

Mr. West, who rose to the top ranks of Harvard’s faculty as a University Professor, said Mr. Summers was destroying the school.

“Larry Summers’s treatment of me reflects that of a managerial bully,” he said in an animated address that brought laughter and applause from dozens of audience members, some of whom, asking the professor questions following the address, spoke in a reverent tone.

For much of his speech, Mr. West listed grievances against Mr. Summers, who was installed as president at Harvard only months before challenging Mr. West. Though some at Harvard supported Mr. Summers in his dispute with Mr. West – there were those who questioned whether his scholarship matched the status given to him as University Professor – others among the faculty have used the incident as key evidence supporting their claim that Mr. Summers leads Harvard with an iron fist.

Mr. Summers, Mr. West said, uses “force as a way of dealing with conflict.” The president is “someone who is immature, who doesn’t know how to relate to people.”

“In that sense, I have some sympathy for the brother,” Mr. West said. “You have all this power and authority, and you still haven’t grown up. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Mr. West, a professor of religion at Princeton, said Mr. Summers was living in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s version of hell, defined as the inability “to love.”

At other times, Mr. West spoke as if he were a character from “The Matrix” movies, in two of which the scholar played a bit role. He said a good education is supposed to free students’ minds and “decolonize their souls.” His writings and speeches evidently influenced the Wachowski brothers, the directors of “The Matrix” franchise.

Mr. West, who has drawn criticism from Jewish leaders for his work with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan – Mr. West, according to the author of the book “Harvard Rules,” Richard Bradley, marched in Mr. Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March – also spoke nastily of Mr. Summers’s public opposition to a divestment petition against Israel that circulated at campuses three years ago. Mr. Summers, taking one of the sharpest stands against such petitions among university presidents, said disproportionate criticism against Israel in academia was anti-Semitic “in effect, if not in intent.”

Mr. West said Mr. Summers “cut off” debate on Israel immediately. “Don’t say you want robust conversation here, and trump it over here,” Mr. West said.

Mr. Summers addressed some of the specific charges that Mr. Summers reportedly made against Mr. West in their meeting before the president softened his stance in the ensuing months.

Mr. West said he was dedicated to his students. Mr. Summers, according to Mr. West, questioned whether Mr. West skipped weeks of classes to assist [Senator Bill Bradley] with his bid for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.

In response to criticism he received for advising Reverend Al Sharpton on his own presidential bid, Mr. West said: “I should be able to spend as much time with Alford Sharpton as I want.”

Mr. Summers reportedly pointed to Mr. West’s 2001 recorded album, “Sketches of My Culture,” as evidence of Mr. West’s lack of serious scholarship. Mr. West defended the album, which Richard Bradley described in his book as a “Beat poet riffing to a hip-hop soundtrack,” as helping to inspire youth.

Following his meeting with Mr. Summers, Mr. West had a conversation with the author Toni Morrison, who told him, as recounted by Mr. West last night, “It sounds like you’re still living on the plantation.”

Mr. West said he took greatest umbrage at Mr. Summers’s refusal to offer a public apology for the dressing-down. In private, Mr. West said, the president was conciliatory, but in the New York Times, he was quoted as saying he had not extended a complete apology.

Mr. West’s version of events was enthusiastically backed up by that author, Mr. Bradley, who joined the academic at the Hue-Man bookstore for a book signing televised on C-Span. Mr. Summers refused to talk to Mr. Bradley for his book, whose account of the dispute, spread over 20 pages, generally portrays Mr. West in a positive light.

Mr. West, wearing his customary three-piece suit, black tie, and French cuffs, appeared to enjoy revisiting the drama, employing the charismatic speaking style that has packed students into his classes at Harvard and Princeton. At times, he mocked the Harvard Corporation, the governing body to which Mr. Summers reports, for sticking with a man who Mr. West said was damaging the university. He ridiculed professors who did not back him during his spat with Mr. Summers, saying they suffered from “Harvarditis.”

Those professors who defended Mr. Summers, he said, did so because they were scared, because “bullies rule by fear and intimidation. They [professors] will stay at Harvard even if you talk about their mamma,” he said.