Legal Commentary

That's the title of Stanley Fish's latest book.  In the book, as the dust jacket says, Fish argues that "the only goal appropriate to the academy is the transmission and advancement of knowledge.  When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the mthods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. . . . Those who do this will often invoke academic freedom, but Fish argues that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that comes into the professor's mind."  He is, in short, an anti-Gutmann, an anti-Nussbaum (although, wrongly in my view, he doesn't mention either of these scholars).

I'm only a third of the way through the book, but it's a great read so far.  I hope to put up a series of more substantive responses to it (and yes, as always, I'm looking for a law review that might be interested in a review of this very timely book).  I make note of it now because it seems pertinent to many of the questions we've been airing in the past few days, and some that have lurked behind our discussion: Are religously affiliated schools proper "academic" enterprises in the sense in which Fish uses the word?  Is the "academic" enterprise necessarily as narrow as he suggests, or should we have a broader conception?  Should an "elite" education be measured by any other metrics than the most academic ones?  Is there any room for a pluralistic conception of the mission of higher education, or is there only a narrow definition of "academic" and a series of other schools, focused on religious mission or social change or any number of other values, that may be fine but aren't "academic" as such?  And are law schools, which mix intellectual inquiry and practical training, really part of the academy in the first place? 

I think Fish is too monistic in his view of the university, and hope to expand on that point soon.  In the meantime, however, let me say that Fish is characteristically spirited and fun and, so far in my reading, has made many incisive, if repetitive, points.  He is particularly useful in arguing that the academic enterprise, in its seeking after truth, should eschew a sense of urgency, which is the realm of politics, in favor of a certain sense of timelessness -- a point I have made here before, and probably a sticking point for law schools and much legal academic writing, and for the endless and distorting quest for "novelty" among both authors and law review editors. 

And it's all very Fishy, written with a tremendous sense of joie de vivre and Peck's bad boyishness.  After the jump, a few quotes.  Note, in particular, the quote questioning whether law schools belong in the university at all, the discussion of whether it would have been right for academics in the '50s to make any positive declarations about segregation, and the very anti-Nussbaumian argument that reading novels doesn't make you a better person.

"Moral capacities (or their absence) have no relationship whatsoever to the reading of novels, or the running of statistical programs, or the execution of laboratory procedures  . . . . "

"Anyone who asks for more [than academics in a narrow sense] has enlisted in the 'we-are-going-to-save-the-world' army along with Derek Bok . . . ."

"[I]sn't the university primarily a place for the unfettered expression of ideas?  The answer is no.  The university is primarily a place for teaching and research.  The unfettered expression of ideas is a cornerstone of liberal democracy; it is a prime political value.  It is not, however, an academic virtue, and if we come to regard it as our primary responsibility, we will default on the responsibilities assigned us and come to be what no one pays us to be -- political agents engaged in political advocacy."

"If you're not in the pursuit-of-truth business, you should not be in the university."

"[W]hat about professional schools and professional training? . . . [I]f students [at such schools] are taught methods and techniques in the absence of any inquiry into their sources, validity, and philosophical underpinnings[,] that professional school is not the location of any intellectual activity and is 'academic' only in the sense that it is physically housed in a university."

"The judgment of whether a policy is the right one for the country is not appropriate in the classroom, where you are (or should be) more interested in the structure and history of ideas than in recommending them (or dis-recommending them) to your students."

"In the 1950s the legal and moral status of segregation was a live political question working its way through legislatures and courts, which were (and are) the proper venues for adjudicating the issue.  Faculty members were free to air their views in public forums and many did, but those who used the classroom as a soapbox were co-opting a space intended for other purposes."

"[A]s for ethical judgment in general, no doubt everything you encounter helps to shape it, but reading novels by Henry James is not a special key to achieving it; and indeed -- and there are many examples of this in the world -- readers of Henry James or Sylvia Plath or Toni Morrison can be as vile and as cruel and as treacherous as anyone else."