Stanley Fish
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Articles by Stanley Fish
The Lamp Magazine | Blind Chance
If you want to minimize risk and indemnify yourself against contingency and still live a life out in the open air, there is an entire industry dedicated to helping you. It’s called insurance. And it operates according to the rules of noir. In fact, insurance and noir are complementary expressions of a vision of the world in which moral, philosophical, and political differences are replaced by statistical differences that have no meaning aside from the fact that they can be noted.
Academic Virtue | Stanley Fish
Not long ago, there was a time when I was responsible for a college with close to thirty departments and units, a budget of between fifty and fifty-five million dollars, four hundred tenure-track faculty members, seven hundred staff, ten thousand undergraduate students, two thousand graduate students, and seventeen buildings.
Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity
This article is part of a preview of the fall 2025 issue of Academe. The full issue will be published in October.
Universal Darkness
Next year I shall be teaching a course in film noir for the first time, and I thought it might be useful to set down my thoughts about the genre. Definitions and lists of characteristics are not hard to come by.
Honest Dishonesty
Whenever I teach “Law at the Movies,” my code name for the course, which I only reveal to the students late in the semester, is “Jurisprudence in Disguise.” By that I mean two things. First, film is the Trojan horse that allows me to introduce jurisprudential questions students might find off-putting were they to be posed directly. Second, those questions are the real content of the movies we study, questions such as these: What is law? How is law established? What is the source of legal authority?
Re-enchanting Celibacy
Over the past few years British feminists have developed some interesting views on sex and sexuality, and I am not using the word “interesting” in its authentic British sense, as a euphemism for “utterly deranged.” Among the reactionary feminists—a term coined by the journalist Mary Harrington—is Louise Perry, who writes in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution that changes in sexual mores since the 1960s have brought with them a raft of negative consequences, downplayed if not...
Almost Cut My Hair
I cut my beard recently, and I am forced to admit that I am significantly uglier than I had remembered. The lower-third situation, while less dire than the chinless standard prevalent among the male species of the fourth estate, is not so hot, and is aggravated by the fact that I am running to fat. The resulting mandible-dewlap combination vaguely suggests portraits of the Renaissance popes, and gives me an unsavory air of wicked babyishness. I have also been reminded how much I hate shaving.
A Great Rock in a River
I sometimes complain that the people of my country pay far too little attention to the glories of their own land and culture. They slog for thousands of miles on planes to view the Taj Mahal or the Temples of Angkor Wat, but it never crosses their minds to visit the Cathedrals of Durham or Lincoln. They bore you to death about the beauties of the French countryside, and they have never visited the Malvern Hills or the North York Moors. But here I make a wider criticism of the modern world.
Low Life
The Spectator of yore had an amusing device: the High Life/Low Life columns. What you got was exactly what it said on the tins. The irrepressible and apparently immortal Taki Theodoracopoulos (a founder of my own publication) would float on a cloud of champagne bubbles around Europe’s regattas, Grand Prix races, and balls—cool marble interiors and glittering gowns, a happy memory of a happy memory, to be sure, but still better than whatever passes for Society with a capital S now.
A Man of Science
Once, when I was young, for a period of three months, I was a man of science. When I entered college, I had the aspirationally hard-headed idea that I would get a degree in something quantitative and make a lot of money afterward. The storms of freshman year drove that ship of theory onto the shoals of my profound mathematical incapacity—if the footmen of mental sums tire you, what will the mysteries of matrix algebra do?
Grayer about the Sleeves
Many years ago, when I was a novice and my habit was still dazzlingly white, I said to one of the older sisters, “I think we should all get wimples.” She replied, “That’s because you have no idea what you’re talking about.” I was a little surprised by this answer.
A Note To University Administrators
Original Article Posted By: Virginia Gentleman, 5/5/2024 1:22:42 PM University administrators faced with sit-ins, tent encampments, and other forms of protest continue to betray an inability to understand their situations.
Electric Priest
Last week, I spent about two hours speaking with Father Justin, the first large language model chatbot ostensibly raised to the priestly order of Melchizedek, while his counsel was still available on the Catholic Answers website. He has since been defrocked, in large part because of people like me. Like most of this A.I. priest’s conversation partners, I was less interested in learning about Catholicism and more interested in testing his (its?) intellectual boundaries.
Everyone, Just Shut Up Already
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Opinion | Everyone, Just Shut Up Already
University administrators faced with the challenge of responding to the various (and opposed) constituencies invested in the Hamas-Israel war have come up with a number of strategies. Condemn one side and express sympathy with the other, a sure loser. Condemn both sides, an even surer loser; all parties will feel aggrieved. Support the legitimate aspirations of both sides and reject violence; you will be faulted for occupying a perch so lofty that the pressing issues of the day disappear.
Anti-fundacionalismo, esperanza teórica y la enseñanza de la composición
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The Future Of Twitter
It started almost as a joke. For a long time, it felt impossible. But a few weeks ago, rumours started to circulate with increasing ferocity. Elon Musk was planning to buy Twitter. Most Twitter users could give you a list of things they’d like changed. The company has underperformed compared to other social media platforms. When Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO, for the second time, Twitter failed to articulate a clear direction for the future.
Epic Ending by Stanley Fish
Inside Paradise Lost by david quint princeton, 344 pages, $35 Early on in Inside Paradise Lost, David Quint writes a sentence that is at once simple and, for this reader, simply terrifying: “The series begins with Virgil’s own submerged reference to Lucretius.” The series Quint has in mind is the series of allusions in Milton’s epic to the flight and fall of Icarus.
The Estate Agent
It is one of the minor symptoms of the mental decline of the United States that Stanley Fish is thought to be on the Left. By some of his compatriots, anyway, and no doubt by himself. In a nation so politically addled that ‘liberal’ can mean ‘state interventionist’ and ‘libertarianism’ letting the poor die on the streets, this is perhaps not wholly unpredictable. Stanley Fish, lawyer and literary critic, is in truth about as left-wing as Donald Trump.
Free Speech in Theory and Practice
You could be forgiven for assuming you were in for a long slog through constitutional doctrine after glancing at the subtitle of Stanley Fish’s new book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump. But once you crack the cover of this slim volume, you quickly realize this is a breezy, entertaining, and very idiosyncratic tour of free speech theory and practice by one of America’s best-known legal and literary theorists.
Opinion | I Wasn’t Censored When I Was Disinvited
By Stanley Fish Nov. 17, 2019 2:24 pm ET Recently I was invited, then disinvited, to speak at Seton Hall University. Members of a faculty committee had decided by email that they didn’t want a university audience to be subjected to views like mine. I had been writing on the emergence on campus of what I call a regime of virtue. This was the first time I experienced it directly. My ideas were judged unworthy of being heard.
The reason Mark Zuckerberg's comments are laughable
(CNN)In the course of Mark Zuckerberg's back and forth with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last week, the New York congresswoman asked him: "So you won't take down lies or you will take down lies?
Speech Has Never Been Free, and That’s Good
Censorship always exists. The question is to what end. The one thing speech isn’t is free. There are costs to those who produce it and costs to those who are subjected to it. Of course, the term “free speech” does have a clear meaning under the Constitution: If you want to say something, you don’t have to ask the government’s permission, and you won’t be punished by the government for saying it.
The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump
“The First Amendment doesn’t license all speech, nor does it immunize the speaker from any consequences of that speech. Rather, Fish says, it simply means that speakers may speak without fear of government restraint or retaliation, but not fear from private forces.” For the average citizen, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has the most relevant applications.
Harold Bloom's Warning to the World
Harold Bloom's Warning to the World | RealClearPolitics
Harold Bloom and the Question Not to Ask About Art
By “high unpleasure,” Bloom meant the experience of participating in the struggle of a supreme mind to understand the world and itself. The reward (please don’t say payoff) is the ability “to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves, and perhaps to accept change in ourselves, as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change,” which is of course death.
In defense of the NBA: The league has every right to come down hard on critics of China who work for it
By Stanley Fish New York Daily News | Oct 17, 2019 | 3:57 PM NBA Commissioner Adam Silver speaks at a news conference Oct. 8 in Saitama, Japan. (Jae C. Hong/AP) When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned the National Basketball Association not to put profits ahead of free speech, he joined a chorus of many, including President Trump, who have miscategorized the tiff between China and the league.
Neoliberalism and Higher Education
Iâve been asking colleagues in several departments and disciplines whether theyâve ever come across the term âneoliberalismâ and whether they know what it means. A small number acknowledged having heard the word; a very much smaller number ventured a tentative definition. I was asking because I had been reading essays in which the adjective neoliberal was routinely invoked as an accusation, and I had only a sketchy notion of what was intended by it.
Semicolon - Cecelia Watson - Hardcover
Skip to content Share This Title: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson On Sale: 07/30/2019 $19.99 Spend $49 and get FREE shipping on HC.com Quantity: About Product Details Praise “Delightful.” —Mary Norris, The New Yorker A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world’s most polarizing punctuation mark The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why?
And How to Read One : Fish, Stanley: Amazon.de: Bücher
New York Times Bestseller “Both deeper and more democratic than The Elements of Style” – Adam Haslett, Financial Times “A guided tour through some of the most beautiful, arresting sentences in the English language.” – Slate “Like a long periodic sentence, this book rumbles along, gathers steam, shifts gears, and packs a wallop.” —Roy Blount Jr. In this entertaining and erudite New York Times bestseller, beloved professor Stanley Fish offers both sentence craft and sentence pleasure.
Stanley Fish's Academic Clickbait
April 19, 2017, marks Stanley Fish’s seventy-ninth birthday. Originally hailing from Providence, Rhode Island, Fish has established himself as a major figure in literary postmodernism while denying that he is a postmodernist and has—famously—“defended” the humanities while denying that they have any practical value. What gives?
We're All Badgers Now
A conversation about unionization and higher education between Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. SF: In over 35 years of friendship and conversation, Walter Michaels and I have disagreed on only two things, and one of them was faculty and graduate student unionization. He has always been for and I had always been against. I say âhadâ because I recently flipped and what flipped me, pure and simple, was Wisconsin.
Can You Have a Happy Birthday on April 19?
On the little block in Providence, R.I., where I grew up, three of us kids celebrated our birthdays on April 19. I thought that was pretty remarkable; April 19 must be pretty special, I concluded. Many years later I feel the same way, but for different reasons. This evening MSNBC is airing “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist,” for it was 15 years ago to the day that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
Is It Good for the Jews?
When I was growing up in the ’40s and ’50s, a single question was asked in my neighborhood of every piece of news, large or small, local or national: “Is it good for the Jews?” We have now learned to identify this question in all of its versions – Is it good for the Catholics? Is it good for the Latinos? Is it good for the gays?
Guess Who's Not Coming to Dinner
Columbia University and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might seem to be an odd couple, but for a while last week it looked as if they might be dating. A few years back, when an invitation (extended by a dean) to the Iranian leader generated outrage and bad publicity, Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, responded by trashing Ahmadinejad before introducing him. On Sept.
Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation
The question I posed at the conclusion of my last post was how do the technologies wielded by digital humanities practitioners either facilitate the work of the humanities, as it has been traditionally understood, or bring about an entirely new conception of what work in the humanities can and should be?
When Harry Should Avoid Meeting Sally
A philosopher I know told me that once, when he was explaining his views on a contested matter to a group of his peers, he was met with this objection: “But that sounds like Stanley Fish.” I would bet that no one else in the room had ever met me and that few if any had ever read me. It is just that for many in his corner of the discipline, “Stanley Fish” is a placeholder for ideas you don’t want to be associated with.
Evidence in Science and Religion, Part Two
In the post previous to this one, I revisited the question of the place of evidence in the discourses and practices of science and religion.
Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities
The humanities are taking it on the chin. If there were any doubts about this proposition, they have been dispelled by the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point’s proposal to eliminate 13 majors, including history, art, English, philosophy, sociology, political science, French, German, and Spanish. The administration cited large deficits, programs with a low enrollment, and a desire to play to its strengths — STEM subjects and training in technology.
Stanley Fish says historians are deluded in thinking their training gives them special insights in politics that should be passed on to students (and others)
Stanley Fish is a professor of law at Florida International University and a visiting professor at Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University. He says they (and others) should stop trying to sell the humanities, claiming the effort will backfire. ... The idea is that because they are trained deliberative thinkers, academic humanists have a special capacity (and duty) to correct those of us whose education has been less rigorous.
Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities
The humanities are taking it on the chin. If there were any doubts about this proposition, they have been dispelled by the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point's proposal to eliminate 13 majors, including history, art, English, philosophy, sociology, political science, French, German, and Spanish. The administration cited large deficits, programs with a low enrollment, and a desire to play to its strengths — STEM subjects and training in technology.
Opinion | ‘Transparency’ Is the Mother of Fake News
They won’t. Indeed, they will proliferate because the politically angled speech that is supposedly the source of our problems is in fact the only possible route to their (no doubt temporary) solution. Speech proceeding from a point of view can at least be recognized as such and then countered. You say, “I know where those guys are coming from, and here are my reasons for believing that we should be coming from some place else” — and dialogue begins.
Is It the Business of the University to Silence Voices?
So by now you probably know that the conservative social scientist, Charles Murray, was shouted down and not afforded the opportunity to speak on his ideas at a recent incident at Middlebury College. You may also know that he and his campus hosts were chased down by a mob — with one faculty member experiencing serious injury. Welcome to the new age.
Is the Business of the University to Silence Voices?
So by now you probably know that the conservative social scientist, Charles Murray, was shouted down and not afforded the opportunity to speak on his ideas at a recent incident at Middlebury College. You may also know that he and his campus hosts were chased down by a mob - with one faculty member experiencing serious injury. Welcome to the new age.
Citizen Formation Is Not Our Job
The National Association of Scholars is right to oppose the “new civics,” but its solution is wrongheaded.
Citizen Formation Is Not Our Job
The National Association of Scholars is an education-advocacy group that advertises itself as “working to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship.” It leans conservative, but in saying that I intend no criticism, just an identification. In the past the NAS and I have done battle, but I find myself agreeing with at least half of the arguments being made in its latest report, “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics.” The main argument is that they don’t.
Don’t Blame Nietzsche for Donald Trump
Back in 2001, just after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a number of commentators blamed both the event and the perceived weakness of the response to it on something called postmodernism, characterized by its critics as an extreme form of relativism that leaves its adherents unable to tell truth from falsehood or fact from fiction.
How to Win an Academic Argument
In a 1976 essay — “Interpreting the Variorum,” published in Critical Inquiry — I coined the term “interpretive community.” An interpretive community is not made up of persons who, because they share some of the same ideas and aims, get together and form a club, as Star Trek fans do.
How to Win an Academic Argument
In a 1976 essay — "Interpreting the Variorum," published in Critical Inquiry — I coined the term "interpretive community." An interpretive community is not made up of persons who, because they share some of the same ideas and aims, get together...
Column: Professors, stop opining about Trump
Professors are at it again, demonstrating in public how little they understand the responsibilities and limits of their profession. A group calling itself Historians Against Trump has published an "Open Letter to the American People." The purpose of the letter, the historians tell us, is to warn against "Donald J.
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