He likes to humiliate people in public for the fun of it and is, not surprisingly, widely loathed. He is greedy, neurotic, controlling, and short. He is, in other words, a surpassingly delightful human being. And, with that, MacFarquhar is off to the races as she profiles Fish, a controversial professor of English literature and critic of liberalism of various stripes, who decided to take the money and run, to the Stalinist-looking campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. In part, that was explained by his more general argument that there's no way to determine many truths in an objective manner.
Fish is a bomb thrower in an academic world of timidity.
And he is someone who relishes intellectual combat, more than willing to hire those whose work he feels is wayward or to be chums with some of his harshest critics. June 19 Advocate previews a resolution to be brought to the annual meeting of the American Medical Association by its Rhode Island affiliate, contending that the Boy Scouts of America ban on gays will increase the risk of teen suicides. June 18 Nation concedes it goofed when buying into an Internet report that the Bush White House has been serving genetically engineered food.