I am generallty cheered by the President’s letter as being an official restatement of the fundamental importance and inviolableness of the Chicago Statement and Kalven Report. The letter further extends those principles explicitly to all “units” of the University. This was previously only implicit.
The letter then turns to the special case of one such unit - the English Department, whose stated policy of limiting admissions to the Ph.D. program to applicants in Black Studies is then analyzed for adherence to these principles. Two possible rationales are given for this policy, one of them as constituting a political test, the other as simply defining a direction for the Department. The former would violate the principles; the latter would not. Interestingly, Zimmer does not judge which of these rationales actuated the English Department. The Department is given a way out, if it chooses to take it. It may have done this at least superficially in that its statement of its admissions policy has been excised from its Manifesto regarding anti-Blackness in literature in the latest iteration of the Manifesto.
However, I am left - as I believe Zimmer himself or any reader of the Manifesto would surely be - highly doubting that any applicant whether in Black Studies or any other field would not be screened for adherence to the politics of the Manifesto. The letter does not address this explicitly, but that is surely what it is referring to when it speaks of the way the principles could be violated in the “implementation” of a policy or by how it is “reasonably perceived by students and faculty.” It says that any such policy must be “explained carefully” with those principles uppermost.
The Manifesto hardly does that, and it remains a reasonable inference that its politicized tenets are the driving force behind the policy.
The English Department is being given some time and some wiggle-room. Will it take them?