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University That Said It Would Only Accept Grad Students Focusing On ‘Black Studies’ Is Now Hiding Requirement But Still Enforcing It

   DailyWire.com
Protesters wearing masks march through University Circle while holding up placards and banners during the protest.
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In July, the University of Chicago’s English Department released a faculty statement saying it would only accept “applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.”

“The English department at the University of Chicago believes that Black Lives Matter, and that the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks matter, as do thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence. 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 read. “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.”

“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,” the statement added.

As The Federalist pointed out on Monday, the faculty statement has been edited to remove the sentence about only accepting applicants who would work on Black Studies.

Student publication the Chicago Thinker noticed the change and reached out to the university’s English Department for comment.

“The department’s public affairs office directed the Chicago Thinker to the graduate admissions page, where the original line appears: ‘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,’” the Federalist reported.

“Under ‘Frequently Asked Questions about the Ph.D. Application,’ the English Department’s admissions page clarifies that the ‘focus on Black Studies applies only to the 2020-21 Ph.D. admissions cycle.’ The admissions page also says admitted Black Studies Ph.D. students are ‘encouraged to take advantage of the wide variety of courses, not restricted to Black Studies, offered by the Department and the Division,’” The Federalist continued. “It is unclear whether the admissions page comments were added after the department deleted them from its July faculty statement, or if the comments were always available on the admissions page. What is clear is that the department never changed its mind about its decision to only accept ‘Black Studies’ students.”

The outlet suggested the change to the faculty statement came after criticism of the exclusionist policy.

In a statement to Campus Reform when the faculty statement was being reported, University assistant director for public affairs Gerald McSwiggan said the university “can accept a limited number of Ph.D. graduate students in the 2020-21 application season due to the COVID-19 pandemic and limited employment opportunities for English PhDs.”

“Currently, there are 77 Ph.D. students studying a wide variety of disciplines within the English Department, and the department is admitting 5 additional Ph.D. students for 2021. The English department faculty saw a need for additional scholarship in Black Studies, and decided to focus doctoral admissions this year on prospective Ph.D. students with an interest in working in and with Black Studies. As with other departments in the University, the department’s faculty will decide which areas of scholarship they wish to focus on for Ph.D. admissions in future years,” he added.

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