Alan Kors on the "New" Stanley Fish

I am old enough to remember when Richard Nixon periodically tried to remake himself into the"New Nixon." All the while, Nixon never owned up to his past misdeeds or mistakes.

The same process seems to be occurring with Stanley Fish, the author of the infamous There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing Too.

Over at the Torch, Alan Kors gives some historical background on the Stanley Fish makeover. . Now, a dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Fish recently defended Ward Churchill's free speech outside the classroom. He commented that “Political persuasion is just not what is supposed to go on in the college classroom, even though it may be going on—and going on legitimately—at the noontime rally or in dormitory bull sessions.” He also said that “It is not the job of a senior administrator either to approve or disapprove of what a faculty member writes in a nonuniversity publication.”

Back in 1998, however, Fish wrote chillingly:

The correct response to a vision or a morality that you despise is not to try and cure it or to make its adherents sit down and read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, that’s not going to do the job. The only way to fight hate speech or racist speech is to recognize it as the speech of your enemy and what you do in response to the speech of your enemy is not prescribe a medication for it but attempt to stamp it out. [emphasis added] So long as Critical Race Theory and others fall into the liberal universalist assumption of regarding hate speech as some kind of anomaly which could be recognized as such by everyone, they’re going to lose the game. They will win the game only if they really try to win it, rather than falling in with Justice Brandeis’ pronouncement that ‘Sunshine is the best disinfectant.’”

Kors concludes:

Sad stuff. Once he became an administrator, the careerist Fish simply ended the embarrassment of defending partisan speech codes, fending off issues of principle with denials that the issue was relevant to current academic practice.....FIRE’s motto always has been the dictum of Justice Louis Brandeis, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant."....I, for one, prefer preserved Brandeis to rotting Fish. The University of Illinois at Chicago will have an annual Stanley Fish lecture in his honor. To do justice to Fish, it should shed darkness over moral issues, promote careerism and politics over substance and the search for knowledge, and be reserved for unprincipled chameleons.