Some of you seem to be saying that this policy is no big deal and should be read as nothing more than a reasonable response to the disappearance of jobs, with Black Ph.D.'s being a special case because they are so highly marketable as universities everywhere move to increase the numbers of Black faculty. On this reading rather than follow the example of Columbia and close down entirely, the Chicago English Department has seized the opportunity to maintain its viability by the expedient of more intensely recruiting the only candidates whose degrees any longer have a practical value.
Sad as this is, it might be defensible as policy if it were not for the rationale offered in justification:
“English as a discipline 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… For these reasons 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…”
To be clear, it does not especially concern me that white applicants will be shut out for a time. Infinitely more disturbing are the reasons given: that the discipline some of us have loved and the books we have taken solace and inspiration from are rotten to the core, riddled with anti-Blackness, are nothing but apologetics for colonialism, a prop or a product of hierarchies of every imaginable malignancy. How did I miss that this was the effect of Henry James on a young James Baldwin, who formed his own exquisite prose style from that of the man he was not ashamed to acknowledge as “the Master”? And was it the anti-Blackness in Shakespeare that led Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to read the Bard’s works so laboriously and thoroughly? Did Ralph Ellison take nothing from Franz Kafka but the impression that the guy was a white oppressor?
For that matter, did any of us mere readers of whatever race take from the great writers in our language lessons only in hierarchical oppression? Somehow all that went over my head as I sat in those classes at the U of C contemplating the poems of Donne, the plays of Shaw, and the novels of George Eliot. The profs must have been tweaking all those stories, dramas and poems to give us the misguided notion that they were beautiful, moving, and even - horror of horrors - true. I missed all the oppression of it in those old profs, but it must be so, because this English Department says it is.
Of all the many irritating and simply false assertions in that statement what most saddens and dismays is the collective admission that we (no exceptions permitted) are all guilty of these thought-crimes. Loving literature for its own sake and not insofar as it supports a narrative of oppression sounds like it could get you in deep trouble in this department. Beware, all ye applicants of whatever skin color: You must despise literature, abjure it, promise to do better, give up all notions of beauty, form, and expressiveness and take to activist posturing. That may not have been what you glimpsed once in the power of great writing and what made you want to study English, but in this department it is the law.
It was once the policy of the University of Chicago to not only permit but encourage its individual members to take political positions of every stripe, make public statements, become activists on behalf of any cause. Except in relation to its educational mission the University itself did not make statements nor take positions. These were the Kalven principles, whose rationale was that all ideas and all positions, with some few exceptions, should be contestable, up for discussion, subject to analysis, this being the true business of a university. But when a University or department within it makes a political statement it thereby stifles further debate and renders dissent from the official line an offence. This is inconsistent not merely with the Kalven principles but with the educational mission itself.
In making the official collective statement above the English Department is effectively requiring all its faculty and students to embrace critical race theory. Where does that leave anyone, whether white or black, whether faculty member or student, who would wish to study and write about a classic author or period in a way that would not reduce the subject to a discourse on racial or related themes, no matter how far those themes were from anything the poor dead deluded author thought he or she was up to?
Perhaps this is a minor instance imbedded within the many wild and woolly events of this annus horribilis 2020. Perhaps it is no great thing that a few white students will be turned away from graduate studies at the University of Chicago. Perhaps, however, the statement is really signifying a more general turning - away from literary studies and the literary life itself. Perhaps it is a turn toward the final destruction of everything we know and love in our language. Is it that or is it merely the brief and transitory product of our fevered times? We need a Shakespeare for our own day to illuminate us.