Below is a letter to my very first college professor in response to the recent Faculty Statement (July 2020) of the English Department at The University of Chicago (
https://english.uchicago.edu), in which the English Department announced that it will
only accept applicants in its graduate school for the 2020-21 academic year that seek to do work in Black Studies.
______
Dear Mr. Chandler:
You probably do not remember me,
but you were my professor in my very
first class at The University of Chicago in 1977. As a graduate of the Chicago Public School
system, I was ill prepared for the rigorous education that awaited me. The first few papers that you returned to me
were a sea of red, as you attempted to shape something worthwhile out of a very
raw product.
Some of it did stick and, in
addition to you, I was blessed to have Joe Williams, Frank Kinahan and Robert
Streeter attempt to finish what you started.
Over the past forty years, my career
has taken various turns, focused mostly in law and finance. The faculty at The University of Chicago
provided me with a set of valuable writing skills and a deep and enduring love
of literature, particularly American literature—Thoreau, Melville, Poe, and Cooper. The anthologies I read during those years still
sit on my bookshelf, although my tattered copy of Strunk & White has been
replaced. I blog weekly and have
faithfully kept a journal since my college days. I feel the deepest gratitude to the faculty
members in the English Department at Chicago for enriching this aspect of my
life.
It is because of my respect for
the Department, that I was shocked and disheartened by the announcement that
the graduate English department would only accept students devoted to
Black Studies in the 2020-21 academic year.
It saddens me that The University of Chicago would exclude any students
that seek a degree to study anything outside the work of Black authors. I would agree that Black Literature deserves
attention as a subfield and as the Faculty Statement noted, the City of Chicago
especially has a rich tradition of Black authors that produced works of
literary merit. Nevertheless, the Faculty
Statement is diametrically opposed to everything the University purports to
stand for.
As an initial matter, the
statement does not say whether there was unanimity in its adoption. It uses the word “collective” seven times in
a short six paragraph essay—a word that is a clue as to the thinly-veiled Marxism
now embedded within the Department. Most
astonishingly, the Faculty Statement condemns its own entire discipline of for all of the inequities that have been
visited upon Black and Indigenous people—an odd assertion that is at once
self-indulgent and self-flagellating. Who would even want to work in a department
that had such a vital role in those heinous things? If that were true, shutting the Department
down would seem to be a more appropriate remedy. Without any support whatsoever, the statement
condemns not only the English discipline, but the entire University as “a site
of exclusion and violence for others.” What
violence is the author or authors speaking of, exactly? Most incredibly, the Department excludes
students interested in anything other than pursuing a degree in Black Studies, purportedly to “build a more
inclusive and equitable field for describing, studying, and teaching the
relationship between aesthetics, representation, inequality and power.” In its quest to have a more inclusive
department, the English Department excludes students that are interested in
much of the Western canon. It would be hard to get more Orwellian.
As pernicious as its aims, the Faculty
Statement’s writing wouldn’t pass muster in your freshman humanities
class. I have distinct memories of your fair and
accurate comments that much of my initial writing was unacceptable because it
was “full of jargon and cliches.” Yet,
the Department website published this paragraph:
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. And while inroads have been made in terms of
acknowledging the centrality of both individual literary works and collective
histories of racialized and colonized people, there is still much to do as a
discipline and as a department to build a more inclusive and equitable field
for describing, studying, and teaching the relationship between aesthetics,
representation, inequality, and power.
I am confident that if I would have submitted a
writing like the above as a student in your class, you would have rightfully
skewered me. The real “collective” is
the collective groans being emitted by the spirits of Joe Williams and Frank
Kinahan after reading this mishmash.
This severe restriction by the
English Department of the subject matter of graduate studies and the writing
used to justify its action are alarming.
I mourn the collapse of liberal education generally and, specifically,
the wholesale adoption of Critical Race Theory by a once great department. The Faculty Statement leads me to conclude
that Marxist ideology now has it in its clutches—a department that feels
compelled to reject Western Civilization and to hold its own discipline
responsible for the historical sins and excesses of colonialism. The University should consider changing its
motto from Crescat Scientia; Vita Excolatur (Let knowledge grow from more to
more; and so be human life enriched) to Nos
enim sumus sicut et ceteri (We are the same as everyone else).
Out with the beauty of Coleridge,
Dickens and Shakespeare. In with the
questionable wisdom and insights of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Regretfully,
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