More of Stanley Fish's Post Modern Rules About Everything
Stanley Fish, literary theorist and Intellectual Decider for the New York Times, comes down hard on Lee Bollinger for getting too political as a university administrator in this column. Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with Fish--I am no expert on what university administrators should and should not do or say. But I would like to point out that Fish’s rules are quite narrow:
“Columbia does not, or at least should not, stand anywhere on the vexed issues of the day, and neither should its chief executive, at least publicly.”
Ever? On anything? Can Columbia as such ever condemn or support anything? Could they have condemned Nazism as a university? (Godwin’s Law strikes again!)
“Remember always what a university is for – the transmission of knowledge and the conferring of analytical skills – and resist the temptation to inflate the importance of what goes on its precincts.”
The conferring of analytical skills? People pay $200,000 just to have analytical skills conferred?!
And finally:
“A university president doesn’t have the luxury of choosing whether to speak as a citizen or as a faculty member or as an administrator.”
anglicancalvinist, please have at Mr. Fish for me.
“Columbia does not, or at least should not, stand anywhere on the vexed issues of the day, and neither should its chief executive, at least publicly.”
Ever? On anything? Can Columbia as such ever condemn or support anything? Could they have condemned Nazism as a university? (Godwin’s Law strikes again!)
“Remember always what a university is for – the transmission of knowledge and the conferring of analytical skills – and resist the temptation to inflate the importance of what goes on its precincts.”
The conferring of analytical skills? People pay $200,000 just to have analytical skills conferred?!
And finally:
“A university president doesn’t have the luxury of choosing whether to speak as a citizen or as a faculty member or as an administrator.”
anglicancalvinist, please have at Mr. Fish for me.
posted by CharlesPeirce @ 11:00 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
CorrectmeifI'mwrongbutareyoutryingtoseparatethepublicandtheprivateandtheSACREDAND THE ReligIOUS SPHERES OF LIFE?!??!
Damn modernist hippie idiots.
So here is my humble defense of Fish’s comments.
“Columbia does not, or at least should not, stand anywhere on the vexed issues of the day, and neither should its chief executive, at least publicly.”
There is an implicit “politically” after the “anywhere” and I cannot agree more; universities in America operate without any clear sense of self-definition or purpose. Because older paradigms for understanding the place and purpose of the university seem incompatible with the modern world, they are largely replaced with a sort of agnosticism about purpose apart from the pratical. So universities now are fundraising institutions that train employees of America’s corporations to do tasks and, so that they can pretend to something like a transcendental social benefit, they operate as political machines – again, an operation on the practical level. What Fish is challenging is this entire notion of what a university is, what a university is for, and what the officers of that university should aspire to.
“Remember always what a university is for – the transmission of knowledge and the conferring of analytical skills – and resist the temptation to inflate the importance of what goes on its precincts.”
Curiously, the inflation of importance is the result of a devaluation of significance. Again, ”importance” in this critique, has a political flavor to it: universities imagine themselves as influential actors in the political arena by merit of a perception of high cultural capital. But they only turn to the political arena when they cannot give a sufficient account of why they merit such capital and, thus, cannot perpetuate it. If they did give it some consideration, they would realize that seeking to turn significance into importance is the undoing of the base for that very real cultural capital.
Here is a perfect example: University presidents and faculty engaging in the political is a condition of possibility for the truthiness of the Bush administration. By making academic status subservient to political ends, it conditions the value of academic work and social position; the place of the academy is only revered by Americans insofar as they are in agreement with the political ends of the academy. To the degree that they hold a divergent politic, they also tend to hold a divergent estimation of the legitimacy of the academy.
“A university president doesn’t have the luxury of choosing whether to speak as a citizen or as a faculty member or as an administrator.”
That’s because he is not speaking as a subject, but as a role. We don’t make public/private distinctions often anymore and I think it will be at least part of our undoing. Our private selves are subjects with perspectives, and views, and commitments, and endless complexities. Our public roles could not have less to do with that. That isn’t to say that there isn’t any overlap and the distinction is clear and neat, it is just to say that roles, particularly public roles, are definitionally meant to shroud the subject who occupies that role. Such subjects should aspire to clarify that distinction whenever possible. Invoking first amendment rights is completely antithetical to that notion, it assumes the collapsing of role into identity.
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That said, I think the bigger issue is the most interesting one; namely, that we cannot imagine how to be engaged in the events of our world in any mode other than the political. President Bollinger is not alone in this, he is representative of an entire generation of academics who cannot conceive of engagement apart from politics. It is this incredibly stifling, dried-up, dogmatic script that rules the modern academy: academic work IS political work – exposing power structures that maintain inequalities of one sort or another, explaining those structures in political terms, and proposing exclusively political solutions - and, if understood otherwise, is nothing but ivory tower elitism. More significantly, this same assumption is basically operative for average Americans: the only engaged posture is a political posture. I mean, I just think that is a completely bankrupt notion for both academic institutions (and the work of their faculty) as well as citizenship.
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