fish this is part of an ongoing series of conversations that we have been

having here at Amherst College for the last couple of years or so maybe it's a

little longer than that ever since a dramatic presidential

election woke us up to divided country and to a divide self and to the fact

that many of us we're deaf in regards to what was happening if not in other parts

of the country certainly in other parts of the world there was an invitation by

a series of alums to engage in conversations within the college and the

college communities that is the five colleges in other a undergraduate and

graduate students the faculty in the administration and essentially with the

community at large with a larger population on the various and opposing

sides of the divide inviting us to be able to listen to those that don't have

or share our ideas and instead of reducing them to stereotypes or ignoring

them because they they speak in ways that we do not do the opposite and bring

them in to that kind of dialogue we have had a number of very distinguished

guests throughout this two three years from Martha Nussbaum to Bill Kristol to

to Bret Stevens to a variety of thinkers activists a scholars that

continue to this day I want to thank or my behalf and on

behalf of the college the 36 members of the 50th reunion of the class of 1970

I think I got that right for their support particularly to two of

them that initiated this idea of listening to

the other half I want to tell you that the format of today's event is a

free-flowing conversation based on recent book that Stanley Fish has

literally just published I will say just a few things about him and about the

book in a second but before I do that I want to thank the

folks at Amherst Books that they graciously agreed to bring copies of the

book for you to hopefully buy and have a Professor Fish sign and to the folks of

Communication and to publicity and marketing Davis in particular for all

the good work that they put in order for this to be known by the various

constituencies of our community even before the event starts Stanley Fish is

controversial a figure who wears many hats he is a legal scholar he is a

literary critic a scholar of Milton who within the university has played a

variety of roles he was for a number of years at the University of California at

Berkeley he was also a at Johns Hopkins he is distinguished professor at

Florida International University right now a named chair a distinguished

professor and he is named chaired visiting scholar at Yeshiva University

in New York this semester he has also been a columnist for The New York Times

for more than a decade

18 years is sometimes writing on a weekly basis in

others in a less pressured way it is important to remember that

he within the university has played a variety of roles because I think that's

going to come up he has not only been a student because in order to get work to

where he is you have to have gone through being a student a teacher that

is a professor but he has also been an administrator a at the University of

Illinois, Chicago a Dean of Arts and Sciences which will probably

come up in several a moment during the our conversation in his critique of the

role not only professors and members of campus communities

do but also in responses that we get from the administration I generally

believe that a the back of a book the blurbs as we call it in publishing is

really publishing mashmallow you get friends of yours to say nice things

about you but in this book The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech,

Religious Speech, Fake News, Post Truth and Donald Trump The most recent by

Professor Fish one of more than a dozen there is a blurb that comes from

the New Republic that I thought it would be a good idea to start with it says the

following a scholar thrillingly authoritative authoritative wholly

convinced giddy with aptitude Fish isn't only one fish Fish is in fact a whole

school of fish Fish the lawyer and Dean Fish the columnist and cultural critic

Fish of the right and Fish of the left Fish the philosopher and polemicist and

funded Fish has written on virtually every vital cultural issue you are not

obliged to agree with him and you are not obliged to like him but if you care

about the enlarging necessity of contest in cultural discourse then you are

obliged to read him if I want to start Stanley... Let me

just rest in that for a moment. You don't get that every day. That school of fish sounded like dr. Seuss

talking about it talking about professor that they did the public intellectual I

want to start way being you being this public intellectual but also a

positioned in the Academy as you are with a recent op-ed piece that you

published in The Wall Street Journal maybe not month ago two weeks ago in

which you talk about being invited and then disinvited from Seton Hall and you

say that you were that you were not censored in the gist of it him we have

invited you and not yet this invited you here so I'd like to start with this

sense of a what does it mean to be disinvited and why isn't that censorship

well I was disinvited I was called by a faculty member also an administrator who

told me that the Seton Hall University was about to inaugurate a new president

and that it's part of the ceremonies they wanted a series of lectures mocking

the occasion and I was being invited to give the first one and I said fine but

it depends on the date and whether or not my schedule can accommodate it this

gentleman told me that he would get back to me in two weeks or three weeks with a

couple of dates but and he did but not to give me dates but to tell me that the

invitation had been withdrawn mm-hmm I asked why and he said that a

committee which did not meet in person but communicated its members

communicated with one another via email had decided that mine were not ideas

that the Seton Hall community should be subjected to and

so we had a brief conversation he was extremely embarrassed interestingly

enough he insisted that the invitation that he had issued to me over the

telephone had been authorized by the Provost and that she had in this case

decided that this particular battle was not one she wanted to take on which as

an administrator as an administrator I fully understand a decision like that

one you know I'm going to save my energy for whatever it is that I believe is

crucial to Seton Hall University either having Stanley fish here or not having

Stanley fish here it's not crucial to Seton Hall University and I think that's

absolutely right she subsequently apologized and I met with it last week

and I was given an entirely different version of the story and I don't want to

make a judgment between the two versions I'll leave them with you she told me

that it was an instance of signals being crossed that the person who called me

was not supposed to have made the invitation but was supposed to have done

something else I don't know what that something else might have been because

in the Academy someone doesn't call you up to say we're thinking of inviting you

if we did in fact invite you would you accept doesn't work that way and and I

didn't ask her at this lunch because it wasn't the appropriate context in which

to posed the question well if there were signals crossed

what preventing what prevented you from issuing the invitation anyway so that's

the entire story an apology that wasn't an apology but an apology that passed

the buck to someone whose signals had been crossed there there it is now the

ideas that Seton Hall didn't want to hear at least according to what I was

told when the shamefaced gentleman called me

to disinvite me the ideas were the ideas that I've been retailing for many years

which could be summed up as the idea for example that while social justice is

surely a good thing it's not an academic good thing and that no academic activity

should be in any way concerned with or associated with issues of social justice

now that's an that's a position that a lot of people would disagree with and

presumably someone on that committee disagreed with that position strongly at

least that's the only reading I have now why wasn't I censored I wasn't censored

because first of all I had no right to be invited to Seton Hall that is I

didn't have the right to be invited and I had no right not to be invited it was

just the administrative decision made on both ends as far as I can tell

rather clumsily by the administrators which is no surprise to me at all

since academic administrators are in general a a clumsy lot and I say that of

course very much aware that I was one my one myself so that's the context in

which I don't think I was censored or anything like that now everything

depends on the reason for which the invitation was withdrawn

was it withdrawn because I had it had been discovered that I had a criminal

past let me assure you that I don't have a criminal past No so it was read it was

withdrawn I said in the op-ed for reasons that were non intellectual and

therefore non education and that's the and and that's the objection that I have

to the entire experience it turns out that in the same week that this happened

to me and you may have read about this some students at Williams College I'm

not sure how many of them sent a letter to the William College

community in which they pledged to boycott all courses in the English

department that were not centered on race and I took that to be an action

parallel in many ways to the action that Seton Hall had taken with respect to me

why because the decision as to what course or courses to take or to support

was again being made on non-educational non-academic and frankly political

grounds it turns out so happens that the last course I taught in the liberal arts

arena was of course called major poets of the 17th century and the poets I

taught were John Milton John Donne Ben Jonson George Herbert and Andrew Marvell

not I think a list that could be quarrel with an association with the term major

and of course there are issues of race that turn up in the works of those poets

as some of you will no doubt know Ben Jonson wrote a mask that is a quart

production called the mask of blackness in which Queen Anne and 11 of her

handmaidens appeared in blackface Milton in one of his prose tracks just said

that Asian and Semitic peoples were particularly prone to being slaves and

in a poem called anagram John Donne writing a parody of the usual

celebration of the lady's virtues and beauties described his mistress as

having a complexion that made Moore's look white so there's that stuff but

that's about it you know if I were going to teach a course

on those poets I might name those things but if I were to focus on those things

and tease them out into the content of the course I would be abdicating my

pedagogical responsibilities because that's not what most of the poems

written by these poets are about what you should do I said in this op-ed is

teach the material and not in fact tale of the material according to some

political or social pressure that is now being exerted so I wanna I want to

continue on or pursue the idea of the the current generation of students that

is activists and has a vision of what should and shouldn't be taught and in

there's a there and ask you to summarize some of the views that you have and you

expressed in the book about microaggressions about the trigger

warnings and so on I myself a joint you in some of these

views there is no way one can teach the Bible or Shakespeare without including

all the aggression the violence the blood that goes in it you believe

however that a alerting students to what is about to come is a color linked to

them and it's not what we should do on campuses though I don't think it cuddles

them that's the argument of Jonathan hate and Greg lukianov in in their book

they don't think students should be coddled and therefore they're against

trigger warnings and such things I have no interest in students being coddled or

not being coddled in fact in a very strong sense I have no interest in

students that is what I mean by that is I want to give students the experience

of a course that introduces them to materials they were previously

unfamiliar with or not as familiar with it's perhaps they might be at the end of

the course it's maximum maximum form I want to

teach you a course such that the students who take it could if they

decided to turn around next week and teach it that's my goal now what the

sensibilities of my students are what they are feeling what their inner lives

are like how many grandmothers have died during the semester there's the three

grandmother rule that you know that you you tell your students only three

grandmother's deaths per semester as an excuse I couldn't care less about that

I'm only interested in putting these materials on the table whether I'm

teaching poetry or more often these more often these days teaching

cases and of course on let's say the two I teach most often are jurisprudence and

religion and the law so I'm interested in in in putting these materials before

the students and joining with them in an attempt to analyze what's going on

and atomize the structure the history the tradition do some comparative work

how is this done in other precincts and other countries and stuff like that

that's what I do in class that's what I assume everyone does in class that's the

only thing you should do in class now occasionally it might be the case as it

was this semester that something occurs to you and you say it I was teaching a

course called law at the movies this semester and one of the movies I showed

and then we discussed was the movie the People vs Larry Flynt which is about

pornography and about a famous Supreme Court case a hustler versus Falwell

which I happen to believe was incorrectly decided but that's a whole

other set of questions but I told the students before they saw the movie that

this is not only a movie about pornography

it's a pornographic movie and I thought you know they should know that but

that's about it so that would be the limit I suppose

of my activity in the way of issuing trigger warnings behind all of this is a

more basic point do students have rights the answer to that question is a flat no

students don't have any rights they certainly don't have a right to

participate in their own education they certainly don't have a right to choose

or monitor the materials being offered and of course now of course there are

some instructors who in fact do give students that right I am NOT one of them

and I look with I look askance at those instructors who do but that's the

instructors prerogative students have one right that I will be willing to

stand by and that's the right to competent instruction and by competent

instruction I mean first instruction given to you by

someone who is aware of the present status of the field or discipline