From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Subject: Why there is no such thing as free speech in academe ...
Reply-To: jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Date: 4 Jan 93 00:07:08

        WHY THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS FREE SPEECH IN ACADEME TODAY
            AND WHY STANLEY FISH THINKS THAT IS A GOOD THING

                            E. Michael Jones

I remember the last paper I did in Stanley Fish's class. It was on the
theories of Stanley Fish, so it wasn't long. It didn't take long to
explain that a hermeneutic that revolved around the assertion that
"You can only read what you've already read," was inherently
self-contradictory. That Professor Fish would not like this paper came
as no surprise to me. This was already evident from his behavior in
class. When the students agreed with the ideas of Professor Fish, they
were praised as being "brilliant," a word he used in reference to
something I said in class once. When the students disagreed with
Professor Fish, they were ignored. So Fish's displeasure at what I had
to say (it would go on to appear in College English, the first article
I had published) came as no surprise; what was surprising was his
response to my critique.  The paper was returned in a matter of
minutes. At the bottom, next to the grade was the simple, if somewhat
disconcerting explanation, " I don't believe that any more."

The "that" in question was, of course, his critical theory. Then it
went by the name of Reader Response Criticism, which was a '70s
phenomenon, the literary critical equivalent of I'm Okay You're Okay.
There was no text, according to this theory.  The reader was the sole
determiner of meaning. Reader Response Criticism was the ultimate in
intellectual democracy or solipsism, depending on how clearly you
understood it. When I suggested that his theories led inexorably to
solipsism in class one day, Fish flew into a rage, which only shows
that he is smarter than his theories indicate.

I found myself remembering this incident while reading an article in a
recent issue of Newsweek on "Thought Police on Campus." There right
in the middle of the discussion was a picture of a now-wizened
(fifteen years in the academic fast lane seems to have taken its
toll) Stanley Fish telling the Newsweek reporter that "Disagreement
can be fun."1 That's not the way I remember it. It was not fun to
disagree with Stanley Fish, at least not when you were a student in
his class.

I mention this because Stanley Fish was described in the
already-mentioned issue of Newsweek as the creator of "an important
critical theory that seeks a text's meaning in the reader's response
to it." So maybe Stanley still believes in his theory after all. Or
maybe he only believes in it when the reader is dumb enough not to see
through it, as is the case with reporters from Newsweek. It's hard to
say. The 1990s Fish has become a sort of critical chameleon.
Professors today, he tells us in the same piece, must retool about
every 18 months. Just as you've finished mastering the last set of
doctrines, another comes along. Structuralism had hardly been absorbed
before there was poststructuralism. A lot of people still haven't come
to terms with that, but it was replaced by postmodernism, radical
feminism, new historicism, which slid into anthropological new
historicism vs. cultural materialist new historicism. Now we 're
getting ecological criticism. Probably just around the corner is
animal-rights criticism.2

And who knows? Maybe there will be a specific branch of animal rights
criticism known as Chameleon Crit. Chameleons are not only adept at
changing color, their tails often break off in the grasp of those who
attempt to catch them. Instead of the thing itself, you are left with
a wriggling worm-like appendage.

Stanley, Newsweek tells us, is "a man who is accustomed to getting his
own way."  3 This is, of course, the gist of his critical theory,
according to which, Paradis e Lost means pretty much what the reader,
i.e., Stanley Fish, wants it to mean. Reader Response Criticism was a
quintessentially '70s phenomenon. It was the literary hermeneutic of
the Me Generation. Disagreement among readers was resolved by
appealing to what Fish called the judgment of "interpretive
communities," which again meant people like Stanley Fish. This
critical theory coincided with books on psychology with titles like
"How To Get what You Want Through Intimidation" and things like that.
Fish was bound to attract a following by giving expression in the
literary profession to the crass pushiness that characterized so many
professors of that particular generation.

I mention all this now because Stanley Fish has a certain uncanny
consistency to him, in spite of all of the self-contradiction and,
dare we say it, mendacity in telling us what he believes and then
telling us that he doesn't really believe it after all when its self-
contradictions are all too apparent. Just as Reader Response Criticism
is okay in Newsweek because the reporters there aren't aware of its
self-contradictory nature.  The same is true of other ideas.
"Disagreement is fun," as long as Stanley ends up on the winning side
of the argument. When it seems that he and the people he represents
are going to come in for a beating, as in the recent wave of sentimen
t against political correctness on campus, he is willing to advocate
any and all m eans to end the disagreement.

Take academic freedom for example. For years the cultural
revolutionaries who took over our universities have been telling us
that there is nothing more sacred than academic freedom. In
retrospect we can see that this was a ploy that was used by a group
out of power to get in power. In the traditional view, there were all
sorts of constraints that were put on academic freedom, but these
were all of a moral nature.  Academic freedom, in the traditionally
understood sense of the word, was a means to achieve the truth. The
same was true of freedom of speech. According to the traditional view,
the use of speech was subordinate to the moral law. Obscenity,
slander, "yelling fire in a crowded theater," were all instances of
where the m ral order exerted hegemony over the right of expression.
In the hands of the cultural revolutionaries, however, academic
freedom was not used as a means to achieve the truth; it was proposed
as an end which subverted the truth. It became one of the chief
stratagems in overturning the moral order and one whereby they
established themselves in positions of power. It may be that they
never believed strongly in the principle in the first place, or it may
be that they just found their principles inconvenient once they became
secure in positions of power. What is obvious is that a change is at
hand.

To paraphrase Stanley Fish, they don't believe in that anymore. In
1990 Fish could tell Newsweek that "Disagreement can be fun." In
1992, he seems to have changed his mind again. In an essay which
appeared in an anthology entitled Debating PC, Fish tells us "There's
No Such Thing As Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too."4 His
argument has a curiously traditional ring to it. Speech, he tells us,
is not an absolute good; it should not be allowed to do harm.
Criticizing Benno Schmidt's more liberal view that speech should be
tolerated because "freedom must be the paramount obligation of an
academic community," Fish says that Schmidt has "no sense of the
lacerating harms that speech of certain kinds can inflict." Fish comes
out in favor of campus regulations banning "hate speech." "Speech,"
he tells us, "is never and could not be an independent value, but is
always asserted against a background of some assumed conception of the
good to which it must yield in the event of conflict."  5

This is all well and good I suppose, but what is this "conception of
the good" which Fish has in mind. The traditional view claimed that
speech was subordinate to the moral law, which was the good in
question. The modern revolution claimed that in the case of speech the
moral law is subject to individual freedom. This was the rall ying cry
which allowed the revolutionaries to take over the university. Now
that they are in positions of power, the rules of the game are
changing once again. Now freedom of speech is once again subordinate,
but not to something as specific as the Judeo-Christian moral law, but
rather to "core values"6 which Fish and the rest of the tenured
revolutionaries get to determine. So Fish and his friends get the best
of both worlds in this latest transvaluation of all values and the
educational system gets the short end of the stick. Academe becomes a
sort of Puritan theocracy, with full power to enforce rules which they
themselves make up. The major difference is that the Puritans believed
in the moral law, so that we at least had some sense of what our
speech was to conform to. The revolutionaries believe in no external
law. What criteria will they use to enforce belief in their "core
values"?

Fish in his article comes out against hate speech; however, his first
amendment theorizing never gets around to specifics on what
constitutes hate speech, nor does it get around to specifying the
moral context in which some acts can be denominated hateful. He does,
however, tell how the old system worked and how it is no longer
workable.

The forward-looking view of what the first amendment protects has a
great appeal , in part because it continues in a secular form the
Puritan celebration of millenarian hopes, but it imposes a
requirement so severe that one would expect more justification than is
usually provided. The requirement is that we endure whatever pain
racist and hate speech inflicts for the sake of a future whose
emergence we can only take on faith. In a specifically religious
vision like Milton's this makes perfect sense (it is indeed the whole
of Christianity), but in the context of a politics that puts its trust
in the world and not in the Holy Spirit, it raises more questions than
it answers and could be seen as the other prong of a strategy
designed to delegitimatize the complaints of victimized groups.

What Fish is proposing here is having his cake and eating it too. He
wants the traditional arguments for the curtailment of expression
without the traditional rules applied to that curtailment. The
traditional rule was, of course, the moral order.  Speech was to be in
conformity with the moral order, in fact all behavior was to be in
conformity to a code which man discovered but did not create, one
which, as Moses would have put it, came from God. Now, according to
Fish's view, we have the sam e divine sanction applied by people who
believe in neither God nor the moral order . In the traditional view,
speech was to be conformed to the moral law. Fish argues that the same
rigorous enforcement should take place but without the moral
guidelines to guide the enforcing. In the absence of those external
and objective guidelines, it becomes painfully clear that what will
get enforced at campuses like Duke is the will of those in power. Not
only that, there can be no appeal to this will because accor ding to
the people enforcing these "core values" there are no external
standards whereby to adjudicate disputes. Professor Fish, remember,
believes that there is no text. T here is no Constitution, no
Decalogue, nothing beyond what he and his fellow tenured
revolutionaries decree as "good." Unlike the libertarian Schmidt, Fish
is propos ing censorship of ideas, but unlike the traditionalists he
will not tell us which no rms are to govern the censoring. Fish, as I
said, wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants the power of a
dictator in an academic theocracy without any constraints imposed on
the exercise of that power imposed by the moral law. This view is not
new to this century; it is commonly known as totalitarianism and it
is now the reigning orthodoxy at this country's colleges and
universities.

According to Fish, decisions about what is and is not protected in the
realm of expression will rest not on principle or firm doctrine but on
the ability of persons and groups to so operate (some would say
manipulate) the political process that the speech they support is
labeled "protected" while the speech inimical to their interests is
declared to be fair game.7

Might, in other words, makes right. This passage expresses in nuce
what has happened at our universities. They have been captured by
people who believe in neither "principle [n]or firm doctrine." They
have been captured by people who b elieve that their own self-interest
is the only criterion of right and wrong. Now these people, having
captured positions of influence, are willing to abandon the pretext
that they believed in academic freedom altogether. Academic freedom in
this deeply totalitarian view was simply a pretext for seizing power.
Since there is no "text," no "principle or firm doctrine," no
objective moral law, according to these people, power is the sole
criterion of right and wrong. Just as Reader Response Criticism tells
us that the reader (or, actually, certain readers) has absolute power
over the texts, so the political equivalent of this view tells us that
the professors have absolute power over the university. The
traditionalists were held in check by an objective code applicable to
all, in other words, by the moral law. The deconstructors deny by
their very theories the existence of any external codes. And then in
the next breath they tell us that they should be appointed judge,
jury and executioner in any disputes which arise in academe. Given
their "core values," it is not difficult to see how these dispute s
will be adjudicated. Their supreme law is self-interest. Whatever
threatens their self-interest is wrong. Fish talks about "victimized
groups" in his piece, but this appeal has no meaning outside of a
morality which undergirds it. Fish's claims about "victimized groups"
is predicated on precisely the moral law whose existence he in the
same breath denies. The revolutionaries, however, specialize in having
their cake and eating it too. They make moral demands, they assert the
ascendancy of their "core values" over freedom, but in the same breath
tell us that there are "no principles or firm doctrine." This means of
course, that morality, like any other text, means what they say it
means. This is the essence of the totalitarian hegemony which Fish and
hi s ilk currently exercise over this nation's educational system.
That system has become the private benefice of those who believe that
the only measure of right and wrong is their politically organized
desire.  Fish recognizes no law higher than his own desires organized
into "interpretive communities" which will impose these collectively
held desires on the institutions they control. There is no appeal to
reason with peo le like this, for their very intellectual system says
that there is no law beyond their own desires and the power to force
or project those desires onto the world at large.  No country can
survive for long with people like this in positions of intellectual
influence.  The catastrophic effects of our extremely expensive
educational system on the very people it is supposed to educate is a
good indication of the price we continue to pay.

At the beginning of his article, Fish poses the very question which
should be posed to the professorate he represents: Would this form of
speech or advocacy, if permitted to flourish, tend to undermine the
very purposes for which our society is constituted?

The jury in this country is still out on this one. Unfortunately there
is no statute of limitations for deliberation of this kind.

                                END NOTES

I Newsweek, "Taking Offense," (December 24, 1990), p. 48
2Newsweek, "Learning to Love the PC Canon," (December 24,1990), p. 50.
3Newsweek, "Taking Offense," (December 24, 1990), p. 48
4Paul Berman, ed. Debating PC, (New York: Dell, 1992), pp. 231ff.
5Berman, p. 233.
6Berman, p. 232.
7Berman, p. 242.

___________________________________________________________ E. Michael
Jones has a Ph D in English Literature from Temple University in
Philadelphia and is the editor of Fidelity magazine which is published
in South Bend, Indiana. His provocative manuscript on the link between
the Civil Rights movement and the sexual revolution still awaits a
courageous publisher.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.