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it is my pleasure to welcome you all to this a conversation tonight with Stanley
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