When news broke that the University of Chicago’s English department would only admit graduate students next year who are “interested in working in and with” Black studies, it was greeted with both applause and raised eyebrows. Leaders of English and African American-studies departments at other institutions called it “an impressive commitment” and a “bold, edge-cutting” position. But the move also attracted derision, including from some sources who don’t typically weigh in on graduate-school admissions policy decisions.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted that studying authors like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Austen was “presumably not acceptable” under Chicago’s arrangement, and others criticized the move as “racist” and “anti-intellectual.” Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper’s Magazine, tweeted: “I am obviously interested in black literature. But being strong armed into studying it??” Faculty members at Chicago said on Twitter that the department had received hate mail.
The decision carries extra resonance coming from an English department that is among the most high-profile in the country and at a university that has traditionally declined to take institutional positions on questions of social justice or politics. That stance dates back to a 1967 report, commissioned by the university to stake out the university’s “role in political and social action” in the wake of protests against the Vietnam War, and critics say Chicago’s decision represents a deviation from that policy as well as an abandonment of academic principles.
The statement Chicago’s English faculty released in July begins with a statement that Black lives matter. “As literary scholars, we attend to the histories, atmospheres, and scenes of anti-Black racism and racial violence in the United States and across the world. We are committed to the struggle of Black and Indigenous people, and all racialized and dispossessed people, against inequality and brutality,” the statement posted on the English department home page reads.
The second paragraph on the home page read in part, “For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods.” That language has since been removed from the home page, but is still present on the department’s Black studies and admissions pages. Jeremy Manier, a university spokesman, confirmed to The Chronicle on Friday that the department would admit only those interested in Black studies for the 2020-21 admissions cycle.
The scholars also wrote that English “has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction, and anti-Blackness. Our discipline is responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why.” Given that context, they continued, “we believe that undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere.”
Included in that commitment, said the faculty members, is “vigorous participation in university-wide conversations and activism about the university’s past and present role in the historically Black neighborhood that houses it.” But doctoral students can elect whether to engage in such discussions, said Manier. (Faculty members in Chicago’s English department declined to comment, referring questions about the decision to Manier.)
A ‘Hard-Won Victory’
The number of students admitted to Chicago’s English department will be lower than usual for the 2020-21 admissions cycle because of the pandemic and a lackluster job market, the university said in a statement. (A number of other programs have chosen to suspend admissions for fall 2021 entirely in order to allocate more funding to already-enrolled students.) The department will admit only five students this year, though it expected to receive about 750 applications, Maud Ellmann, the interim department chair, said in a statement, noting that the department sees higher application rates in “times of crisis.”
“The reduced number of spaces persuaded us to focus on specific areas so as to give careful consideration to all the applications we receive,” Ellmann said, noting that Black studies has become a significant part of the program thanks to the hiring of several new scholars focused on Black studies. The faculty, she said, “wanted graduate students interested in Black studies to know that they would receive the highest standard of mentorship in our program.” The decision to admit only students interested in Black studies, then, may act as both a way to winnow a competitive application pool amid challenging financial circumstances and as a way to take a strong stance on the questions of race reverberating throughout academe. Susan A. Manning, the chair of Northwestern University’s English department, called it an “impressive statement and commitment.”
Chicago’s focus on Black studies is “a hard-won victory,” Koritha Mitchell, an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, said, and the result of “an incredible amount of groundwork” on Chicago’s part. “One year of graduate admissions is nothing in comparison to the hundreds of years of oppression that they are trying to address,” Mitchell said. “But in order to have even that one-year decision, the amount of groundwork they had to do, in terms of the hiring they’ve done in the last couple of years, especially at the full-professor level and the tenured-associate level, is just astonishing.”
‘Bold, Cutting-Edge’
The five students who begin at Chicago in fall 2021 won’t be working exclusively in Black studies (the department currently has 77 students). Instead, a statement on the admissions page read, they “will be encouraged to take advantage of the wide variety of courses, not restricted to Black Studies, offered by the Department and the Division.” Manier, the university spokesman, said they’ll be able to select from “dozens of courses in English” and “across the humanities, in modern languages, for example, or philosophy, classics, divinity, etc.”
So it’s not true — as Cruz and others have suggested — that this class of graduate students will be unable to study Shakespeare. In fact, the doctoral curriculum includes a course called “Black Shakespeare,” taught by Noémie Ndiaye, which “explores the role played by the Shakespearean canon in the shaping of Western ideas about blackness, in processes of racial formation, and racial struggle from the early modern period to the present” and examines Black characters in plays such as Othello and The Tempest.
None of that should come as a surprise, Mitchell said. “That’s old hat for people who actually know the field,” Mitchell said, citing recent scholar-led movements like #ShakeRace and the Bigger 6 Collective. Among the discipline’s “most vibrant lines of inquiry is how whiteness and other racial categories are operating in classic literature,” said Mitchell.
It’s not unusual for graduate-admissions processes to target students interested in a particular line of inquiry — a common consideration is whether a student’s interest falls within the scholarly purview of a faculty member in the department. At Chicago, the English department will focus on other subject areas in future years, Ellmann, the department chair, wrote in a statement. “This is a practice already well-established in the sciences, and under current circumstances it makes sense for us to focus on specific fields instead of trying to cover the whole range of English studies with a minimal intake of student,” she said.
Mark Bauerlein, a professor emeritus of English at Emory University, who criticized the decision on Twitter, said the department may have been better served by being less public about its plan. “I’ve been on admissions committees — you don’t have to say all this out loud. Just say, ‘Hey, look, let’s try to emphasize Black studies in this year’s entering class. We don’t have to make some big announcement out of it. We don’t need to talk the talk, we’ll just walk the walk,’” Bauerlein said. “I think that the intellectual reputation of the University of Chicago’s English department has suffered greatly because of this move.”
To Jacqueline Goldsby, chair of Yale’s department of African American studies, who also holds an appointment in its English department, the Chicago faculty statement contains two key arguments: that “all scholars have a responsibility to know the literatures of African American, African diasporic, and colonized peoples, regardless of area of specialization, as a core competence of the profession” and that Black studies is a broad field of intellectual inquiry. These, she wrote in an email to The Chronicle, are “bold, edge-cutting, principled, and iconoclastic positions to take, given literary studies’ resistance to acknowledging Black literary histories and aesthetics as integral to the discipline.”
Chicago’s decision poses a challenge to English departments at peer institutions, Goldsby said — both to hire and develop faculty members in Black studies and to cultivate the field’s growth through graduate-admissions policies. “Are Chicago’s peer English departments ready to rise to this precedent?” she asked.
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