// essays //
Winter 2006
Current Q&A: Stanley Fish
Eliav Bitan
Stanley Fish is a public intellectual, legal scholar, and literary theorist, known most widely for his scholarship of 17th century English poet John Milton. He has taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University, and both English and Law at Duke University. He was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Since June of 2005, Fish has held the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professorship of Humanities and Law at Florida International University.
Fish is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and has been published in Harper's, Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, and Columbia Law Review. He has published books on topics ranging from Milton's Paradise Lost to free speech and political correctness. A prolific writer, some of Fish's most important works include: Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost," (1967), Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980),There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too (1994), Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1999), The Trouble with Principle (1999), and How Milton Works (2001). Five books of criticism have been written about Fish's scholarship.
In his recent lecture at Columbia, "Politics and Academic Freedom," Fish discussed the differences between academic and political issues and argued for the freedom of professors to explore academic subjects, while denying any right for professors to present political views in the classroom.
Eliav Bitan: The Current frequently discusses issues of free speech. In your book There's No Such Thing as Free Speech you identify yourself as a skeptic about the notion of free speech. What does that label mean to you?
Stanley Fish: Do I? Well, I'll take your word for it. My skepticism with regard to free speech has to do with the claim some people make that free speech is a free-standing value. My argument is that it is not. And here's the way I often make that argument in class: I ask my students, "What is the First Amendment, freedom of expression, for?" And they usually give a set of standard examples which are quite historically accurate. Facilitate the search for truth, to defend dissenters, to produce an informed citizenry, to increase the free flow of ideas in a democratic society. There are other answers, but those are the main ones.
Then I say to the students that you have to realize that if you give any answer to the question "what is the First Amendment for?" then you're logically committed to censorship. Why? Because if you define it in terms of some goal that is not itself, but towards which it points, then you have to realize that there are some forms of speech that will be subversive to that goal, and therefore if you were to censor, or regulate, or even repress them, you would not be in violation of the First Amendment—you would be realizing it. My point is that the First Amendment is not a free-standing value. If it were, if in fact expression was being protected, without any care whatsoever for what was being expressed, then the First Amendment would have as its design the protection of noise. Why do you want to pledge yourself to that? So either it's the protection of noise or it's not a free-standing value.
EB: So by saying the First Amendment is not a free-standing value, you mean there's some speech that's protected and some that's not accepted?
SF: No. What I meant by saying it's not a free- standing value is that if you have an answer to the question "what is the First Amendment for," you've said that freedom of expression is in support of something; it's a value because of some effect in the world that you hope it will bring about.
EB: In the United States system, who decides what the First Amendment stands for?
SF: The Supreme Court. The First Amendment is only a legal document, so there are no first amendment issues that are not legal issues.
It's an administrative issue for universities when something has happened which leads them to think that there's a free speech issue involved. But that's almost never the case. For example, a lot of people thought free speech was the issue in Larry Summers being fired as president at Harvard. (They say he resigned, but no one believes that for half a second.) It wasn't. There were no free speech issues there, although a lot of people wanted to make it a free speech issue. Now, you would have a free speech issue in a public or private university that was not sectarian—that is religiously supported—if faculty members were told that certain ideas, or a certain set of material couldn't be taught because they were judged by somebody to be morally or ideologically inferior. That would be a free speech violation and it would involve the conditions of your employment. This is especially true at a public university where your employment can't be tied to your either having an ideology or rejecting an ideology. In a religious institution, this is not only allowed, but mandated! But most universities these days wouldn't do that.
Now, some people say they do that with intelligent design. You can't teach intelligent design. That's not a free speech judgment; it's a disciplinary judgment, a judgment that intelligent design is not an answer to any question currently being asked by biology. And it's biology we're teaching!
Intelligent design is a cultural phenomenon, and if you were teaching a course in, let's say, the relation between popular culture, religion, and political debates, you of course would want intelligent design along with Holocaust denial and various disputes about Mormonism and so forth and so on in that course. But it's not a free speech issue. The Holocaust deniers want to make it a free speech issue when they ask 'why aren't history departments hiring Holocaust deniers?' Holocaust denial is not in the discipline of history, a position recognized as a player in the game. Holocaust denial is the equivalent in physics of astrology. You're under no obligation to teach something the discipline doesn't recognize as a serious contender. Again, it's not a free speech issue.
EB: Would you say that it is an academic freedom issue?
SF: No. Not at all.
EB: Is there an academic freedom issue involved in the issue of stem cell research, where the government makes certain regulations on the research academics are conducting?
SF: Well if the government makes a regulation, if the government has determined that a form of research is illegal, then no university, professor, or group should be engaging in it, period. That's not to say the government was wise in making this regulation. But you don't do things that are currently illegal because you disagree with the policy that made it so.
EB: How would you apply the standard of free speech to the Middle East Studies controversy at Columbia, where students claimed they were being denied free expression because professors forced opinions on them in the classroom?
SF: Well, there are two different issues here: are professors either explicitly or implicitly pressuring students to come down on one side or the other of a political question? If they're doing that, then they're not doing their job. They're doing another job—they're being politicians or activists. That's not what we're paid to do.
As for students, students don't have any right to express their views in class. Some forms of pedagogy find it useful, pedagogically useful, to allow students to express their views in class, to allow students some degree of latitude to express their views, but there's no student right for expression. An instructor can always say, and should not in any way be disciplined or punished for saying, 'well that's not a question I want to raise in this course.' That question may be an interesting one, and it may be something we can talk about over a beer, but it's not a question I want raised in this course at this time.
EB: So you're suggesting that there's an inherent difference between an academic issue and a political issue?
SF: Absolutely!
EB: However, students and administrators frequently encounter professors who don't make that distinction--
SF: That's not right.
EB: So what should they do?
SF: They [professors] should be disciplined. In some universities there are procedures, including the possibility of students registering complaints and then there being an investigation. Usually that's a bad road to go down because no one is happy at the end. But in general I think that if an administration discovers that in some way professors are proselytizing rather than instructing, then that teacher should be alerted to his or her responsibilities. And, I think, if it were my administration, that professor should be given an opportunity to change his or her way of teaching. And then, if it came forth that change hadn't occurred, I think that disciplinary measures are in order, all the way up to, in some cases, dismissal.
EB: How should an administrator discern between a professor's speech being political or academic?
SF: That's easy!
EB: But I'm especially thinking of the history of the Middle East or the economics of war in Iraq, where it seems that there are obvious political implications.
SF: Any subject can be made academic!
It's very simple to academicize the history of the Middle East—a lot of people do it. There are a lot of books that say, here are the arguments, here are the alternative histories that people give, here are the justifications.
Academicizing is easy. You remove the subject matter from its real world urgency and you make it into an intellectual question. That is, you ask of it academic questions, not political questions. What're the structure of the arguments on either side? How did it come about that these seem to be the alternative possibilities at that moment? Without saying this is the possibility we should choose and this is the one we should reject. There's nothing hard about it!
EB: Teachers in many disciplines suggest no difference between political and academic--
SF: They're wrong.
EB: What do you think is the best means for students to take action when they feel a teacher is politicizing an academic issue?
SF: I'm not sure. I haven't been a student for a long time, and when I was a student this was never a question. It never happens in my class. Because the way I set the class up, from the very beginning, is to introduce to students, "here's what we're going to be studying—objective study." I'm not looking for opinions, I'm not looking for agendas and so forth, and so it never arises. When it does arise it seems to me it's probably arisen in the classroom of someone who hasn't got a firm grasp on the distinction that I'm trying to make.
EB: You said that professors should focus on academic questions about the structure and history of arguments, and present various histories of different interpretations of facts. How would you apply this system of teaching to a concept like intelligent design when people would say they're just trying to get people to teach the controversy?
SF: Well that's a bad argument. Teaching the controversy is just like balance. Or what one tends to hear sometimes called "academic diversity." When you teach academic controversies you teach those approaches and methods that are in fact in the game. Intelligent design is not in the game.
EB: Who decides what gets to be in the game?
SF: The discipline. In other words, each discipline has its own history, protocols, landmark accomplishments and basic or primary questions. Each discipline in effect says, although no one in particular says, what questions are and are not relevant within the field. In the field of biology the question of origins of the effects that are being studied is not in question. Biology studies material operations; it doesn't inquire into origins. Of course inquiry into ultimate origins is an issue going on in other disciplines. So you can bring intelligent design into a cultural studies program, where its being studied as a cultural phenomenon—where did it come from, what relationship does it have to creationism, when did these debates about Darwin start, (and that would be immediately after the publication of The Origin of Species) and so forth. In other words, you could academicize intelligent design but you wouldn't be doing the biology of it, because, and let me make this point as clearly as I can: intelligent design is not the answer to any question asked in biology.
EB: There are situations in America right now where entire academic departments have made a decision about what questions should be asked.
SF: That's right, and that's usually the case.
EB: Sometimes in the case of a Middle Eastern studies department or a history department, because of the biases of those professors, the decision about what questions should be asked excludes arguments some people feel should be part of the debate.
SF: There shouldn't be any debate of that order. There shouldn't be any debate, which has as its outcome a decision about who is right and who is wrong in these disputes. That's not the business of an academic department. The business of an academic department is to study the disputes or arguments or debates, not to resolve them. In any department where in fact a political or partisan point of view has become an orthodoxy, that's a department which is no longer doing academic work and that's wrong.
EB: Let's talk about specific instances of speech on our campus. Can you speak to whether it was responsible of the Columbia Republicans to invite the Minutemen to campus?
SF: Sure. The Minutemen, or anyone else, can be invited to campus. There are no restrictions on who can be invited to campus. Why should there be?
EB: Would you extend that statement? Would you say they same thing about an invitation to president of Iran?
SF: Absolutely.
EB: If students at a university do not believe that person should be coming to speak, whose decision is it? Is it the students' or administration's?
SF: Most of these speakers are invited by students. Student fees pay for most of these speakers. This is because academic speakers don't get any money, and are selected by departments. So, whenever you have controversial speakers, they're being invited by some students, isn't that true?
EB: Here at Columbia, the administration—or at least Dean Lisa Anderson— invited President Ahmenidajad, there was student protest, and they retracted the invitation.
SF: Well the administration shouldn't have retracted the invitation. The question of whether or not they should have made the invitation is separate one. That's a question of judgment. But once they put the invitation out, they shouldn't have retracted it.
EB: What factors should they use to judge in making the decision to issue an invitation?
SF: There is no set of factors. There might be any number of reasons. There are innumerable factors; there is no particular closed set of factors.
EB: And there is no ideology that you would consider so wrong as to bar it from being expressed on a private campus?
SF: In an extracurricular context, no. Remember what extracurricular means, is "outside the curriculum." It's part of what I call show business. It's just a show, it's theater. So you decide what kind of theater you wanna produce.
Fish is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and has been published in Harper's, Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, and Columbia Law Review. He has published books on topics ranging from Milton's Paradise Lost to free speech and political correctness. A prolific writer, some of Fish's most important works include: Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost," (1967), Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980),There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too (1994), Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1999), The Trouble with Principle (1999), and How Milton Works (2001). Five books of criticism have been written about Fish's scholarship.
In his recent lecture at Columbia, "Politics and Academic Freedom," Fish discussed the differences between academic and political issues and argued for the freedom of professors to explore academic subjects, while denying any right for professors to present political views in the classroom.
Eliav Bitan: The Current frequently discusses issues of free speech. In your book There's No Such Thing as Free Speech you identify yourself as a skeptic about the notion of free speech. What does that label mean to you?
Stanley Fish: Do I? Well, I'll take your word for it. My skepticism with regard to free speech has to do with the claim some people make that free speech is a free-standing value. My argument is that it is not. And here's the way I often make that argument in class: I ask my students, "What is the First Amendment, freedom of expression, for?" And they usually give a set of standard examples which are quite historically accurate. Facilitate the search for truth, to defend dissenters, to produce an informed citizenry, to increase the free flow of ideas in a democratic society. There are other answers, but those are the main ones.
Then I say to the students that you have to realize that if you give any answer to the question "what is the First Amendment for?" then you're logically committed to censorship. Why? Because if you define it in terms of some goal that is not itself, but towards which it points, then you have to realize that there are some forms of speech that will be subversive to that goal, and therefore if you were to censor, or regulate, or even repress them, you would not be in violation of the First Amendment—you would be realizing it. My point is that the First Amendment is not a free-standing value. If it were, if in fact expression was being protected, without any care whatsoever for what was being expressed, then the First Amendment would have as its design the protection of noise. Why do you want to pledge yourself to that? So either it's the protection of noise or it's not a free-standing value.
EB: So by saying the First Amendment is not a free-standing value, you mean there's some speech that's protected and some that's not accepted?
SF: No. What I meant by saying it's not a free- standing value is that if you have an answer to the question "what is the First Amendment for," you've said that freedom of expression is in support of something; it's a value because of some effect in the world that you hope it will bring about.
EB: In the United States system, who decides what the First Amendment stands for?
SF: The Supreme Court. The First Amendment is only a legal document, so there are no first amendment issues that are not legal issues.
It's an administrative issue for universities when something has happened which leads them to think that there's a free speech issue involved. But that's almost never the case. For example, a lot of people thought free speech was the issue in Larry Summers being fired as president at Harvard. (They say he resigned, but no one believes that for half a second.) It wasn't. There were no free speech issues there, although a lot of people wanted to make it a free speech issue. Now, you would have a free speech issue in a public or private university that was not sectarian—that is religiously supported—if faculty members were told that certain ideas, or a certain set of material couldn't be taught because they were judged by somebody to be morally or ideologically inferior. That would be a free speech violation and it would involve the conditions of your employment. This is especially true at a public university where your employment can't be tied to your either having an ideology or rejecting an ideology. In a religious institution, this is not only allowed, but mandated! But most universities these days wouldn't do that.
Now, some people say they do that with intelligent design. You can't teach intelligent design. That's not a free speech judgment; it's a disciplinary judgment, a judgment that intelligent design is not an answer to any question currently being asked by biology. And it's biology we're teaching!
Intelligent design is a cultural phenomenon, and if you were teaching a course in, let's say, the relation between popular culture, religion, and political debates, you of course would want intelligent design along with Holocaust denial and various disputes about Mormonism and so forth and so on in that course. But it's not a free speech issue. The Holocaust deniers want to make it a free speech issue when they ask 'why aren't history departments hiring Holocaust deniers?' Holocaust denial is not in the discipline of history, a position recognized as a player in the game. Holocaust denial is the equivalent in physics of astrology. You're under no obligation to teach something the discipline doesn't recognize as a serious contender. Again, it's not a free speech issue.
EB: Would you say that it is an academic freedom issue?
SF: No. Not at all.
EB: Is there an academic freedom issue involved in the issue of stem cell research, where the government makes certain regulations on the research academics are conducting?
SF: Well if the government makes a regulation, if the government has determined that a form of research is illegal, then no university, professor, or group should be engaging in it, period. That's not to say the government was wise in making this regulation. But you don't do things that are currently illegal because you disagree with the policy that made it so.
EB: How would you apply the standard of free speech to the Middle East Studies controversy at Columbia, where students claimed they were being denied free expression because professors forced opinions on them in the classroom?
SF: Well, there are two different issues here: are professors either explicitly or implicitly pressuring students to come down on one side or the other of a political question? If they're doing that, then they're not doing their job. They're doing another job—they're being politicians or activists. That's not what we're paid to do.
As for students, students don't have any right to express their views in class. Some forms of pedagogy find it useful, pedagogically useful, to allow students to express their views in class, to allow students some degree of latitude to express their views, but there's no student right for expression. An instructor can always say, and should not in any way be disciplined or punished for saying, 'well that's not a question I want to raise in this course.' That question may be an interesting one, and it may be something we can talk about over a beer, but it's not a question I want raised in this course at this time.
EB: So you're suggesting that there's an inherent difference between an academic issue and a political issue?
SF: Absolutely!
EB: However, students and administrators frequently encounter professors who don't make that distinction--
SF: That's not right.
EB: So what should they do?
SF: They [professors] should be disciplined. In some universities there are procedures, including the possibility of students registering complaints and then there being an investigation. Usually that's a bad road to go down because no one is happy at the end. But in general I think that if an administration discovers that in some way professors are proselytizing rather than instructing, then that teacher should be alerted to his or her responsibilities. And, I think, if it were my administration, that professor should be given an opportunity to change his or her way of teaching. And then, if it came forth that change hadn't occurred, I think that disciplinary measures are in order, all the way up to, in some cases, dismissal.
EB: How should an administrator discern between a professor's speech being political or academic?
SF: That's easy!
EB: But I'm especially thinking of the history of the Middle East or the economics of war in Iraq, where it seems that there are obvious political implications.
SF: Any subject can be made academic!
It's very simple to academicize the history of the Middle East—a lot of people do it. There are a lot of books that say, here are the arguments, here are the alternative histories that people give, here are the justifications.
Academicizing is easy. You remove the subject matter from its real world urgency and you make it into an intellectual question. That is, you ask of it academic questions, not political questions. What're the structure of the arguments on either side? How did it come about that these seem to be the alternative possibilities at that moment? Without saying this is the possibility we should choose and this is the one we should reject. There's nothing hard about it!
EB: Teachers in many disciplines suggest no difference between political and academic--
SF: They're wrong.
EB: What do you think is the best means for students to take action when they feel a teacher is politicizing an academic issue?
SF: I'm not sure. I haven't been a student for a long time, and when I was a student this was never a question. It never happens in my class. Because the way I set the class up, from the very beginning, is to introduce to students, "here's what we're going to be studying—objective study." I'm not looking for opinions, I'm not looking for agendas and so forth, and so it never arises. When it does arise it seems to me it's probably arisen in the classroom of someone who hasn't got a firm grasp on the distinction that I'm trying to make.
EB: You said that professors should focus on academic questions about the structure and history of arguments, and present various histories of different interpretations of facts. How would you apply this system of teaching to a concept like intelligent design when people would say they're just trying to get people to teach the controversy?
SF: Well that's a bad argument. Teaching the controversy is just like balance. Or what one tends to hear sometimes called "academic diversity." When you teach academic controversies you teach those approaches and methods that are in fact in the game. Intelligent design is not in the game.
EB: Who decides what gets to be in the game?
SF: The discipline. In other words, each discipline has its own history, protocols, landmark accomplishments and basic or primary questions. Each discipline in effect says, although no one in particular says, what questions are and are not relevant within the field. In the field of biology the question of origins of the effects that are being studied is not in question. Biology studies material operations; it doesn't inquire into origins. Of course inquiry into ultimate origins is an issue going on in other disciplines. So you can bring intelligent design into a cultural studies program, where its being studied as a cultural phenomenon—where did it come from, what relationship does it have to creationism, when did these debates about Darwin start, (and that would be immediately after the publication of The Origin of Species) and so forth. In other words, you could academicize intelligent design but you wouldn't be doing the biology of it, because, and let me make this point as clearly as I can: intelligent design is not the answer to any question asked in biology.
EB: There are situations in America right now where entire academic departments have made a decision about what questions should be asked.
SF: That's right, and that's usually the case.
EB: Sometimes in the case of a Middle Eastern studies department or a history department, because of the biases of those professors, the decision about what questions should be asked excludes arguments some people feel should be part of the debate.
SF: There shouldn't be any debate of that order. There shouldn't be any debate, which has as its outcome a decision about who is right and who is wrong in these disputes. That's not the business of an academic department. The business of an academic department is to study the disputes or arguments or debates, not to resolve them. In any department where in fact a political or partisan point of view has become an orthodoxy, that's a department which is no longer doing academic work and that's wrong.
EB: Let's talk about specific instances of speech on our campus. Can you speak to whether it was responsible of the Columbia Republicans to invite the Minutemen to campus?
SF: Sure. The Minutemen, or anyone else, can be invited to campus. There are no restrictions on who can be invited to campus. Why should there be?
EB: Would you extend that statement? Would you say they same thing about an invitation to president of Iran?
SF: Absolutely.
EB: If students at a university do not believe that person should be coming to speak, whose decision is it? Is it the students' or administration's?
SF: Most of these speakers are invited by students. Student fees pay for most of these speakers. This is because academic speakers don't get any money, and are selected by departments. So, whenever you have controversial speakers, they're being invited by some students, isn't that true?
EB: Here at Columbia, the administration—or at least Dean Lisa Anderson— invited President Ahmenidajad, there was student protest, and they retracted the invitation.
SF: Well the administration shouldn't have retracted the invitation. The question of whether or not they should have made the invitation is separate one. That's a question of judgment. But once they put the invitation out, they shouldn't have retracted it.
EB: What factors should they use to judge in making the decision to issue an invitation?
SF: There is no set of factors. There might be any number of reasons. There are innumerable factors; there is no particular closed set of factors.
EB: And there is no ideology that you would consider so wrong as to bar it from being expressed on a private campus?
SF: In an extracurricular context, no. Remember what extracurricular means, is "outside the curriculum." It's part of what I call show business. It's just a show, it's theater. So you decide what kind of theater you wanna produce.