Has Stanley Fish Lost His Mind?
Posted on February 16th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
In this blog, he appears to argue that academics who are tardy and/or ill-prepared for meetings are doing so in the name of free speech, and that they are therefore abusing free speech.
It would be hard to imagine another field of endeavor in which employees believe that being attentive to their employer’s goals and wishes is tantamount to a moral crime But this is what many (not all) academics believe, and if pressed they will support their belief by invoking a form of academic exceptionalism, the idea that while colleges and universities may bear some of the marks of places of employment — work-days, promotions, salaries, vacations, meetings, etc. — they are really places in which something much more rarified than a mere job goes on.
However one feels about the question, it would be nice if Fish provided a single example of an academic who feels that failing to fulfill professional responsibilities is an academic right….
7 Responses
2/16/2009 12:17 pm
Fish is confusing fact and fiction, and his model is best found in the case of Lester Antilles, in James Hynes excellent novel, The Lecturer’s Tale, which I mentioned on another post. P. 204:
“In a discipline where scholarly heft was defined by being more postcolonial than thou, Lester Antilles was the heftiest of the lot. As a graduate student at an Ivy League school he had announced to his dissertation committee that doctoral theses at major Western universities were a primary locus of the objectifying colonialist gaze on native subjects, and he refused on principle to participate in the marginalization of indigenous voices or to become complicit with the hegemonic discourse of Western postcolonial cultural imperialism. In practice, this meant that for six years he refused to take classes, attend seminars, or write a dissertation. As a result of this ideologically engaged nonparticipation, he was offered tenured positions even before he had his Ph.D., but by refusing to write a book or any articles on his topic — publishing with major university presses being even more complicit with imperialism than writing dissertations — he provoked a fierce bidding war. Columbia won by offering him an endowed chair and a full professorship, and on Morningside Heights he courageously continued his principled refusal to teach any classes, hold any office hours, publish any books, serve on any committees, or supervise any dissertations. For this demanding and theoretically sophisticated subaltern intervention in the dominant discourse, Antilles made well into the six figures, more money than the president of the United States.”
Amusing, yes, but fiction.
2/16/2009 1:39 pm
RT: That’s outstanding!
2/16/2009 2:08 pm
Yes, SE, as is the whole book. Our hero, the adjunct lecturer of the title, has magical powers that lead to various satisfying comeuppances for his Lester and some of his other distinguished colleagues.
2/16/2009 3:48 pm
I like The Lecturer’s Tale, too. But most people I know who come ill-prepared to committee meetings are just people who come ill-prepared. It’s as simple as that. It would be very hard to argue-except for the sake of humor-that these people really think they’re engaging in some kind of protest.
2/16/2009 4:17 pm
The Lecturer’s Tale also has a wonderful rewrite of the Victorian story, “Casting the Runes” by M. R. James (which I recommend), that gave me an all-too-academic pleasure when I read Hynes’s send-up of academia.
2/16/2009 4:38 pm
P.S. Fish gave a lecture on my campus a while back and I and three other colleagues sneaked out the back after a quarter hour, thinking, yes, he’d lost his mind. (Actually, it wouldn’t be quite right to call it a lecture. He encouraged questions and challenges from the audience and then lectured us in his responses. At least, that’s what he did in the first 15 minutes before we made our getaway.)
2/18/2009 1:57 pm
Ciekawa strona, dodalem ja do ulubionych, zapraszam do odwiedzenia mojej