Good catch, @JBStillFlying . I hadn’t revisited the English Department website since the date of Zimmer’s October statement clarifying that the Chicago Principles apply to units within the University. The Zimmer statement clearly had the English Department in its sights. The department thereupon immediately altered its own prior statement to indicate only that it would simply “prioritize” Ph.D. applicants in Black Studies, not close the door entirely to other fields. However, they retained the following language:
“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 institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty here and elsewhere…”
That language taken with the prioritization of Black Studies indicated to me that anyone with traditional literary interests and without an activist perspective need not apply. It seemed a sad day for a storied department. Whether the department itself drew back from that brink or whether discussions behind closed doors were held with the administration we will never know. However, I note that the language cited above has been entirely eliminated from the present iteration of the statement (which can be found under “News” in the Graduate Studies section of the English Department web page), which now simply expresses support in general terms for Black Lives Matter. It continues to say that “in the coming academic year (2020-2021) we are prioritizing consideration of applicants who work in and with Black Studies”. Yet, as you say, that hardly seems borne out by the applicants actually admitted for that year (and what about future years?). I scrolled through the cohort of the twelve admittees for 2020-2021 and found only one of them indicating any interest in Black Studies and none in Post-colonial studies. They were a mixture of genders, ethnicities and interests spanning the spectrum of the species Young Scholar. Many had postmodernist interests, but there were also several with distinctly traditional literary interests.
It is hard to know what to make of this. Could it be that after a period of moral panic ordinary life has resumed even in the English Department?