- It is my pleasure to welcome you all to this conversation tonight with Stanley Fish. This is part of an ongoing series of conversations that we have been having here at Amherst College for the last couple of years or so. Maybe it's a little longer than that, ever since a dramatic presidential election, woke us up to a divided country and to a divided self and to the fact that the many of us were deaf in regards to what was happening, if not in other parts of the country, certainly in other parts of the world. There was an invitation by a series of alarms to engage in conversations within the college, in the college communities that is the five colleges in other, undergraduate and graduate students, the faculty and the administration. And essentially with the community at large with the larger population, on the various and opposing sides of the divide, inviting us to be able to listen to those that don't have or share our ideas and instead of reducing them to stereotypes or ignoring them because they did speak in ways that we do not do the opposite and bring them into that kind of dialogue. We have had a number of very distinguished guests throughout this two-three years from Martha Neusbaum to Bill Crystal to Bret Stephens to a variety of thinkers, activists, scholars that continued to this day. I want to thank on my behalf and on behalf of the college, the 36 members of the 50th reunion of the class of 1970 I think I got that right for their support, particularly to two of them that initiated this idea of listening to the other half. I want to tell you that the format of today's event is a free-flowing conversation based on a recent book that Stanley Fish has literally just published. I will say just a few things, about him and about the book in a second. But before I do that, I wanna thank the folks at Amherst Books that graciously agreed to bring copies of the book for you to hopefully buy and have a Professor Fish sign and to the folks of communication and to publicity and marketing, David in particular for a all the good work that they put in order for this to be known by the various constituencies of our community even before the event starts. Stanley Fish is a controversial figure who wears many hats. He is a legal scholar, he is a literary critic. A scholar of Milton who within the university has played a variety of roles. He was for a number of years at the University of California at Berkeley. He was also at Johns Hopkins. He is distinguished professor at Florida International University right now, a named chair, a distinguished professor, and he is a named chair visiting scholar at Yeshiva University in New York this semester. He has also been a columnist for the New York Times for more than a decade.
- [Fish] 18 years
- 18? 18 years, he's sometimes writing on a weekly basis and others in a less pressured way. It is important to remember that he, within the university, he has played a variety of roles because I think that's gonna come up. He has not only been a student because in order to get where he is, you have to have gone through being a student, a teacher that is a professor, but he has also been an administrator, at the university of Illinois, Chicago, Dean of Faculty?
- A Dean of Arts and Science
- Arts and sciences, which will probably come up in several moments during our conversation in his critique of the role, not only professors and the members of campus communities do, but also in responses that we get from the administration. I generally believe that in the back of a book, the blurbs as we call it in publishing is really publishing marshmallow you get friends of yours to say nice things about you. But in this book, the first, how to think about hate speech, campus speech, religious speech, fake news, post-truth and Donald Trump in the most recent by Professor Fish one of more than a dozen. There is a blurb that comes from the new Republic that I thought it would be a good idea to start with. It says the following, a scholar thrillingly authoritative, wholly convinced, giddy with aptitude, Fish isn't only one fish, Fish is in fact a whole school of fish. Fish the lawyer and dean, Fish the columnist and cultural critic, Fish of the right and Fish of the left, Fish the philosopher and polemicist and pended, Fish has written on virtually every vital cultural issue. You are not obliged to agree with him and you are not obliged to like him, but if you care about the enlarging necessity of contests in cultural discourse, then you are obliged to read him. I wanna start Stanley with,
- Well, let me just rest in that for a moment. Come on , here on. You don't get that every day.
- That's right. That the school of Fish sounded like Dr Zeus talking about professor the public intellectual. I wanna start the being you being this public intellectual but also positioned in the Academy as you are with a recent oped piece that you published in the Wall Street Journal, maybe not a month ago,
- Two weeks,
- Two weeks ago in which you talk about being invited and then dis-invited from Seton Hall and you see that you were not censored. The gist of it and we have invited you in not yet, dis-invited you here. So I'd like to start with this sense of what does it mean to be disinvited and why isn't that censorship?
- Well, I was disinvited I was called by a faculty member, also an administrator who told me that the Seton Hall University was about to inaugurate a new president and that it's part of the ceremonies. They wanted a series of lectures mocking the occasion and I was being invited to give the first one and I said, fine, but it depends on the date and whether or not my schedule can accommodate it. This gentleman told me that he would get back to me in two weeks or three weeks with a couple of dates, but, and he did, but not to give me dates, but to tell me that the invitation had been withdrawn. I asked why. And he said that a committee which did not meet in person but communicated its members, communicated with one another via email had decided that mine were not ideas that the Seton Hall community shouldn't be subjected to. And so we had a brief conversation. He was extremely embarrassed. Interestingly enough, he insisted that the invitation that he had issued to me over the telephone had been authorized by the provost. And that she had in this case decided that this particular battle was not one she wanted to take on which as an administrator, as an administrator, I fully understand a decision like that one, you know, I'm going to save my energy for whatever it is that I believe is crucial to Seton Hall University either having Stanley Fish here or not having Stanley Fish here is not crucial to Seton Hall University. And I think that's absolutely right. She has subsequently apologized and I met with her last week and I was given an entirely different version of the story and I don't wanna make a judgment between the two versions. I'll leave them with you. She told me that it was an instance of signals being crossed that the person who called me was not supposed to have made the invitation, but was supposed to have done something else. I don't know what that something else might've been because in the Academy, someone doesn't call you up to say, we're thinking of inviting you. If we did in fact invite you, would you accept? Doesn't work that way. And I didn't ask her at this lunch because it wasn't the appropriate context in which to pose the question, well, if there were signals crossed, what preventing what prevented you from issuing the invitation anyway? So that's the entire story and apology that wasn't an apology. But an apology that passed the buck to someone who's signals had been crossed. There it is now the ideas that Seton Hall didn't want to hear, at least according to what I was told, when the shame faced, a gentlemen called me to disinvite me. The ideas were the ideas that I've been retailing for many years, which could be summed up as the idea, for example, that while social justice you're sure you're a good thing, it's not an academic good thing and that no academic activity should be in any way concerned with or associated with issues of social justice. Now that's a position that a lot of people would disagree with. And presumably someone on the committee disagreed with that position strongly. At least that's the only reading I have now. Why wasn't I censored? I wasn't sensitive because first of all, I had no right to be invited to Seton Hall. That is, I didn't have the right to be invited and I had no right not to be invited. It was just the administrative decision made on both ends as far as I can tell rather clumsily by the administrators, which is no surprise to me at all. Since academic administrators are in general a clumsy lot. And I say that of course, very much aware that I was one myself. So that's the context in which I don't think I was censored or anything like that. Now everything depends on the reason for which the invitation was withdrawn. Was it withdrawn? Because I had, it had been discovered that I had a criminal past. Now let me assure you that I don't have a criminal past. No. So it was re it was withdrawn, I said in the oped for reasons that were nonintellectual and therefore non-education. And that's the objection as I have to the entire experience. It turns out that in the same week that this happened to me, and you may have read about this some students at Williams College, I'm not sure how many of them sent a letter to the William College community in which they pledged to boycott all courses in the English department that were not centered on race. And I took that to be an action parallel in many ways to be action at Seton Hall had taken with respect to me. Why? Because the decision as to what course or courses to take or to support was again, being made on non-educational nonacademic and frankly political grounds. It turns out, so happens at the last course I taught in the liberal arts arena was a course called Major Poets of the 17th Century. And the poets I taught were John Milton, John Dunn, Ben Johnson, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. Not, I think at least that could be quarreled with an association with the term major. And of course there are issues of race that turn up in the works of those poets as some of you will no doubt know. Ben Johnson wrote a mask that is a court production called the mask of blackness in which a queen in and 11 of her handmaidens appeared in black face. Milton in one of his prose tracks just said that Asian and Semitic peoples were particularly prone to being slaves in a poem called Anagram John Dunn writing a parody of the usual celebration of the lady's virtues. And beauty's described his mysteries as having a complexion that made more's look white. So there's that stuff, but that's about it. if I were gonna teach a course on those poets, I might name those things. But if I were to focus on those things and tease them out into the content of the course, I would be advocating my pedagogical responsibility because that's not what most of the poems written by these poets are about. What you should do I said in this oped is teach the material and not in fact tailor the material according to some political or social pressure that is now being exerted.
- So I wanna continue on or pursue the idea of the current generation of students that is activist and has a vision of what should and shouldn't be taught and ask you to summarize, some of the views that you have and you expressed in the book about microaggressions, about trigger warnings and so on. I myself joined in some of these views, there is no way one can teach the Bible or Shakespeare without including all the aggression, the violence, the blood that it goes in it, if you believe, however, that the alerting students to what is about to come is a coddling to them. And it's not what we should do on campuses.
- Well, I don't think it cuddles them. That's the argument of Jonathan Haidt. And God, I know this guy Reg Lukeneoff in their book. They don't think students should be cuddled. And therefore they are against trigger warnings and such things. I have no interest in students being cuddled or not being coddled. In fact, in a very strong sense, I have no interest in students. That is what I mean by that is I want to give students the experience of a course that introduces them to materials they were previously unfamiliar with or not as familiar with this perhaps they might be at the end of the course. To put it in its maximum form I want to teach a course such that the students who take it could, if they decided to turn around next week and teach it. That's my goal. Now what the sensibilities of my students are, what they are feeling, what their inner lives are like. How many grandmothers have died during the semester? There's the three grandmother rule that you know, that you tell your students only three grandmothers that's per semester as an excuse. I couldn't care less about that. I'm only interested in putting these materials on the table, whether I'm teaching poetry or more often these, the more often these days teaching cases and of course on, let's say the two I teach most often are jurisprudence and religion and the law. So I'm interest in putting these materials before the students and joining with them in an attempt to analyze what's going on and atomize the structure, the history, the tradition do some comparative work. How is this done in other precincts and other countries and stuff like that. That's what I do in class. That's what I assume everyone does in class. That's the only thing you should do in class. Now, occasionally it might be the cases, it was the semester that something occurs to you and you say it. I was teaching a course called Law at the Movies this semester. And one of the movies I showed and then we discussed was the movie the people versus Larry Flint, which is about pornography and about a famous Supreme court case, a Hustler v. Falwell, which I happen to believe was incorrectly decided. But that's a whole other set of questions. But I told the students at before they saw the movie that this is not only a movie about pornography, it's a pornographic movie. And I thought, you know, they should know that, but that's about it. So that would be the limit, I suppose of my activity in the way of issuing trigger warnings behind all of this is a more basic point. Do students have rights? The answer to that question is a flat no. Students don't have any rights. They certainly don't have a right to participate in their own education. They certainly don't have a right to choose or monitor the materials being offered in the course. Now, of course, there were some instructors who in fact do give students that, right? I am not one of them. And I look with, I look askance at those instructors who do but that's the instructors prerogative students have one right that I would be willing to stand by. And that's the right to competent instruction. And by competent instruction, I mean first instruction given to you by someone who is aware of the present status of the field or discipline, whatever it is who comes to class prepared, who creates a syllabus in a series of readings that in sequence illustrate and lead to the exploration of the large issues that are the content of the subject matter Whatever it is. If you're not getting that as a student and in fact if you're getting rather some instructor, some instructor who comes in and tells you what his or her political views are or anything in that direction and you're not getting competent instruction because you're no longer being instructed by professional academic, you are instructed by a political agent, which you never want to experience.
- Did you include political views in your classes?
- Of course, political views, any view can be brought into the classroom so long as it is interrogated in an academic way.
- Including yours?
- Well, I don't bring my views into the classroom in a direct way except, Oh I did in fact tell my students that I thought that the hustler case was wrongly decided. But I invited a good friend of mine from NYU who in fact had a role in the movie and is a noted first amendment scholar and who has views directly opposed to mine. And so we had a good time at that.
- Can I ask you, I'm gonna pursue that topic of rights on campus and outside it, but before I go there, could you offer us a diagnosis or an explanation of why the current generation of students has the values that he does in presents and fights for those values in its own way. How has, in how many years have you been teaching?
- 56.
- And how have the students
- Okay 57. One of those incredible numbers.
- the student's body changed in that incredible number of years.
- Well, what's happened is that the student body, at least some of them, not all of them, some students have stepped into the role that was always there, but was usually occupied in past generations by the church, by donors to the university, by parents, by legislatures. And that role is the role of attempting to take over the university or the university space and make it reflect their values and concerns. The Academy has been fighting back against such attempts at hostile takeovers for a very long time, it is the reason, for example, that the American Association of University Professors was formed in the first two decades of the 20th century. But now the subversive, what I would think of as the subversive forces, the forces that would turn the Academy away from it's special assignment and instead make it the vehicle of what I would say is something alien.
- What's that special assignment?
- This special assignment is very simple abstract. It's to advance knowledge in the social sciences, humanities, physical sciences, mathematical sciences, computer sciences that and therefore to attempt to shift through the alternative and competing views of what is correct and true in those disciplines and discuss and analyze the arguments pro and con that are being put forward. That's what we do in the Academy. What we don't do in the Academy or at least what we don't do in my Academy. What we don't do in my Academy is move toward the kind of conclusion that then leads to action in the real world. For me, the Academy is that place where you would turn things over in a deliberative manner and stopped short of the waters of action. That doesn't mean that what you give students or introduced students to might not lead them later on once the door is closed in the last class, has concluded to take very specific actions, but you can't design that. The only thing you can as an instructor can design is of course that delivers the pedagogical goods and the pedagogical goods are, as I described them, you introduce the students to the life of a deliberative churning over over a number of issues. You equip them with analytical skills and you invite them to exercise those skills in daily conversations in class and in projects that handed in at the end of the course.
- What do you do With a student, Stanley as of today in a class that shows that political bend and the need to push the professor in a much more ideologically engaged way, which is often the case.
- What would you be surprised if I tell you that no student in my class ever does any such thing? Because
- I'm not surprised.
- Right, there are many, everyone teaches differently and there are many ways of teaching that can be differently effective. And to some extent they are functions of temperament and personality. My method is very simple. I scare students to death as soon as possible while letting them know that while doing it, I am a figure of fun myself. Now the wonderful thing about this is even when I let them know that I am aware of how ridiculous my posture is when I bark orders at them, it works anyway. That's the whole wonderful thing about rhetoric as you, those of you who remember choices partner's tale may recall rhetoric can work even and in fact, often when those upon whom it is being worked are aware of it. So that's the way I teach. So very early on, my students know what not, what kinds of questions are not going to be posed here and what kinds of questions will be considered.
- You will have the benefit of old age if I might put it that way. But somebody who is 40 or 45 teaching today, maybe either not yet tenured or on the road to tenureship.
- Yeah.
- Might not have the benefit of the white hair saying whatever he wants and not the fearing the risk of a reaction.
- Well, I started teaching, I got my PhD early at the age of 23, and I was the same exact teacher then as I am now. And since I was teaching graduate students from the beginning, I was fortunate enough to have that experience. Many of the students that I would teaching were older than I, it didn't make any difference. It didn't make any difference at all. But I don't recommend this method to others. So let's take the hypothetical of a teacher who is not me which we may perhaps thank God are many. Let's take someone who is more how shall we say, amiable in his self presentation and less insistent in the pedagogical method. And then someone asks a question which is in fact not a question that is either to the point or in fact is to any academic point at all at this moment perhaps and only at this moment the phrase teachable moment, which I utterly despise comes to mind. You can take advantage of that. I mean, if you can do it artfully and you can say, well, you know, that's an interesting question and it's an urgent question. That is the questions that students ask that don't belong in the classroom nevertheless can be an often are urgent questions. So you say, look, that's an urgent question. In some ways our society needs to take it up and attempt to answer it. But let me try to explain to you why that's not gonna happen here and why it shouldn't happen here. And then have that discussion. At which point a student will say, as a student did say today when I spoke in professor Daniel Gordon's class Daniel was a professor of history at UMass Amherst as many of you will know. And a student raised the question, actually, the question that you raised. Well aren't there many politically charged topics that come up in classes and are you gonna ban them all to which my answer of course is I'm not gonna ban any of them. I'm just gonna insist that you interrogate them in an academic way so that conversation can occur and the point can be made perhaps in a more useful way than the brutal way that I usually employ.
- Can you tell me about a teacher, not a professor, tell me a teacher that you had in your early years that is utterly unlike you, but had a deep influence in the way you think.
- That's a hard one because to my knowledge which I'm sure this is finally not true, but I don't know. The truth is I've not been a disciple of anyone. On the other hand, I do remember two teachers very well. One was my high school teacher in English by the name of a woman by the name of Sarah Flannigan who was rigorous and no-nonsense. And it was the first person who said to me when I handed in something she said to me something like, well you're pretty good at this. And I'd never heard that from anyone before. And when you're 15 or 16, or 17 years old and everyone who comes to your house that is friends of your parents are saying, and what are you gonna be and what are you going to do? And you haven't thought of anything to be. And the possible then suddenly occurs to me that you might in the end be nothing at all. So that when this, when Sarah Flannigan told me you do this and you can do it fairly well, I latched onto it and never let go. The other teachers that I'll mention briefly was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and by the name of Maurice Johnson an 18th century scholar who's bearing and urbanity and wit and saltatorial style. I was so taken by that I wanted to imitate him. I have never succeeded.
- You said that students have no rights
- Right
- on campus. Do faculty have any rights? I want to talk about the section in your book where you reflect in a number of important recent cases of faculty members having made statements, that the reached out reach within the campus, but outside of the campus walls and reverberated in society in a variety of ways, resulting sometimes in the dismissal of a particular professor, and I wanted get you also to that the rights of administrators or in administrators who would say, I defend the right of this or that faculty member who said something that the administrator find disgusting and in your view the fact that that administrator added that second line is in itself disgusting.
- Absolutely, that is absolutely to put it simply, you don't first defend the right of your faculty member to say something and then turn around and condemn what he said by what I call the administrative two-step. That is first, yes, he has or she has the right to say it, but believe me, I'm on the right side. I'm a virtuous person, I'm gonna condemn it just as the world must condemn it. That is really weaselly behavior. And many administrators unfortunately engage in that behavior. And partly they engage in that behavior because administrators by and large, don't know what business they are in. For example, a lot of administrators believe that they're in the free speech business. And as I say in the title of my campus chapter in this book, free speech is not an academic value, but since many administrators don't understand it, when a free speech challenge comes their way, they get paralyzed. And after being paralyzed, they go to their office of legal counsel, which is populated by persons who have only one thing in mind, avoid lawsuits. So they get very bad advice from the office of legal counsel. But if they only understood what their job is, which is to ensure the health and growth of the academic enterprise, they wouldn't take what I call the free speech bait. And they wouldn't say things like, well, we must allow him to say what he said as a private citizen but I want you to know that we condemn it. Because when you say when you're a dean or a provost or a chancellor and you condemn someone's point of view, even as you acknowledged that you have no capacity to dismiss him or her, you are positioning yourself politically and because you occupy and recognizable office, you are positioning the university politically. The university should never be positioned politically because once it's A, it's not any longer doing its job and B, it makes itself vulnerable to all of those constituencies that always want to assault the university.
- So you said that day you couldn't care less about the politics of students. Could you care more about the politics of professors? Should professors within the institutions have political views that are expressed outside of the classroom? And even as you do, I see a two phase here on your site, if I might use that aspect. You don't get into the political side, but you write opiate paces constantly in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that might put Yeshiva University or Florida International into a uncomfortable position because of something Professor Fish said, should a professor have been encouraged to become a much more public figure into what extent that position compromises his or her freedom as an individual? Are we professors a private citizens on campus or are we members of that academic community exclusively concerned with the production manufacturing packaging of knowledge?
- A book I wrote in 2008, the title of it kind of answers that question and the title of that book was "Save the World on your Own Time." "Save the World on your Own Time" by which I meant it's perfectly all right for you as an academic to write op-eds or letters to the editor or chair committee which is pursuing some controversial policy. So long as you don't do it on the university's dime so long as while you're acting in the university, you are performing activities that you are both trained and paid to perform. Both those words are very important, trained and paid. So to answer your question directly, I don't think that should be any consequences visited by a university and a professor who on his or her own time as a private citizen gets to say something in print that gathers or provokes a great deal of attention, some of which may be reflected back in a way on the university. Again, that's why the, what I call the administrative two-step a moment ago is performed because universities are aware of the extent to which they are shall we say vulnerable to shifts in public opinion and they wish quite understandably to push that vulnerability or to minimize that vulnerability rather as much as possible. So that while I understand administrators who quickly condemn the speech whose protection they have just announced I believe that it's a very bad thing for them to do but of course, I've already said that. Now there's a case that came up. Some of you may have seen it last week. The University of Indiana, a faculty member by the name of Eric Rasmusen who's I think in the business school and perhaps also in the department of political economy, has a private server in which he says things like African American students shouldn't even apply to first tier institutions because they don't have the capacity to do the work required there. He says, he asks a question rhetorically in an essay he wrote women ruining the Academy and he gives the answer in the title probably. He has another piece in which he explains that all males, all geniuses males or almost all geniuses are males and he says all these kinds of things. And of course, what happens, it gets publicized by someone perhaps by him as far as I don't really know the backstory. And there's a demand that he be fired and there's a demand that he be fired. Now the provost at Bloomington, Indiana, Bloomington performed a perfect version of the administrative two-step. She said again he spoke as a private citizen and therefore we as a university cannot prohibit or sensor his words comma, vial and stupid as they are. Ah, listen to that vile and stupid as they are. She should have been fired. At least you would have if I had the power to do so in the next moment. Now as long as you're asking, mucin is not structuring his teaching according to his strong political, ideological views. There's no reason at all academically to move against him.
- And who decides that? Who can monitor that? Should somebody come in and legislate on how that syllabus is built or what the content is?
- Well, most universities have colleges and universities have processes through which teaching is assessed for example student evaluations. But I should add that I have been bitterly opposed to student evaluations since they first appeared to me in 1965 at the University of California at Berkeley in something then called the slate supplement. I think that student evaluations are a terrible thing because they're terrible thing because there's so many reasons. Most of the people who fill them out do so out of for negative reasons, reasons of bitterness, disappointment and hostility. The idea that someone who has taken a course in one for a semester is therefore competent to judge the performance of a teacher that is in many cases the performance of the teacher that is the course that you have taken will only be realized in your imagination years later. This nothing good to be said about teaching evaluations. Nothing good to be said, but they're there. And my ranting against them isn't going to remove them. So they are there. And in all the cases I write about in the book, the Amy wax case at the University of Pennsylvania, the Steven Soleda case at the University of Illinois at Urbana, the James Tracy case at Florida Atlantic University, all of these people said things and took positions which made most of their colleagues in a good percentage of the student body furious. But on the other hand, all of the teaching evaluations for these three people,
- Was the problem?
- was the problem and show that their courses were not made into soap boxes for their political views that they studied the material that they fairly graded assignments that were reasonable and so forth and so on. So, on the other hand, if it can be demonstrated that a teacher is using his or her classroom for the purpose of furthering personal, ideological partisan or even moral views, then there's a reason to move against that person.
- I want to, in the interest of time, Stanley, I wanna move out of campus and into social media where I assume we're going to get into even more intense ideas from you and you write about them in your book. There is the Mark Zuckerberg has testified before Congress
- Many times.
- many times, and he has suggested that there will come a time when artificial intelligence will be a sophisticated enough to stop hate speech on Facebook. But until then, he and no one in his company will legislate what should or shouldn't be a posted. On the other hand, you have Twitter. which has moved forward in deciding what should or should not be posted, particularly on this election. I can do this. On this election given the record that we have of the 2016 meddling of foreign governments and the nasty voices that some candidates, who eventually became presidents, have been expressing. So I'm not a nostalgist I think of a time when social media wasn't there when I arrived to Amherst in 1993 email was barely starting, there wasn't anything like what we have today. And there were lines outside the office for students to be able to see you and talk, etc, instead of sending you a text at 12 o'clock at night.
- Right, right.
- So I'm interested in particular about your vision of how social media is excessive, offers maybe too much information. Do we have and you mentioned something in the book, instead of having censorship by the absence of material, you have censorship by the over abundance of material. I remember if I can just stop you there. I remember, I'm an immigrant from Mexico and I remember arriving to the United States in the mid 80s and thinking how incredible it was, the amount of cereal boxes that I could find on a supermarket. It was an embarrassment of richness. And I chose one,
- Which one?
- Raised in brand. And I have gone with Raised in brand since then.
- Can't go on with grape nuts.
- You all this to see that I love the possibility of the possibilities that that supermarket offered to me. But eventually I went back to the very simple. So I want you to delve into the time in which we live, where censorship is actually a reversal and abundance that can paralyze you and even nullify us.
- Well, I must say that I am in a nostalgist. I've long for the days when there were three television networks and other what antediluvian features of life. But the question you pose is a serious one and all of the questions that you've posed, of course are serious ones. The answer requires me to identify what shall we call it, a repeated mantra or affirmation that often accompanies celebrations of freedom of speech. And that is that the more speech, the better, the more speech, the better. In first amendment law as some of you will know this view, the more speech the better is famously represented by two statements made by Justice Brandeis. The first statement is that sunshine is the best of disinfectants by which he means that if bad ideas or pernicious ideas, dangerous ideas are let out into the world and into the light of day daylight will show us what they are and they will wither away and die. And as I said, as I say in my book, the only counter argument to that is all of recorded history. Because exactly the reverse happens all the time, which isn't necessarily an argument for censorship, but it certainly is an argument against what I think of as the totally unfounded optimism of a statement like sunshine is the best of this the vectors. The other statement is very much the same of Brandeis is he says the remedy for bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence which is I suppose an optimistic version of Gresham's law but that doesn't work either. The internet has in effect given us a technological realization of the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of ideas, which is one of the phrases that always accompanies celebrations of the first amendment was introduced in the 1920s in a descending opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes. And it imagines and I think this is relevant. It imagines the life of decision making as taking place in a setting like a new England town meeting where there are a bunch of people, all of whom you have known for most of you are life who's sitting around trying to decide whether or not the municipality can afford a new sewer system. That's the model. That's the model underlying most ACLU type celebrations of the first amendment. But when the marketplace of ideas becomes populated by billions and trillions of ideas without any mechanism at all for assessing them or judging them, then we don't have that kind of town hall town meeting rather scenario. We have something much more insidious. The villain here, Oh, that may be too strong a word, which is why I was searching for another, but I didn't find it. The villain here is the idea of transparency. One of the worst ideas in the history of the world. Transparency. Anyone who's ever been married knows that the last thing you wanna be as transparent, it won't last two weeks. Okay, so transparency is a bad idea. What transparency advocates and Zuckerberg is one and Jack Dorsey used to be one and several of the other CEOs used to be the transparency is the people are beginning to see that transparency isn't all that it was cracked up to be. But one of the polemics that comes along with transparency is that if in fact we can remove from our interactions with data gatekeepers and filtering mechanisms that are provided by experts and or long established institutions, we will come closer to knowing the truth because the data then will come to us unencumbered by any process of selectivity performed by so called experts. Okay I sometimes call this the romance of the data and us, you know, kind of moving out into the sunset, just us and the data. But here's what really happens if in fact you removed gatekeeping mechanisms if you no longer are interested in regulating the flow of data or the flow of speeches that might be which are two concepts that often belong together and you remove all of the gatekeepers what you will have, especially in the internet era is millions, indeed billions of pieces of data unrelated, each of which is unrelated to anything. And each of which is making its claim to be absolutely true and relevant. 'Cause once you get rid of all the regulating and selecting and the gatekeeping and the filtering, you have a world in which information just lies around billions of pieces of it, like pieces of Lego waiting for some troll or predator to arrange some of it in a narrative that can do some form of insidious work. And we know that that's exactly what's happening. So we don't want transparency because of this is what it leads to and you don't want the mantra of the more speech, the better now pursuing us into the internet era, it's simply isn't true. The more speech, the better. It's as we say false.
- I wanna pursue that thought, but I wanna bring an image here that might be useful. I teach a course on selfies. And
- On what?
- Selfies. You know,
- You do?
- I do.
- They let you? And they let you do it?
- Here at Amherst.
- Who did, who was responsible? Come on, let's have a committee.
- And I the students, there's I do know a proliferation of selfies, the connection between the selfie and the self portrait.
- Have you taken a selfie?
- I've taken many selfies.
- Never took one.
- Alright, so
- Abstinence,
- I asked the students if they are generation given the amount of selfies that they take is more narcissistic than the generations that have come before? And one student answered, it's not that we are more narcissistic, but we have the means to express that narcissism thanks to technology in ways that the previous generations did not have. The question that I have for you has to do with the thermometer of hate so to speak. Is there more hate in the world because of the channels we're talking about hate speech one of the topics of your book, is there more hate in the world because of the channels to express it? Be it that social media, I know it's varieties or it is always, it has always been a constant. One of the things that you always say in your book is that fake news and we'll get there in a second. Fake news, there's nothing new about it. It has been fake news have been fake news for a long time. So the amount of hate speech has been constant, throughout history, but we're now capable of a registering it to monitoring it maybe without the sensors or the authorities that you're talking about. Is that the case?
- Well, it's no longer localized. I would agree that hate speech and hate the aversion that we all feel in a variety of ways towards the other that's always been a feature of human life in the general battle between that we see in a social philosophy these days between tribalism on the one hand and cosmopolitanism on the other hand whatever whatever, wherever you stand on that question and I am myself a strong tribalist. But wherever you stand on that question, you have to say that tribalism always survives and comes back. And with tribalism, you always have something that you might call hate. And it can take any number of forms and has in our own history, you know, Irish, no Irish need not apply. No Jews allowed. I walked daily, when I was a kid in Rhode Island pass the country club not a country club, a beach club, rather, this was on the beach that had a policy that no Jews were allowed. And one day I was about 13 years old, I decided I would go into this beach club, which didn't have arm guards or anything. So I went into the beach club and wandered around and very shortly someone came over to me and said, are you a member? And I said, yes. And then he said, and what's your name? And the only thing I could think of was the name of a friend of mine, I said, Harvey Goldman.
- You were thrown out.
- That was the end of that. But now, yeah, but that was contained. This was one beach house along the Narragansett Rhode Island shore. No one thought very much about it. There it was, everybody knew that there were these forms of discrimination. But now as your question suggests not only do they have more than a local habitation, they have a universal habitation. But it's apparently very easy to set up websites that present to the weighting world or to the innocent world your forms of wait.
- Before I go to the next book, why didn't you use your name? I think you used a friend's name? I mean Stanley Fish also sounds Jewish.
- Yeah, does it? I don't know why. I just thought, well, I shouldn't tell him who I am. So I'll think of some other name. And that was the name that popped into my head. Let's call it a failure of the imagination.
- Is Trump a failure of the imagination too or at triumph?
- Oh, well, Trump was a triumph of a certain kind. No, I mean this I write in one of my chapters. Well, actually Trump is a recurring figure in almost every chapter in this book.
- Yeah some outrageous things are said in there. And well, I don't say any outrageous things about Trump 'cause it's not an anti-Trump book in any way. But what I do say and try to do in one of the chapters is analyze Trump's success as a political figure, especially with respect to the kind of speech he engages in. Because this is a book about speech. And when I came up with the term to describe and perhaps account for the success Trump has in certain ways and with certain populations. And what I say he is perfected. And when I say perfected, I'm not necessarily saying that he has done this through deliberative thought. It may be instinct, it may be a combination of the two, something that I call principled irresponsibility. Now, what is principle of irresponsibility? Most politicians, that is almost all politicians, except for president Trump I have at least a minimal concern about reconciling what they say today with what they said yesterday and perhaps with what they said last week or last month.
- But he has no interest in them.
- And they are called to account on that matter. Trump is interested in only one thing. And that is the moment, the rhetorical moment, the moment in which he's putting someone down or giving them a nickname or retailing a conspiracy theory that he's picked up from some source. And then he just uses that and gets out of that moment and then goes into the next moment. And when she might perform in ways that entirely contradict the performance of a moment ago, but has the same effect. So in a way, Trump is kind of like a super Cartesian. He invents like the French, he invents the world not every morning but every minute the Trump world is invented every minute. Now the unfortunate thing for those who wish to oppose him is that when he does this, they respond by making arguments or they respond by saying, well, you said x a moment ago, but two days ago you said y? They haven't yet figured out that that's not the game he's playing. He's, and they're still playing the old game. When you're accountable for what you said and you supposedly have to have an argument or a reason for having said it, this has nothing to new. So long as his opponents are still operating on the basis of old rules and protocols that he has left behind, they will always be behind him. And by the way, I see no sign that any member of the democratic party or any group of Democrats has in fact fashioned away to either counter this because by and large, they haven't recognized it. They're gonna lose again.
- Do you believe that Trump Is not an exception in that after him, whenever that happens, we go back to the prior status quo? Or do you think instead that Trump, as you said presents new rules of speech, new rules in politics that inaugurated a new way that from here forward will be this status quo?
- Well Trump as many before me have said participates and participate strongly in something that has been happening for at least the last 50 years. And that is the expansion of executive power. A colleague of mine at Cardozo Law School by the name of David Rudenstine has written a very good book called "Difference", massive detailing of the ways in which the judicial difference, especially and also legislative difference to the executive has in effect created what George W. Bush actually it wasn't George W. Bush, but his advisers were calling the unitary presidency and we now have the unitary presidency being put forward in the current context of the impeachment hearings. Also the unitary presidency was a part of Richard Nixon's rhetoric when he was in the course of beings impeached. So one of Trump's lasting the effects of one of the lasting effects of his tenure may be the pushing forward again, the furthering of the expansion of the executive to the point where what Nixon once famously said, quote, if the president does it can't be a crime unquote may be in fact realized. The problem is that every person who occupies that office believes in the unitary executive, even when perhaps his or her outward demeanor doesn't suggest it. Obama believed in it. He really did and acted in accordance corn. So that the only thing that's gonna stop the emergence further emergence of the executive with almost unbridled power will be a reassertion by the Congress and perhaps by the judiciary of its part in the separation of powers bargain. And if I could predict whether or not that was gonna happen, I would be making a lot more money than I am.
- We're coming here to an end, at least for this part. We'll invite the audience to ask questions. There's a microphone here to my left and to the audiences, right. I have a couple of questions before that. One of them has to do when I mentioned that there's a few elements that to me sound or feel outrageous if they are less really to do with Trump in your book then with the way you present a certain arguments in that is the statement of you have been accused and you have always insisted probably inefficiently because you keep on being accused that you are a real activist and that all that is connected with postmodernism in one way or another. There's a moment in which you talk about how Trump said that he's was the largest crowds ever in the history of the America. And there was a reporter who described this a reporter that said, well, but the photograph show that that is not the case. And then he said, well, but this was information eventually went down to this was information given to me.
- [Stanley] Right? But then you stop that paragraph and you say, well, let's analyze this. And probably it could be seen as being a truth. What if there were no other events or the weather was, had taking a place in such a way that given this particular moment compared to others, it was the biggest crowd. That seems to me totally illogical.
- Illogical.
- Illogical.
- Why illogical?
- It seems to me that the photographs, empirical evidence show that compared to the Obama, inauguration and previous inaugurations not only Democrats, but Republicans, there were a lot of more more people. And in fact, in the Obama, the weather was much colder than during the second inauguration was much colder than during the first and hopefully only inauguration of Trump. So I don't, maybe you can explain that.
- Oh, sure, but I'll just repeat what I said in the book, which is obviously wasn't persuasive to you. What I'm saying is that if you just declare that something is bigger than something else, my crowd is bigger than yours there are always a set of presuppositions about how the question of size is being assessed. And what the reporter you referred to and what the press in general did was just point the finger point. There they are there. There they all are. Well, I was saying that's possibly a relatively crude method of determining size. You might wanna determine size by first factoring in what the weather was like in the various, at the moment of the various inaugurations. Or there might be, I'd forget which ones I come up with. I come up with a bunch of possible alternative measures, which are kind of like Kellyanne Conway's alternative facts. They're alternative measures within which one might then make a statement about crowd size. You can do that. You can do that. That is, you can change the frame of reference and make your declaration, which from the point of view of one frame of reference seemed obviously false instead seem at least possibly true. Now, you'll recall in that paragraph and then just after I finished this little exercise, I say, now, don't get mad at me.
- I'm not making these arguments.
- I'm not making these arguments.
- It sounds like a rhetorical approach.
- Well, of course I'm not making these arguments. I'm just imagining how they possibly could be made. Now this gets back to the question, gets us to the question finally of fake news. If alternative facts can be manufactured or can be thought up would be better 'cause manufacturing is a pejorative word. If alternative facts could be thought of alternative ways of looking at something, seeing something, assessing something, even counting something, what is it that enables us to choose between if we can between these alternative accounts? The answer that I gave in the book is we must look to those sources of information that have throughout the decades and perhaps centuries earned our trust. One of the things that has happened, as you know, in the last 20,3 0 years has been, and this is the title of a book, the death of expertise. That is the debunking of university expertise, professional expertise, medical expertise, scientific expertise.
- Trump agrees.
- Now,
- Has eliminated all that.
- That is what produces fake news, not summed, intention to deceive, which of course may be a part of it, but the deauthorization of traditional sites, that is S-I-T-E-S traditional sites of authority. Some of you are old enough as I am, although you're, none of you, I think is as old as I am to remember Walter Cronkite, the CBS commentator, who signed off each night by saying, and that's the way it is. And people believed him and they believed him even in those cases, when it turned out that some of the things that he reported were in fact not accurate, why did they believe him? Because they believed that he, and also in general, the press had the aspiration to get things right even if at times it didn't get things right. The difference between I think news that is fake and news that you might rely on is the difference between sources that don't care whether or not the facts are as they are reported and other sources which have the aspiration to in fact report on what is actually the case.
- Are you advocating or you believe Stanley, that we can go back to a time when there is one anchor and one channel that delivers the news given the fractured compartmentalize multilayered polyphonic society in which we live?
- Very well put. I don't know whether it could happen and it wouldn't have to be one. It could just be the industry. If the industry in general were regarded as the kind of engage in the kind of activity that you could trust. Again, not that you could trust it's every product, but you could trust the spirit in which the product was produced. That I think we need to regain because as many philosophers have pointed out without a general trust underlying our operations, every one of us is at sea when it comes to what we believe, what we take to be a true and false. So to my view, whether or not this is possible and you suggest that it may not be the universities must regain and to some extent retain their reputation for being places where the truth about matters in the physical sciences, humanities and physical sciences are in fact sought and sometimes found. And of course, universities that have allowed themselves to be politicized. This goes back to an early point. We'll never have that trust whatsoever, but I think the trust can be regained. And I think that at a certain point although this is a prediction without information that is, I couldn't support it if you asked me to, the experts will strike back.
- This is time to have members of the audience ask questions if anybody's interested again, their microphone is to my left. If you, Richard, if you wanna come here, I wanna ask you as Richard is making his way in front of everybody, if there is, if you could say, that was my last question to you, Stanley that free speech is more at peril and that maybe has already been undermined by the way your argument is built in this book, in an age of fake news and alternative facts, where that a teenager in an Ohio, basement can make a statement that takes as much validity as a scholar coming out from any university because it is presented in that marketplace of ideas that is the internet, are we to be worried about the state of the freedom of speech today when compared to the civil rights era, the civil war period and so on?
- Well, I might call with the assumption behind your question. My argument in this book is that free speech is the source of our problems or at least if some of our problems. And it's not this thing that we should protect, first of all, as I argue here free speech is not a distinct philosophical thing. It's a doctrine made up of a bunch of rhetorics that figure and operate differently in different contexts. As I said many, many years ago in another title of another book, there's no such thing as free speech. There are free speech platitudes, free speech slogans which do rhetorical and political work. The overvaluation of free speech given to us by the American Civil Liberties Union and others is I think responsible for the inability of many to deal with a world in which they're supposedly Eden has arrived and there is more and more speech and then it turns out that more and more speech, more the mantra, the more speech, the better is in fact not true. I would hope that that would lead to a reevaluation of the kind that we see often in European countries. And in Canada but not here where the value of regulated and curtailed speech of speech that has been vetted is asserted above the value of a non entity called free speech.
- Please.
- Yes, thank you. I wanted to address the question of the classroom and the question of politics in the classroom. I'm not sure the ideal of a sort of nonpolitical teacher is really possible or desirable.
- Well, I am one.
- So
- So I'm possible I may not be desired.
- I mean in the sense of of universally the case. I mean, for example, I can understand someone teaching a course on general relativity and having strong political views that have nothing to do with the what's being taught in the class. But suppose someone is sticking of course on the fraction Russian revolution, then one might want, it might be desirable for the teacher to express the political position. And for the students, when I read books on those subjects, I want to know what political position they're coming from. And even in the case of the natural sciences, I mean, one of the examples I can cite is the question of the big bang theory. I mean, one of the people propounded, it was a Jesuit Priest and a lot of the discussion which was eventually settled on empirical grounds was also formulated by the sense that it possibly suggested a theistic creation narrative.
- Right?
- So my question is why wouldn't you necessarily want a teacher who said, I'm going to teach this subject, particularly in say history or philosophy or maybe even economics. And this is my point of view on it and you can reject it or not but that's my point of view.
- I really disliked that position. That is, it's the position in which you think you have insulated the class from politics of a certain kind by being upfront and honest about your politics and what you've really done when you do this is in fact legitimate the introduction of political perspectives in the classroom.
- But isn't that inevitable?
- No, it is not inevitable. It's inevitable that political issues will be attached to the material that you study, but those political issues can be discussed in academic ways. And in my earlier book, "Save the World on your Own Time" I had invented a very ugly word for how to do this. And what you do with any topic that comes into your classroom, political or not, is academisize it and why academisize it. I mean, detach the topic from the real, from its real world urgency where there's a policy to be decided upon and an action to be taken and instead re-insert the topic into what we might think of as academic urgency or what you wanna do is describe, analyze, compare, historicize and all of those things that we customarily do in our classrooms. So again, no topic should be interdicted. There's no topic that cannot be brought into the classroom. So long as it is regarded as the object of analysis and not as the object of either possible embrace or rejection. That's the distinction. That's the distinction. And it's easy. It's absolutely easy. I teach political texts all the time in courses on a political theory. And of course, political issues turn up in Supreme court case in every Supreme court case that you can imagine. But when I teach these materials and also in poetry, political issues are always turning up in the work of poets, both major and minor. But you can study them as opposed to in as opposed to using them as an occasion for making a decision about what to do in the world.
- [Student] Can I ask a brief follow up.
- Of course.
- As an administrator, how would you deal with a professor who was otherwise competent but did introduce his or her political views?
- Fire him?
- [Student] Were you fired at any point?
- No.
- Because you didn't mix the text and the
- 'Cause I also scared administrators to death.
- Yes. Please.
- Thank you Professor Fish..
- Sorry. I've recently been badly injured so it's hard for me sometimes to turn around, but here I am.
- Okay, I'm especially interested in your thoughts on trigger warnings. Guess kind of a application of how an institution like university is involved with Christians and free speech. And the instance you mentioned of showing a movie about pornography, which in fact was a pornographic film. I'm wondering what your thought was behind offering a trigger warning, so to speak then. And if you could give an example of a situation when you would not provide a trigger warning and what difference .
- That's the only situation in which I provided something that might be called a trigger warning. And I didn't do it with a sense that I was providing a trigger warning. In my class law in the movies I handed out, I hand out 15 to 25 questions that the students are to use as a guide when they watch the movie and think about it. And then each student has to pick one of the questions and write a brief one page, one and a half page paper every week. The first question that I put on the question sheet for The People vs. Larry Flynt is a Latin The People vs. Larry Flynt is not only a movie about pornography, it is itself pornographic. And then I said, is this something for which we should criticize the director or can you think of ways of defending the director's choice to produce his film in this way? So there wasn't effective trigger warning. But it was in the course of my pointing out something to the students, which I then wanted them to think about and write about. The trigger warning in so far as it was, one was not issued by me with a sense of the would the sense of the possible vulnerability of some of my students to pornographic images. Someone reported just this Tuesday when I had my final class. Apparently she didn't remember the questions because she sat down at Thanksgiving dinner with her family to watch The People vs. Larry Flynt. That wasn't a good idea and it wasn't, it wasn't a good idea because that's not the kind of thing you do at a Thanksgiving dinner. But you want to look in general, all of these slogans trigger warnings safe spaces, no platforming cultural appropriation, microaggressions they're all versions of the same demand which is the demand that we not learn anything we don't want to learn anything. There's something more complicated about the cultural appropriation argument. Cultural appropriation is a form of racism. And we could get into that would take a little bit. So I have no sympathy as you can tell whatsoever for any of these notions. Microaggressions. Sure. I'm sure that I have microaggressed against a significant number of persons in this audience because of some things that I have said and the manner in which I've said them. At which point I'm attempted to cite or quote the title of an old Eagles song, get over it. So that's you've come in a class, you'd take your lumps, whatever they are. I will say there was one point in my teaching career, this was long before anybody, this is good. This would have been in 1984 I was teaching at Columbia. And I was teaching a course on Milton and a young lady came up to me before the course started and she said, Mr Fish could I tell you about my religious convictions briefly, which she did, and identified herself as a member of a certain partisan sick. And she said, is there anything that I might read in the poetry and prose of Milton that would be antithetical to my religious convictions to which I responded yeah, just about everything. And she decided not to take the course. That was a perfectly reasonable thing for her to do. But does that answer your question?
- Thank you.
- Is that really a perfectly reasonable in the end, knowledge doesn't take place?
- Well, it depends on whether, it depends on the value you hold that you place on religious faith. There's a chapter nobody ever, I get interviewed about this book, no one ever talks about the religion chapter and you haven't talked about. Religious faith is not like other things. To those whose lives are founded in it they don't wanna lose it. Let me give you a very quick example. My favorite case in law is called Mozert v. Hawkins It was a case, I think in the fifth circuit in Ohio, and it was a suit, a cause of action brought by one of my favorite people in all of the legal world. A young mother by the name of of Vicky Smith. And what Vicky was protesting was the fact that her six year old child was required or seven year old child, I forget what, no, it would've been in the sixth grade. How old, how old are people in the sixth grade?
- 12.
- 12, okay. 12 year old child was required to read in an assigned book called "The Prentice Hall Critical Reader." That's what it was Vicky Frost not Vicky Smith, the "Prentice Hall Critical Reader", which contain articles on, you know gender differences, crane articles on witchcraft and some people who worship Satan, but also contained a lot of other things. Now she was told by the superintendent of Hawkins County that the course, these materials were taught, but they weren't taught in a way that advocated any of them. Rather they were taught in a way that was designed to introduce children to the idea that there were many ways of thinking about important issues in the world. And what he said to her is Mrs Frost, you have not understood the difference between indoctrination and exposure. And what she said was immortal. She said, the distinction between indoctrination and exposure is an artifact of the liberalism that is oppressing me. Now, that's really good. That's really good. And as she pointed out, she didn't object. This is what totally flummoxed the other people who in the legals, she didn't object to individual essays. She projected to the entire project of teaching so that her daughter could make up her own mind. She didn't want her daughter to make up her own mind. She wanted her daughter to remain in the faith. Now before you tried out the usual liberal common places to condemn her, think a bit about her. She was a very smart woman and she knew what it was that she wanted for her child. And she knew also that liberal assumptions about being exposed to ideas and then developing the strength of mind to choose between them these assumptions were her enemy. Remember that case? It's really, it's a really important case. Religion is not like anything else.
- Go ahead.
- Yeah. So I'm gonna preface this question by saying I often, when I'm reading you the first time through, I either don't understand the argument or I think it's gotta be wrong and I reread, I reread and eventually I have an aha moment. Pieces fall together. Oftentimes it's actually students who helped me see it. I'm hoping that'll happen again. So you recently, I think you were talking about, I think you are making an argument that decisions by universities or college with respect to their investments are not moral. They're sort of not moral decisions. They don't, you shouldn't be morally judging them for them.
- Correct.
- Given the limited nature of the goals that a college or a university has, all they have to worry about is what would it mean to be a good steward of the college.
- It's called endowment?
- Right. And that struck me. I didn't understand that argument because, so let me just give you an analogy and tell me what's wrong with it. I'm a homeowner as a homeowner, I wanna be a good steward in my house, but that doesn't seem to me to let me off the hook when I'm making decisions about who to hire. Like it doesn't let me off the hook if I decide to hire someone who treats their employees really badly, underpays them, even if their work's a little bit better than someone who treats their employees really great. It seems like that is, I can't be morally indiscriminate about the means to my ends. It seems like moral judgment still has a place there. And why isn't that also the case with colleges and universities, even if it is true that they have the goals that you say they do?
- Well, I think the best answer to this was given the worst answer I've seen. It was given by Andrew Faust who at this time was the president of Harvard University and she was responding to the demands by some students, no doubt, some faculty too that the university divest itself of fossil fuels docs on the reasoning. And the reasoning is strong involved on the reasoning that fossil fuels are endangering the environment to the extent that they perhaps are ultimately endangering the planet. And that's a pretty big argument. And not when easily dismissed or it not one dismissed at all. What Drew Fall said in a statement is that she was going to resist any effort to politicize the operations of those who oversee the endowment. She said that's not their job. Their job is to grow the endowment so that we, that is Harvard which only has about $128 billion or something so that Harvard can better serve its educational mission. To me that's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. That you don't decide that you're gonna divest from stocks that are associated with fossil fuels. You don't decide that you're gonna divest from stocks that have some relationship to the state of Israel. You shouldn't have decided all of those years ago to divest from stocks that in some way were related to South Africa. You remember that, all that's just wrong. And it's wrong because it's mistaking the nature of your enterprise.
- Right, but so I'm a homeowner, so
- I don't care forget the homeowner analogy.
- But then you're not helping me right.
- All right, okay. You said something in your example that the person who treats his or her employees badly still did a better job. You hire that person.
- So if someone says, look, you shouldn't have hired them. They're treating their employees really crummy. I say none of your business because my job is to be a good steward of my house.
- Absolutely.
- Who cares?
- Absolutely.
- Okay.
- Absolutely.
- But the argument is what I thought it was.
- Like, wait a minute. That's the moral argument. My argument is the moral argument yours is not.
- Next question.
- So when talking about speech on campus, you introduced the idea of the academic two-step where some administrator defends the right of a professor or a group to say something and then condemns it.
- Right.
- So let's give the example of like a student newspaper and a student has submitted an article that claims that the Holocaust never occurred. Should the newspaper published that article if to their knowledge, the Holocaust absolutely did occur. That's a complicated question.
- First of all is this newspaper how is this newspaper situated institutionally? Where does it get its funds and so forth?
- I guess a student newspaper gets its funds from the college.
- Finally gets its funds from the college. Then according to a series of Supreme court decisions that of course are as all Supreme court decisions are often contested. But according to series of Supreme court decisions, the school has every right to monitor the activities of the student reporters who work at whole labor at the newspaper funded by the institution. I'm not sure that's an answer to your question. Is it, I think that there was more to your question than my answer recognized.
- Yeah.
- Ah, good, we're on the same page then.
- I guess it's more about the
- What are you worried about? Why don't we go at it this way? What are you worried about? What don't you want to happen?
- Are you worried that the person who is denying the Holocaust is being denied the capacity to say what they wanna say?
- Yeah. And also if like the editor of the student newspaper thinks that this article should not be expressed. Do they have the right to deny the author of the article?
- Well should not be expressed as opposed to think it's false or do you want to not make that distinction should not be expressed as a moral judgment on what is being said. We don't want that kind of thing said it might, it might pollute the atmosphere or something like that as opposed to we don't want to publish things that are demonstrably false.
- The ladder.
- Well if it's, we don't want to publish things that are demonstrably false, it seems to me that the newspaper editor is on very good grounds.
- Okay.
- I think.
- And so publishing the article would be problematic if the
- Look, why would an edit, let's back up a bit and expand on your example. Why would an editor who believes something to be false publish it? One answer and we can go to examples like remember the Danish cartoons of some years ago the Danish cartoons. That is right, Boreham Caricatures of the prophet Mohammed and so forth and so on. Which appeared in the newspaper and what country was it? Denmark where they don't have anything other things to worry about. So they obsess on this stuff. And then what happened was all over the country, all over the world, newspapers decided to publish the cartoons with negative caricatures of the prophet Muhammad did the newspaper editors who did this, that is not the original one, but the ones who then followed up. Did they agree with the characterization or caricature of the prophet Mohammed? Absolutely not. Why were they doing it? They were doing it to make a point about free speech. That's a very bad reason to do anything. To make a point about free speech. They were standing up. They were kind of doing the, what I call the administrative two-step but in a slightly different form. They were showing that they had the first amendment guts or whatever it is that they had. So if your editor or your student newspaper knew that this was false or was gonna publish it, nevertheless, it's because he had some what shall I say, glorified notion of the first amendment and regarded the doctrine of free speech as something like a theology. And a lot of people who are free speech polemicists that is proponents of free speech in a strong way in fact, that is their theology because most of them don't have any other theology. So that's the theology that they have. Is that enough?
- I know you're totally perplexed.
- If I were an editor and that thing came to me, I wouldn't publish it, would you?
- No.
- All right. So we're in agreement. Perfect agreement.
- We are coming late and we have time for one more question.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- Thank you for your question.
- Hi first Fish. I read in Frezzor Shaw's class a couple of years ago your book or not your book, part of your book that you mentioned earlier, there's no such thing as free speech and it's a good thing too, which I think is really catchy title by the way. And I was wondering something about your view ever since I read that and I'm glad to have the opportunity to ask you. Are you familiar with the, now no longer used practice in Roman Catholicism of the excommunication vitandus that is to say also don't talk to them or read them.
- No, I don't. That I think I may have, but refresh my memory or informed me or both.
- Basically I'm the church like identify someone and says, okay, this person has met the grounds for excommunication and we're going to apply this extra sensor to them of also Catholics aren't allowed to read, read them or like, you know, discuss with them.
- So the index of forbidding books?
- Pretty much.
- Okay.
- And one fairly common position to hold on this is that's bad because one limits free speech, it limits the circulation of ideas, that sort of thing. Based on both what I read from that book of yours as well as your example of the religious mother earlier, it doesn't seem like that's the position that you take. And I'm just wondering what position you do take.
- Well first of all, I'm not a Catholic. So any position that I take is limited in its I suppose relevance and resonance by that fact but I would say that what the quote unquote defenders of the faith were doing was defending the faith A. B, that's the business they're in. C, they're not in the free speech business, which is of course the same thing I say about universities. Universities are not in the free speech business. Sometimes free speech, and this is true also of religious institutions. Sometimes free speech concerns and values intersect with academic concerns, but that's accidental. It's like the very thin part of a Venn diagram. More often they, they do not a way to say, and I say this in the book when I'm talking about, I'm talking about in the book in the religion chapter, which no one reads apparently, but which I hope all of you will read. I'm talking about all these cases that have come up recently where bakers and florists and photographers wished to turn away gay couples and not participate in the celebration of their marriage. And then that leads to the court cases which we've already had. And believe me, there are more in the pipeline and they're gonna emerge where you have a conflict between two irreconcilable points of view. On the other hand, the point of view in which fidelity to DD and to doctrine is paramount and therefore it would be wrong from the point of view of the deeply religious photographer or Baker to lend his or her services to an activity his or her religion considers sinful. And then on the other side you have the idea that anyone who hangs up a shingle or opens a store front is in fact obligated to service any customers that come seeking goods or services. I said a moment ago, this is not something that can be reconciled. And this is where I meant before when I said religion is a special thing. Religion is a special thing because fidelity to what you understand to be the commands of your deity trumps if you, pardon the use of the word, trumps all other, all other possible obligations. Some of you may have seen the movie a man for all seasons which is the story of Saint Thomas Moore in which I taught earlier in the semester in a brilliant performance by the Academy award winning actor Paul Scofield. Thomas Moore in this movie does his best to avoid the point where he has to choose between fidelity to what he takes to be the will and doctrine of God on the one hand and fidelity to the legitimately instituted laws that empowerment has passed. He wants to avoid it, but finally he can't avoid it. And as the result of which his head is cut off. And again, it's not that religious persons of the kind that I'm discussing don't value respect for others or value the individual rights of persons no matter what their beliefs. It's just that the religious sensibility that I am discussing doesn't worship them. That is religious persons worship God. They don't worship mutual respect or non-discrimination or any of those things, they worship God. And you can only understand religion if you in fact recognize that fact. You in fact recognize that fact. But what liberalism wants to do to religion is to turn it into just one more discourse or to use a verb that I intensely dislike they want to pluralize it. They want to make religion into just some other kind of discourse, which has a claim to our attention, but not an ultimate claim to our attention. If a religion is a religion, the claim it is making on our attention is ultimate all the time.
- I wanna go back to that quote from the new Republic. It is true. One doesn't need to agree with the Professor Fish, but it's certainly worth listening to and be provoked in the run with one's own version of it. Stanley thank you very much for coming.
- Thank you.