The New York Times


STANLEY FISH

STANLEY FISH

Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of 13 books, most recently “How to Write a Sentence,” a celebration of sentence craft and sentence pleasure; “Save the World On Your Own Time"; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama.
July 11, 2011, 8:30 pm

Vocationalism, Academic Freedom and Tenure

In her new book, “The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For,” Naomi Schaefer Riley brings together two subjects that are usually treated separately in the literature.

The first is the increasing tendency, on the part of students, legislators, administrators and some faculty members, to view higher education in vocational terms and to link questions of curriculum and funding to the realization of career goals. The second is the debate about academic freedom: what is it, who should have it, should anyone have it? What Riley does is take the standard rationale for academic freedom seriously and then argue that the ascendancy of vocationalism, in combination with other factors she names, undermines that rationale and leaves very few college teachers in need of, or deserving of, academic freedom.
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July 4, 2011, 8:30 pm

What Does the First Amendment Protect?

In the two First Amendment cases handed down last week — one about limiting sales of violent video games to children, the other about Arizona’s attempt to make public financing more attractive to candidates — the dissenting justices contend that the protection of speech is not really the issue at all.

In his dissent to Brown v. Entertainment Merchants, Justice Stephen Breyer declares that this is not a case, as the majority claims, about “depictions of violence”; rather it is a case about “protection of children.” What Breyer is doing (or attempting to do) is shift the category under which the matter of dispute is to be considered. According to Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, depictions of violence merit First Amendment protection because they are speech, not acts. Breyer replies that the video games in question are in fact acts, although they are, he acknowledges, acts “containing an expressive component.” That component, he argues, does not outweigh or render irrelevant the “significant amount of physical activity” involved in playing these games, activity in the course of which players do not merely see violent things but do violent things.

The danger Breyer wants to protect children from is not the danger of being exposed to violence, but the danger of being initiated into violence. This happens (or can happen) when game-players are required not merely to view violent acts passively, but to perform them by making a succession of choices (with a button or joystick) that decide the fate of the characters they have created.
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June 27, 2011, 8:30 pm

Handicapping Huntsman

When I ran for the office of secretary of my freshman class at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, my campaign manager was Jon Huntsman, father of Jon Huntsman, Jr., the former governor of Utah, former Ambassador to China and current candidate for the Republican nomination for the presidency. (I won and found, happily, that the office carried with it almost no responsibilities.)

Huntsman senior was then attending college on a scholarship provided by a California businessman. He was good-looking, bright, outgoing and popular. We all assumed, correctly as it turned out, that he was going places. Over the years I saw news reports that placed him at the Nixon White House, in the midst of various commercial and industrial enterprises, on a list of the 50 wealthiest men in the world and on another, more praise-worthy list of the most generous philanthropists in the world. I followed him (at a distance) as one follows a school friend who has ascended to heights one can barely imagine. And now I am following his son.
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June 20, 2011, 8:30 pm

Is Voting Speech?

At the first tenure meeting I ever attended, a candidate for promotion was approved by a single vote, and it turned out that one of my colleagues in the majority had gotten mixed up and believed he was voting for someone else. (It was a very large department.) The decision stood because, it was said, a vote is a vote and the motivations behind it, including having been motivated by a mistake, were not to the procedural point. Voting was, by definition, a one-time affair, and if misgivings or second thoughts or the fact of confusion were enough to warrant a revote (“I now know who she is; let’s do it again”), there is logically no place to stop and the department’s business could never get definitively done.

The counterargument was that a vote is an expression of opinion and my colleague was being deprived of the opportunity to express his; and, even worse, he was on record (if only on a secret ballot) as supporting an opinion he did not hold. The counterargument to the counterargument was that the point of the process was not to protect a faculty member’s freedom of expression, but to protect the process, to ensure that it was carried out in accordance with the institution’s rules and yielded a result that could be subsequently regarded as authoritative. An aye or a nay gets its meaning not from what was going on or not going on in a voter’s mind, but from the institutional significance attached to his act even before he performs it. (It’s like inadvertently raising your hand at an auction and buying the pink elephant.) Read more…


June 13, 2011, 8:30 pm

The Triumph of the Humanities

Our house in the western Catskills overlooks the Pepacton Reservoir, a 20-mile ribbon of water between Margaretville and Downsville. Maps on the Internet, depending on their scale and detail, will show you where the reservoir is in relation to nearby towns and roads. What they won’t show you, although every resident of the area knows about them, are the four towns — Arena, Shavertown, Union Grove and Pepacton — that were flooded in the middle ‘50s so that the reservoir could be constructed. (Today, after more than 50 years, resentment against New York City remains strong.)

The maps and pictures of the reservoir are determinedly linear; the eye follows the water in its journey down Route 30 toward the city. But for the the old-timers, and the new-timers who have been caught up in the romance of the lost towns, the eye stops and looks down to what are now the geological layers of civilizations, one on the surface and claiming a literal, no-nonsense empirical reality (“If you want get from Andes to Downsville, you can travel on either side of the reservoir”), and the other below the surface, where lie subterranean Brigadoons that emerge not every hundred years but whenever the reservoir gets so low that pieces of a drowned culture suddenly and unnervingly come into view. At those moments the eye simply cannot travel the straight line encouraged by visible coherences and road signs; the natural pull of forward progress is forestalled and one begins to ruminate on what lies beneath our every step as we raise our feet to take the next one.

There is now a (relatively) new discipline in which this breaking down of time into spatial units that are read vertically rather than horizontally is the obligatory gesture. It calls itself GeoHumanities and its project is nicely encapsulated in the title of one of the essays in a collection that officially announces the emergence of a field of study. The collection is called “GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place”; the essay (by Edward L. Ayers, an historian and president of the University of Richmond) is entitled “Mapping Time.”
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June 6, 2011, 8:30 pm

Faculty Governance in Idaho

If you’re a college or university teacher, whom do you work for?

If you were a jeweler or an accountant or a court clerk, and the same question were asked, the answer would follow from the hierarchy of an organization and/or the origin of your paycheck. You would work for the store manager, who would work for the owner. Or you would work for a company that would be answerable to shareholders and a board of directors. Or you would work for the district attorney and, finally, for the state.

The identification of who you work for would also be the identification of the person or body responsible for setting the conditions of your labor, assessing your performance and deciding on compensation and promotions. Someone who chafes under these conditions of employment has the option, at least theoretically, of going out on his or her own and starting a small business. Those who do this will often say, “I wanted to be my own boss.”

Academics want to have it both ways, and sometimes do. They want, that is, to work in an organization and enjoy its benefits and at the same time be their own bosses. The way they rationalize this condition of privilege (who wouldn’t want to enjoy it?) is to say that they work for no one or for everyone: they work for the common good. As Matthew Finkin and Robert Post explain it, in the course of summarizing the 1915 American Association of University Professors’ “Declaration of Principles On Academic Freedom,” “faculty are not ‘employees’ answerable to the will of their employers but instead ‘appointees’ responsible to the ‘wider public’ for the fulfillment of the social function of universities” (“For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom”).
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May 23, 2011, 9:00 pm

What’s Up With the Jews?

It’s been an interesting week or two for Jews. Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Beaver,” opens nationwide in theaters and Jews must decide whether to pay good money to see a movie starring someone whose father is a Holocaust denier, and who has himself vilified Jews in public. In Cannes, the Danish movie director Lars von Trier rambles on at a press conference about sympathizing with Hitler, being annoyed with Israel and admiring Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer. Next day he recants, but it’s too late; he’s declared persona non grata at the film festival.

Then there is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French economist and politician who was poised to become France’s first Jewish president, imprisoned at Rikers Island after being accused of forcing sex on a chambermaid at a New York hotel. (Strauss-Kahn has now moved to a very constrained “house arrest” while awaiting arraignment, if he can find a house.) Meanwhile, on May 11 this newspaper publishes the results of a Pew Forum study that shows 67 percent of Reform Jewish households in the United States making more than $75,000 a year; only 31 percent of all households hit the same mark.
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May 16, 2011, 8:30 pm

Sex, the Koch Brothers and Academic Freedom

More than a few of the respondents to my column about CUNY’s on-again-off-again-on-again awarding of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner say that while I may be correct about the “technical” definition of academic freedom, I miss the larger point. That’s because there isn’t one. A board of trustees with every right to make a decision made it in a way that (a) ran counter to its previous practice (b) permitted a single member (Jeffrey Wiesenfeld) to derail a process that had seemed to be on a familiar track and (c) put CUNY right in the middle of the briar patch called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maladroit, unfortunate and (as I said) dumb. But that’s it. It was just the board screwing up with the predictable public-relations disaster as the result. No one’s freedom was curtailed, no one’s speech was censored, no harm, except to the board’s reputation and by extension to CUNY’s, was done.
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May 8, 2011, 9:30 pm

The Kushner Flap: Much Ado About Nothing

On May 5, the historian Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University gave back an honorary degree she had received from John Jay College because the playwright Tony Kushner had been denied the same honor by the CUNY Board of Trustees.  At the urging of a trustee who objected to Kushner’s  views on Israel, the nomination, which had been forwarded by the faculty and administration of John Jay, was tabled.  (Kushner had been informed of the impending honor.)

Professor Schrecker explained in a letter to the board’s chairman, Benno Schmidt, that she “could not remain silent when the very institution that once recognized the value of academic freedom now demeans it.” That doesn’t sound right. Kushner is not an academic and so he has no academic freedom that can be demeaned. And his more general freedom — his freedom as an artist and a citizen — has not been infringed on by what the board did. He can still write  and speak and say pretty much what he wants. He just won’t be saying it at a CUNY graduation ceremony this spring.
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May 2, 2011, 8:30 pm

Ideas and Theory: The Political Difference

The last of the 200 comments to my previous column declaring the political impotence of the everything-is-socially-constructed thesis accuses me of assuming that “ideas have no consequences.” Nothing could be further from the truth. “Women have long been marginalized and suppressed by a dominant male culture” is an idea. “Gays have been denied the rights that are theirs as citizens” is an idea. Each of these ideas has been enormously consequential; and each has been the basis of concerted action that altered our political and cultural landscape.

“Everything is socially constructed” is not an idea; it is a proposition at a high, indeed abstract, level of articulation. It is, if you will, a theory, by which I mean a thesis that flies above particulars but tells you in advance of their appearance what the shape and meaning of particulars will necessarily be. “Truth is a matter of correspondence with the facts as they really are apart from any ideological lens or paradigm” is a theory.” “Truths are confirmed or disconfirmed by facts that only are facts within a paradigm” is an opposing theory. (It is a version of everything-is-socially-constructed.)

Notice that neither theory of truth addresses itself to particular facts; each is indifferent to particular facts and says only that whatever they are, they are facts and true by virtue either of correspondence with reality or coherence with a set of paradigm — specific propositions. With respect to particular facts, as you might encounter them in a political or economic or legal context, the theories have nothing more to say; if you want to know what to do — as opposed to knowing the general epistemological conditions within which you will be doing it — they are of no help.
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Inside Opinionator

July 12, 2011
Strange Waters

The Civil War on land pitted former West Point friends against one another. It was a much different matter at sea.

July 10, 2011
The U.S. Capitol at War

The Civil War turns the U.S. Capitol, still under construction, into a barracks.

More From Disunion »

July 12, 2011
Friends in Revolution

Facebook and Twitter have their place in social change, but real revolutions take place in the street.

July 7, 2011
On Gay Rights, Moving Real-Life Friends to Action

How one Web site capitalized on the bonds among friends to mobilize people in New York’s gay marriage campaign.

More From Fixes »

July 12, 2011
On Experts and Global Warming

We non-experts are in no position to argue against the consensus of expert scientific opinion.

July 9, 2011
Let Be: An Answer to Hamlet’s Question

The crisis of thought and action may never be resolved, but fear not.

More From The Stone »

July 11, 2011
Vocationalism, Academic Freedom and Tenure

A new book questions how necessary academic freedom is in the context of higher education today.

July 4, 2011
What Does the First Amendment Protect?

Two recent Supreme Court decisions and the protection of speech.

More From Stanley Fish »

July 10, 2011
The Old Internet Neighborhoods

The Internet forum, that great old standby of Web 1.0., has become an endangered species.

July 2, 2011
How Games Steer Us Through Life

A digital distraction keeps a child balanced between boredom and frustration — but it has its limits.

More From Virginia Heffernan »

July 8, 2011
I Owe William Jennings Bryan an Apology

A childhood prank and, decades later, a ‘Don Giovanni’ moment.

June 17, 2011
Waiting (and Waiting) in the Wings

On the life of understudies, the state of Broadway theater and ‘The Book of Mormon.’

More From Dick Cavett »

July 8, 2011
Just Sign Here

Michele Bachmann’s signing of a conservative “marriage vow” pledge in Iowa raised ire in the blogosphere.

July 1, 2011
Dead in the Water?

The bizarre controversy surrounding the flotilla to Gaza gets washed ashore in Greece.

More From The Thread »

July 7, 2011
Sex and the Supremes

A Supreme Court decision on the First Amendment reminds us that as a nation we look more askance at sex than at violence.

July 1, 2011
Conservative Cash Crop

Michele Bachmann likes to feed the Republican base. But rigid ideology meets mushy reality when it comes to the Bachmann family farm.

More From Timothy Egan »

July 6, 2011
After Tahrir, New Voices in a Global Fugue

In the work of some young composers, music from cultures long divided are sounding together for the first time.

June 22, 2011
Finding the Score Within

How Jimi Hendrix and Bela Bartok saved my life, and why I became a throat-singing composer.

More From The Score »

July 5, 2011
Banned From the Barn

Even without state gag laws on the books, farms are doing a pretty good job of shutting out reporters all on their own.

July 1, 2011
Make Food Choices Simple: Cook

The one place where dinner is most easily done right is in your own kitchen.

More From Mark Bittman »

July 3, 2011
‘Stars & Stripes’

An animated film celebrating Sousa and the Fourth.

June 18, 2011
‘You Might Remember This’

The artist’s third memory film in a series chronicling his sons’ growing up.

More From Jeff Scher »

July 2, 2011
This Summer, the Guilt Is Gratis

It’s that season again. Of the many telltale hallmarks of summer in New York City, perhaps the most unsung are the sidewalk volunteers.

May 4, 2011
Goodbye to All That

How can I leave the city I love?

More From Townies »

June 29, 2011
Common Sense and Sensibility

The Supreme Court’s decision distinguishing between child and adult suspects is common sense. So why was the court divided?

June 15, 2011
Activists by Invitation

If Congress really dislikes “judicial activism” it needs to do a better job of writing laws.

More From Linda Greenhouse »

June 23, 2011
Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Part Five)

An interview with a pioneer of computer science, some speculation regarding the early hackers, and the series concludes.

June 22, 2011
Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Part Four)

An interview with one of the pioneers of time-sharing systems, as the e-mail series continues.

More From Errol Morris »

June 23, 2011
Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Part Five)

An interview with a pioneer of computer science, some speculation regarding the early hackers, and the series concludes.

June 22, 2011
Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Part Four)

An interview with one of the pioneers of time-sharing systems, as the e-mail series continues.

More From Errol Morris »

Opinionator Highlights

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Friends in Revolution

Facebook and Twitter have their place in social change, but real revolutions take place in the street.

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On Experts and Global Warming

We non-experts are in no position to argue against the consensus of expert scientific opinion.

On Gay Rights, Moving Real-Life Friends to Action

How one Web site capitalized on the bonds among friends to mobilize people in New York’s gay marriage campaign.

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Arguing From the Facts

As a recent debate on the budget shows, inductive reasoning can take us only so far.

The Moral Logic of Survivor Guilt

The sense of guilt and betrayal surviving soldiers feel originates not just in what they’ve done, but in who they are.

Previous Series

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Line by Line

A series on the basics of drawing, presented by the artist and author James McMullan, beginning with line, perspective, proportion and structure.

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The Elements of Math

A series on math, from the basic to the baffling, by Steven Strogatz. Beginning with why numbers are helpful and finishing with the mysteries of infinity.

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Living Rooms

The past, present and future of domestic life, with contributions from artists, journalists, design experts and historians.

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Specimens

This series by Richard Conniff looks at how species discovery has transformed our lives.