Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2002/11/03/the_year_i_rubbed_elbows_with_stanley_fish.php
Sunday, November 3, 2002
When I consider how my time was spent in a brief academic career, I'm drawn to one year when I had a passing association with a young Stanley Fish. He is, of course, now well known as a proponent of postmodernism, a form of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism now popular in universities. I encountered him in 1972, while I was in graduate school where he was a visiting professor, still in a pre-postmodern era. I've often thought about the courses and other academic hurdles I encountered that year, because I think the seeds of many current academic problems were present then.
Because my experience was in an English department, and because Fish and the other most prominent exponent of postmodernism, Edward Said, are or have been English professors, I think what I saw may provide some insight into what might be needed to address these academic problems in the future. I would add that my time in graduate school showed me that I wasn't cut out for a teaching career, but while I'm happier outside the academic world, I continue to follow developments there as an interested and somewhat informed outside observer.
Stanley Fish was best known in 1972 for Surprised by Sin, which had appeared half a dozen years earlier, a reinterpretation of Milton's Paradise Lost. He was there to teach Milton, which was unfortunate from my point of view, because I had already taken all the Milton courses, and those from a plodding time-server who couldn't have contrasted more with Fish's effervescence. So I never had a class from Fish, but I wished I could have, and I attended his various presentations to the faculty, and I listened with great interest to the students who were in the Milton classes.
The consensus, from the department chair down, was that Fish was destined to go on to great things. (I think the chair expressed it more or less as 'His ambition is like a pitchfork up his a—, he can't help but amount to something.') Simply put, Fish's thesis was that anything that seemed vexing, inconsistent, or poorly written in Paradise Lost had been put there deliberately by Milton to trap the reader into recognizing his own sinfulness. We graduate students mostly thought that if you could bring this kind of thing off, it was in fact great for your career, especially at a time when the prospects of getting teaching jobs were bleak. We admired the intellectual gymnastics, but we recognized them for what they were. We knew, and Fish later acknowledged, that you could do this sort of 'reader experience' analysis with anything. A fellow student applied the template to 'Bartleby the Scrivener,' or maybe it was Billy Budd—it didn't matter, it worked fine.
The problem with Fish's approach, which he (at least at the time) was open about, was that this made Milton too clever by half. You had to postulate that Milton spent his nights composing Paradise Lost and laying little mind trips on the reader that wouldn't be figured out for another 300 years. They would have gone whizzing over the heads of Samuel Johnson and Percy Shelley, for instance, only to be discovered in the late twentieth century by Stanley Fish. If you had something from Milton like what Henry James might write, explaining what he was trying to do, that would be fine, although of course everyone would have known about it before Fish did, and that wouldn't be any help for Fish's career. So he was pretty easygoing in the question sessions—yes, it was multiplying entities that maybe you didn't need and perhaps couldn't prove, but what the heck, you bought into it or you didn't. He was the visiting professor, after all; it worked for him. The rest of us were stuck in the wrong part of town.
A required course for those of us in the Ph.D. program was something called English 562: The Profession. The course was intended to cover subjects like the academic hiring process, the status of the job market, career paths, promotion and tenure, publication, peer review, and so forth. In short, this should have been everything a graduate student needed to know, told as the straight dope by an experienced professor. As a practical matter, the standing of the course in the minds of the faculty was shown by who they assigned to teach it: in my case, it was a dreamy-eyed lame-duck assistant professor who'd been turned down for tenure himself—not the best role model on one hand, but on the other, he believed everything his more senior colleagues told him, so he was a good source on the conventional wisdom of the time.
We listened to polite fictions about how new assistant professors were hired at the annual MLA convention and how the tenure system assures academic freedom. The twelve or twenty or so of us in the class knew perfectly well we'd be lucky to find part-time jobs teaching bonehead English at local junior colleges, our chances of even landing a tenure-track job were like winning the lottery, and it likely wouldn't happen at the MLA. Some Ph.D. candidatess from prior years were driving cabs or pushing carts full of bedpans down hospital corridors. It wasn't good form to mention this.
In fact, the job search method prescribed to us, not just in English 562, but by the department chair and our graduate advisors, was to get a list of all English departments everywhere (whether they'd posted an open job or not), and send each of them a copy of our curriculum vitae and a cover letter, advising them of our availability to interview at the MLA. This of course is the job-hunting equivalent of human wave attacks, a futile and expensive proposition. While hiring practices differ among academic disciplines, it appears (see, for example, Paul Fussell's account of how he got his first job in Doing Battle) that in English, well-positioned professors are aware of openings in their fields and refer likely candidates via back channels, and interviews at the MLA are a formality at best. I may or may not have been a promising candidate, but my dissertation director, who was in fact very well-positioned, was notorious for not helping his students.
Ten years afterward, sending out hundreds of résumés and cover letters would be a less expensive proposition using a PC or a word processor, though still a bad idea. In the early 1970s, these didn't exist, and to do a mass mailing of individually typed and addressed cover letters, we had to use mailing services that had crude automatic typewriters. The cost was close to a month's pay for a teaching assistant, money we couldn't spare. The result was hundreds of form-letter rejections, some proportion of which contained a complaint from that department's chair that answering the volume of unsolicited applications for non-existent openings was a drain on his department's budget. This said my situation wasn't unique; the graduate studies honchos were giving this advice to Ph.D. candidates nationwide. I still shake my head at the apparent cynicism of my own department chair and his colleagues, who told na've and impecunious graduate students to undertake such effort and expense, knowing how unlikely it would be to pay off.
We also had a fresh issue as a case study: the 1972 dismissal of avowedly Maoist Associate Professor H. Bruce Franklin from Stanford University for inciting to riot during a student takeover of a Stanford building (I believe the case was still pending at the time of the class). The professor posed it as a problem of whether academic freedom could encompass radical doctrines like Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Institutional memory of this episode persists; a web search turns up numerous references.
In hindsight, while Franklin had recently become known for publishing unabashedly pro-Stalinist tracts, the cause of his dismissal from a tenured position was when he incited a group of radical students to take over the Stanford computer center, arguably a felony, though Stanford does not appear to have filed criminal charges. It would have been awkward even at the time to make too much of these facts, and it simply would not be politically correct now. He was seen by the class as not much more than a New Left idealist gone a little overboard, someone who should probably have been given the benefit of the doubt, and certainly someone who should have been protected by prevailing notions of academic freedom.
But in 1972, we had less than half the story, because the saga of H. Bruce Franklin continued. Franklin's first response was apparently to sue Stanford for reinstatement, without success. He then went looking for another academic job, and we may assume he didn't bother with mass mailings of his curricula vitae. After some further bumps in the road, including a job offer from one university that was subsequently withdrawn, Franklin wound up as a full professor in an endowed chair at Rutgers. The classic revolutionary model would see someone in Franklin's position going into exile or underground after an initial defeat, penning angry pieces for Mother Jones, a Benito Juarez waiting tables in St. Louis, planning his triumphal return. Imagine Fidel Castro suing Batista to let him back into Cuba.
Instead, Franklin simply allowed himself to be co-opted. A true revolutionary would not, we may assume, occupy a bourgeois position like an endowed professorship at a state university, drawing his pay directly from capitalist investments and unabashedly participating in the capitalist government-sanctioned curriculum. He writes on topics like Cuba, but his current thumbnail clucks fondly over his children and grandchildren, and it doesn't mention the business at Stanford. In fact, his political activities since then appear to have been entirely theoretical. The belated answer to the question in English 562 is that The Profession most definitely does accept radical doctrines like Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; it co-opts them and, probably unintentionally, makes their advocates faintly ridiculous.
But the questions that really puzzle me now never came up while discussing Franklin in class: by then his list of publications included the Essential Stalin, an attempt at rehabilitating one of the worst despots of the century. What did it say about The Profession if a Ph.D. could prostitute his intellectual capacity and training in the service of truly Orwellian cognitive dissonance? What, for that matter, was an Associate Professor of English doing publishing an anthology of Stalin's works? Wouldn't you expect someone in the Russian, History, or Poli-Sci Departments to do something like this?
In the last question, I thought I was getting closer to a more universal problem. The more experience I had with what professors were doing (I was seeing most of it in the English Department, where it's always been a problem, but it's not unique there), the more I saw that they were abandoning Spenser or Melville or prosody or esthetics, and instead (leaving Marx aside), they were going into Freud, or folklore, or Frazer's the Golden Bough. Fields, in short, that didn't have much to do with English or American language and literature, and indeed fields that were beginning to be seen as obsolete and discredited in their more proper disciplines, such as economics, psychology, or anthropology. Some of this had been around since at least the 1930s, but in the postmodern academic writing I've seen, references to Marx, Freud, and Frazer are very common, probably because those figures are thought to undermine cultural certainties—and the certitude with which they are presumed to do this allows references to their insights to be used as a sort of iconoclastic shorthand.
I had another course that year that taught me more about this problem. This was with Jackson Cope, who had recently taken up a newly endowed professorship. The university was spending freely, adding endowed chairs to attract prominent scholars and boost its academic reputation, which up to that time had been trailing the school's reputation for producing running backs Cope was an authority on Milton and Renaissance literature. I didn't take his Milton course for the same reason I didn't take Stanley Fish's Milton course, but the reports from Cope's course, unlike those from Fish, weren't good. The first class started with 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' and never finished with it. For the rest of the semester, I was told, Cope dithered with this minor poem in every class and never quite made it to the sonnets, Samson Agonistes, Paradise Regained, or the prose.
The following semester I did take his course in English Renaissance drama. This was the single event that made me realize I should leave graduate school. As an undergraduate English major at Dartmouth and later as a graduate student, I was accustomed to having fairly broad leeway in choosing the subject and approach I would take in papers. If the profs wanted me to clear the subject and approach with them before I started work, that was fine—they'd almost always give approval or suggest minor changes, since I would usually present reasonable and interesting ideas. Cope was different. Our assignment in the first class was to develop a précis of our eventual term paper and have it approved in detail. Well, a little strong, but OK. But then came the kicker: we were to choose one of the plays covered in the class and discuss it in a myth and ritual context. There were no other options. The resources to be applied in determining a 'myth and ritual' approach were Frazer's the Golden Bough and the derivative works of Northrup Frye and Joseph Campbell. There were no other options.
Cope's evaluation of each student's précis then became a tool by which he micromanaged how each term paper would be written. I knew at the time that I could have done pretty well by churning out stuff like 'The dichotomous modality of Roderigo's non-appearance in Act IV presupposes his pseudo-redemptive capacity as reflected in the ironically situational dying-rising cycle implicitly adverted in Act II.' But something about me wasn't going to do it. I was back to the question of why English professors were teaching anthropology, and obsolete, discredited anthropology at that. I went to my graduate advisers and asked what I should do. 'Shut up and play the game, Mr. Bruce,' was the answer I got from Cope himself.
Mr. Bruce's Scotch-Irish DNA strongly resisted this admonition. I spent my time in the library researching the decline of Frazer's academic reputation in the anthropology discipline and submitted my progress on this each week to Professor Cope as my précis. The prevailing view among anthropologists was that Frazer had frequently fabricated or altered evidence to support his slightly naughty theories on myth, popular in late Victorian times as a form of respectable pornography, and he was not regarded by specialists as a reliable source. In fact, Frazer had been discredited to the point where current discussions of his status among anthropologists were hilariously entertaining. Joseph Campbell also was regarded as not serious; Northrup Frye was presumably not worth anthropological mention. I thought some of my papers were fairly good; some others were puerile. It didn't make much difference, because I wasn't going to change anyone's mind.
Cope's comments on each returned paper naturally expounded on my unwillingness to do the assignment and my eventual grade in the course, which would be failing. However, Cope, new to the university, was unaware of the legalisms of how one could elect to take an Incomplete, and on the last possible day, I took one. In fact, since I didn't need that subject or those course credits for my degree, there was no requirement under the rules that I ever complete the course. Cope was enraged. My graduate advisers were not pleased. I had been a loose cannon in the department in any case, and up to then the faculty had been patient. Now my days in The Profession were numbered.
Legalities or not, I wouldn't be allowed to get away with thumbing my nose at a chaired professor. Cope's colleagues circled the wagons, They put Cope on my dissertation committee, and he simply refused to approve my dissertation topic until I completed his course. Like many graduate students then and now, I hadn't given serious thought to what I needed to do to continue my career until it was too late. I had also seen enough of teaching to understand what Samuel Johnson meant when he called it 'intricate misery.' This episode focused my mind; as I began to lose interest in finishing my Ph.D., I found a job working on computers for a local government, and as many others have done, I left the field. Enough details of Cope's subsequent career are available to suggest he may not have been happy where he was, and the department may not have been entirely happy with him. He took early retirement from his endowed chair at age 61, moved back East, and passed away thirteen years later, as his obituary noted, due to complications of liver disease.
When I encountered Stanley Fish, still near the base of his career's great arc, he seemed still to be toying with the implications of his major literary discovery, which I would summarize as If You Can Get Away With It, Everything is Permitted. In his interpretation of Paradise Lost, he'd pushed things just a little. With a few ratiocinative somersaults, some in fact potentially helpful in understanding a difficult piece of literature, he saw he'd also invented a machine that could be used to process anything else, from Gilgamesh to Donald Duck. On one hand this might be tautological, something you might dismiss the way you cancel out the zeroes on a fraction. On the other hand, well, if you can do it with anything, then Anything is Permitted. Corollaries would be Everything is Relative, and Nothing Really is Important. I don't believe Fish had reached his full insights in this area by 1973. (It's worth noting the odd juxtaposition of Fish's eventual relativism with John Milton, for whom there were indeed absolutes, and for whom many things were important.)
But Fish's conclusions lead inevitably to what I would call the Great Sophomoric Question: If Everything is Relative and Nothing is Important, Why Am I In Class, And Why Are You Grading My Papers? For 1973, Fish's colleague Jackson Cope provided what I would call The Great Pedagogical Rejoinder: Because I Said So. In later writings, citing 'The Authority of Interpretive Communities,' Fish seems to echo this. There's something chilling in the implicit nihilism in this view, as I saw it played out. Academic endeavor is basically a meaningless game, but rewards accrue to the winners, who also control the game's rules.
Looking at the example of H. Bruce Franklin, there's no requirement in this game that one's public acts and writings demonstrate integrity or internal consistency—'winning,' in the sense of career success (and apparently that only) is self-validating. Nor is there any requirement that scholarly research by the 'winners' be consistent with accepted scholarly insights in other fields. In effect, the 'winners' are exempt from effective peer review. In light of the huge imbalance between the number of graduate students wanting tenure-track jobs and the small number of such jobs available, it shouldn't be surprising that natural selection has taken its course, and the available jobs have gone to the most ferociously career-oriented. In turn, their outlook on life has come to dominate The Profession.
My own conclusion based on what I saw is that certainly by the early 1970s, The Profession was well along in abandoning traditional expectations of subject matter, logical discourse, and responsible peer review. The only ingredients that hadn't been added were the more recently perceived phenomena of political correctness or 'victimology,' in which it is alleged that literature is interpreted to support prevailing academic attitudes toward favored groups. I think the explanation for this is that, for the academic 'winners,' it's become a very useful protective coloration. In fact, the current generation of deans and department chairs no doubt fully understands the universities' perceived vulnerability to charges of racism, imperialism, sexism, militarism, and the like in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Franklin's example is pertinent here. In effect, by vaccinating academic discourse with the dead virus of that era's rhetoric, they've immeasurably strengthened their positions by co-opting potential troublemakers like Franklin In this view, adoption of politically correct views and rhetoric by faculty and administrators is simply self-serving, supported by a post-modern intellectual framework that permits this kind of cynicism. But few of the successful players, I think, believe a word of it—it's there so they can keep playing the game.
As an outside observer, I can't see an easy way to back out of this situation. The incumbents are well-entrenched, and they have the politically correct rules of discourse on their side. The process of identifying promising students and promoting them into faculty positions is very long and detailed, with many decision points and opportunities along the way for washing out all but the most pliable, career-driven, and risk-averse. On the other hand, even circumstances that seem immutable—as they indeed must to the current members of the academic establishment—can be surprisingly susceptible to change. Internet news channels indicate that this year's courses on The Profession, at least in History, are taking as a case study the problems of Michael Bellesiles, one of the key issues in which appears to be the breakdown of responsible peer review. The strong leadership of Harvard's new President, Lawrence Summers, in the Cornel West case and on campus anti-Semitism, is encouraging, but real progress will require many more leaders of his calibre, along with many small decisions every day, by many deans, department heads, and committee chairs, to reverse all the bad decisions that have been made for more than one generation. They also serve who only stand and wait.