Charming and pugnacious, the literary critic and legal theorist Stanley Fish, at 81, remains one of the besieged humanities’ most prominent voices. His new book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump, out last month from Simon & Schuster, brings his combination of theory and polemic to a host of topical controversies. Probably no one will agree with all of it, but, as ever with Fish, it’s impossible to come away from his arguments without feeling one’s own ideas become sharper.
Fish’s career, from Miltonist to university super-administrator to best-selling intellectual pundit, is difficult to imagine now, when the prestige of the humanities has plummeted, along with the funding. From the present vantage, the influence of figures like Fish — or Judith Butler, or Henry Louis Gates Jr., or any number of other scholars with primary appointments in departments of literary study — might seem idiosyncratic.
“Programs that I grew up with and assumed would always be a part of the educational landscape have disappeared,” Fish told me. “That can’t be a good thing if you are interested at all in subjects like literature, history, philosophy.”
In 1959, when Fish was finishing college, he faced a choice between graduate school in English and law school. He chose English, in part because Yale offered him a free ride. I asked whether he’d make the same decision today. “That wouldn’t be a choice at all,” he said. “I would go for law.”
Fish spoke with The Chronicle Review about academic culture, free speech, and cars.
In a recent editorial for The Wall Street Journal you wrote about being disinvited from a talk at Seton Hall. What happened?
I got a call from a faculty member who is also an administrator at Seton Hall, who told me that they’re about to install a new president at the university and as part of the celebration they’re going to have a lecture series about matters of importance to campus life. Would I give the first of the lectures? I said sure, but it would depend on the date. He said he’d call me back, which he did a couple of weeks later — not to tell me a day, but that the invitation was being withdrawn.
Of course I asked why. He said that a committee, which hadn’t met in person but had communicated by email, had decided that I was not who they wanted the audience at Seton Hall to hear.
Did they say which ideas they objected to?
I often say social justice is a good thing, but it’s not a good academic thing. Those are the kinds of views, I believe, that were troublesome for members of that committee.
Let’s talk about your views on academe and social justice. One of the topics you address in The First is university disinvestment in fossil fuels, a step that you object to.
My position has become a minority one; perhaps it was always a minority one. Both students and some faculty feel more and more that colleges and universities should stand for values and policies that are thought to be progressive, rather than sitting on the political sideline. That’s a prevailing sentiment, and it’s one I don’t share.
Once you go in that direction, for example by declining to invest in fossil-fuel stock, you’ve transformed yourself from an educational institution into a political institution. Once you do that, there’s, in effect, no place to stop — the university becomes an extension of partisan politics, just another place where partisan politics occurs.
Are there exceptions? For instance, South African apartheid in the ’80s?
Let’s take apartheid. Some universities during the period before Mandela was released from prison declared themselves unwilling to invest in any stock that was associated with South Africa. To me, that’s exactly the same as the demand these days that a university divest itself of stocks associated with the state of Israel. They’re both efforts to put the university on record in support of some political position. I think it’s wrong in the case of Israel, and it was wrong during the period of apartheid.
Is it different if it’s domestic? Let’s imagine a university ceasing its catering relationship with a company whose ownership was known to have hateful views.
My answer would be the same. Universities that purchase from vendors should attempt, as would any other purchasers, to secure quality goods at a fair price. That is the obligation of the university when it acts as a consumer.
You’re skeptical in the book of “free speech” as a principle. You say that free speech is always a political question, but one in which politics are accomplished by successfully wielding the rhetoric of principle. Is that a fair summary?
That’s a fair summary.
So how do you square this suspicion of principle with what seems to be your rather stringent reliance on the principle of academic autonomy when describing how the university should act?
I’ve always been committed to what is called the “distinctiveness of tasks.” That’s a phrase I borrowed from a law professor at Toronto, Ernest Weinrib. By the distinctiveness of tasks he means you have to determine what a task or job is before you can consider whether or not a particular form or activity belongs to that task or job.
There are certain features that mark an academic space as an academic space, as opposed to a space where things are bought and sold, or where policies are debated, or where votes are taken. I take my cue first from Aristotle in the 10th book of his Ethics, where he makes a distinction between the contemplative life and the active life. The active life leads to going out and attempting to produce results that will alter the condition of your society. Academic life stops short of the waters of politics or of direct action in the world.
When I complain about the introduction of political stances or considerations in the academy, what I’m complaining about is the failure to recognize and be faithful to the distinctiveness of the academic task. I don’t think that is necessarily in conflict with what I say about principles. I’m just making what might be thought to be a descriptive and sociological point, rather than a deep philosophical point. This is a university space; this is what is done in universities.
For how much of the university’s history has it satisfied these criteria?
I can trace the lineage of my view of the academy from Aristotle, then skipping to Immanuel Kant in two essays — “What Is Enlightenment?” and “The Contest of Faculties” — then to Cardinal John Henry Newman, and then to the British political theorist Michael Oakeshott. In other words, there’s a long tradition. Nevertheless, as your question suggests, that hasn’t always been the way that universities and colleges have operated.
There have always been constituencies that have tried to gain control of universities in order to make them reflect their priorities. There’s a long history of such efforts and an equally long history of attempts to turn those efforts away. That’s why the American Association of University Professors was formed, to come up with a set of standards that would reject interference from the outside.
Has that been always successful? Obviously not. It’s always a battle, never completely won, to keep the academic life academic.
You’re quite skeptical of the current wave of student activists. How would you respond to somebody like the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, who says that the specter of student militancy is a mirage, a kind of ideological hallucination trumped up by right-wing media?
Right, molehills made into mountains by the right. I don’t think that’s true. First of all, I was disinvited by Seton Hall, which shows you that there is a set of attitudes which led a committee to decide that they couldn’t hear certain ideas. There are enough incidents reported, and enough pledges to carry out the project of teaching for social justice, that I can’t quite buy that minimalizing view of the matter. I don’t think we’re all just making this up out of whole cloth.
Senior administrators are entirely inept at dealing with these issues, because they don’t understand them at all.
What do they not understand?
Did you see what happened at the University of Indiana at Bloomington? [Eric B. Rasmusen, a professor in the business school, wrote public tweets widely felt to be racist, sexist, and homophobic; the provost, Lauren Robel, issued a statement explaining that while Rasmusen’s speech was protected, she found it deeply objectionable.] I read the account in Inside Higher Ed of this event, and I literally picked up the phone and called my publisher, got the assistant to my editor, the poor guy — I said, “Look, I’m going to dictate an op-ed to you.” And I did it right off the top of my head, without even rereading the piece.
Here’s what I said: Robel did what I describe as the usual academic administrator two-step when faced with a faculty member who has said controversial things. First, she said that since Indiana is a public institution, it must abide by First Amendment rules. But she also managed to say, “as vile and stupid as they are” [referring to Rasmusen’s views]. That was wrong. Do you understand why?
Because you believe that university administrations should refrain from offering an opinion on the value of any given speech.
Because to do so is to position the university relative to a political question. What this particular provost is doing is displaying her virtue bona fides. She’s saying, “I’m the right kind of person. I want to let you know that although I am compelled by the First Amendment not to dismiss him, I certainly want to join in the universal condemnation of him.”
My point is a simple one. You don’t first announce that you are protecting the rights of your faculty and then in the next breath condemn what your faculty has just said.
Is this a completely inflexible principle, or are there any exceptions? There was a well-known Harvard psychologist from several years ago who had a sideline in extraterrestrials. I could imagine Harvard thinking that they should distance themselves from his belief in aliens. Or another more pressing example: What about an anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist who is also a tenured epidemiologist?
Let me go with another example that is more on point, because it’s more charged. At Northwestern there’s a person, whose name escapes me, who was an active and well-published Holocaust denier. He was also a professor of electrical engineering. A group of faculty members tried to move the administration to discipline or rebuke him in some way. The president of the university, a fellow I used to know named Henry Bienen, rebuked the faculty for using a university server to advance a political agenda, and pointed out that there was no evidence whatsoever that this professor’s views corrupted his teaching.
But what if the Holocaust denier were also a historian of 20th-century Europe? And what if he didn’t deny the Holocaust in his courses, but he did on television, or on YouTube? Let’s say at a private university, to remove First Amendment protections.
There was a guy I wrote about many years ago, a paleontologist who was also a Young-Earth creationist. He believed that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, and that the fossil record was God’s way of tempting us to impious conclusions. He was questioned about this. He said, “Look, when I’m in class I’m teaching according to my discipline, even though what my discipline teaches is false.” I see nothing wrong with that. If he is able to act responsibly in his classes, teaching materials the basic assumptions of which he denies, well, that’s quite a remarkable achievement. We should not penalize him for it!
So if, in fact, there’s someone who believes that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or something happened but it’s become a device that Jews use to raise funds and shame the world into giving them a country — if he believes something like that, but when teaching modern-European history teaches the standard account, then he’s fine. He’s fine. Now, of course, there’s the question of whether it’s known that he’s a Holocaust denier.
In my hypothetical, it would be known to the students but not taught to them in class.
If it’s known to the students but not taught to them in class, then I would insist on the distinction. If you are doing the academic job, then what you say in extramural contexts should not affect your professional status.
Would it be fair to say that you’re talking about not just the academy but the expressive rights of workers in any workplace, the academic included but by no means uniquely?
Well, any workplace that’s a public workplace. That gets us to Colin Kaepernick, where a private association is either curtailing the rights of its employees or punishing them for what they say. They’re perfectly within their rights to do so.
I understand the public/private distinction as it pertains to the First Amendment. But I understood you to be arguing that, in the case of universities, the norms you’re endorsing are good whether the university is public or private.
Yes, that’s right. I think whether it’s a public university or a private university, it’s engaged in what I call, not dismissively, the academic game. And therefore, whether it’s a public or private university, someone who’s introducing the goals or reward system of another game is making a very large category mistake.
That’s why I wanted my Holocaust-denying historian to be at a private university. I wanted to give him every chance to be fireable.
He couldn’t be fireable at a public university, for the reasons that we’ve already discussed. But Henry Bienen could have acted against his Holocaust-denying faculty member at Northwestern, which is a private university. But if he had done so, he would have violated not a First Amendment stricture but a stricture about the life of the mind, about what we do at colleges and universities.
So the principle really admits of no exception except for pedagogical sins?
That’s right. But pedagogical sins are not a small category. They can involve a great many things. They can involve not only being ill prepared, not showing up, not turning back assignments with comments, berating and harassing your students, et cetera.
The happiest day of my deanship, though it came too late to be of much use, was when my chief accountant told me — I wish he had told me on my first day in the office — that I had the right to dock salaries. I immediately exercised it in the case of a person who was acting in egregious ways — not coming to his classes, sending his teaching assistant to do the teaching, and things like that. But without a power like the one I learned that I had, I would have been helpless. I would have had to refer the matter to a university committee. And you know what happens when something is referred to a committee.
Switching gears somewhat — you wrote a famous essay in the early ’90s about the Volvo as the definitive car of academic life. What’s the definitive vehicle now?
Subaru seems to breathe the same kind of virtue that academics are after. Academics want material things, but they want to feel good about their having them. So they have to demonstrate that buying this extremely expensive Volvo is a good thing. About 10 years ago, the answer I would have given is the Prius.
That’s what I thought you were gonna say.
Ten years or 20 years ago, people were buying Priuses in the same spirit in which they gave up smoking. In other words, an act of virtue. I’m not gonna buy that souped-up XK8 Jaguar (a great car by the way). I’m gonna buy myself a Prius and receive many bonus points in the good book of life. You can count on academics to be playing several games at the same time. Even though the objects with which they play those games change.
So what are you driving now?
That’s a fraught question. My principal car had been, until six months ago, a Mercedes E400 coupe, which is a great car. But in May, on my way to play basketball, I approached a green light, took the turn — I don’t remember, because I was in a horrible automobile accident.
And so that car has disappeared. Right now I’m driving a 2004 silver Thunderbird. Remember they made that retro Thunderbird in 2002, in a few colors — banana yellow, black, silver, and white? I got myself a silver one of those. It’s an interesting car. It’s really both a Lincoln and a Jaguar. Most of the component body parts are from the Lincoln, but they used a Jaguar engine that Ford put into the Lincoln, during the years that Ford owned Jaguar.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
