http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter
Early life
McWhorter was born and raised in Philadelphia. He attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia, and after tenth grade was accepted to Simon’s Rock College, where he earned an A.A. degree. Later, he attended Rutgers University and received a B.A. in French in 1985. He received a master’s degree in American Studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1993 from Stanford University.
Career
After graduation McWhorter was an associate professor of linguistics at Cornell University from 1993 to 1995 before taking up a position as associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1995 until 2003. He left that position to become a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. From 2006 to 2008 he was a columnist for the New York Sun. He is Contributing Editor at The New Republic and The Root.com, writes a biweekly column at The New York Daily News and also writes regularly for Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily. Since 2008, he has been a lecturer in linguistics, American Studies, and the Core Curriculum at Columbia University.[1]
He could have taken the easy route and become Chairman of the African Diaspora Studies Department at some SUNY or UC campus, stopped writing and researching, and just collected checks and held court.
Instead, he's a serious linguist who has done new work in his field. He is, by disposition, a man of the left and if liberals ignore him they do so at their peril.
So, I hope they do.