The Audacity of Fish

As many have seen, for some insane reason the Chronicle of Higher Education made the decision to have a conversation with Stanley Fish about about virtue mongering. In fact, the title of the article is "The Unbearable Virtue Mongering of Academics." It's almost as if Fish knows how unbearable he is and is punishing the rest of us bleeding-heart commies by not shutting the hell up.

Preparing to read anything involving Fish is similar to prepping oneself for dental work. You know it's going to be exhausting and painful--why are we doing this? Why is The Chronicle still fawning after Fish like a naive school girl? I can only guess because he's bored and egotistical enough to think anyone is still granting him credence--and they have space to fill. Len Gutkin, the author of this eye-roll inducing piece masquerading as journalism, is quick to fawn over him. What a joke. 

Fish has, unsurprisingly, continued with his opinion that the university should--in no way, shape, or form--take a political stance. He uses examples such as a request for him to speak being rescinded and the Provost at IUB's rebuke of their racist, sexist, business professor as examples of universities politicizing. He goes on to defend the idea that a Holocaust denier should be able to teach (even History, if he could keep his beliefs to himself) and remain in the university.

The problem with all of this is not just Fish, or The Chronicle. The problem is the illusion that one can live in a world where things like academia and politics can be mutually exclusive. A friend was telling me about a common prompt in basic economics courses--"why are diamonds more valuable than water?" I said that it was unethical to pose such a question, one is a stone that no one has to have, the other is a commodity that is necessary for the survival of every human being on the planet. I was told I was misunderstanding and trying to think too deeply...this is just about understanding scarcity. My response was that his response captured exactly what is wrong with society, with academia as a whole. We have people who believe that you can divorce morality from these abstract theoretical problems. They're focusing on scarcity, not what happens to the people who can't afford water.

Fish is wrong and will always be wrong because his entire premise rests on the idea that institutional (or instructional) neutrality is ever possible. It isn't. When we try to divorce from the moral, the ethical, the political, we instead advocate for the other side.