The University of Chicago English Department announced on its website that it will only be admitting graduate students this year you are interested in working “in and with Black Studies.”
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The department said it “believes Black Lives Matter, and the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and Rayshard Brooks matter.”
“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 school said.
The statement was widely mocked on social media as an extreme case of virtue signaling and was seen by some as the latest example of how college campuses are incubators of a Democrat ideology that puts race above all.
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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, took to Twitter on Monday to call out the school and said the study of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Dickens and Austen “are presumably not acceptable.”
Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, also tweeted, “I am obviously interested in black literature. But being strong armed into studying it??”
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali said “this is all too idiotic.”
“Most of us don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she posted. “By the logic of their creed, wouldn’t English be the oppressor’s language?”
Campus Reform reported that the Black Studies program will include a course on Black Shakespeare, and how the literary icon helped form “Western ideas about blackness” and the ways the playwright portrayed black characters. The website said it reached out to the school for comment but did not hear back.
“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,” the faculty said in a statement on its website. “In support of this aim, we have been expanding our range of research and teaching through recent hiring, mentorship, and admissions initiatives that have enriched our department with a number of Black scholars and scholars of color who are innovating in the study of the global contours of anti-Blackness and in the equally global project of Black freedom.”