Stanley Fish in Conversation with Ilan Stavans at Amherst College

Subtitles section Play video

it is my pleasure to welcome you all to this a 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 divided country and to a divide self and to the fact
that many of us we're 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 alums to engage in conversations within the college and the
college communities that is the five colleges in other a undergraduate and
graduate students the faculty in the administration and essentially with the
community at large with a 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 they speak in ways that we do not do the opposite and bring
them in to that kind of dialogue we have had a number of very distinguished
guests throughout this two three years from Martha Nussbaum to Bill Kristol to
to Bret Stevens to a variety of thinkers activists a scholars that
continue to this day I want to thank or 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 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 want to thank the
folks at Amherst Books that they 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 Davis in particular for 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
controversial a 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 a at Johns Hopkins he is distinguished professor at
Florida International University right now a named chair a distinguished
professor and he is named chaired 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
18 years is sometimes writing on a weekly basis in
others in a less pressured way it is important to remember that
he within the university has played a variety of roles because I think that's
going to come up he has not only been a student because in order to get work to
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 a at the University of
Illinois, Chicago a Dean of Arts and Sciences which will probably
come up in several a moment during the our conversation in his critique of the
role not only professors and members of campus communities
do but also in responses that we get from the administration I generally
believe that a the back of a book the blurbs as we call it in publishing is
really publishing mashmallow 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 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 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
funded 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 contest in cultural discourse then you are
obliged to read him if I want to start Stanley... Let me
just rest in that for a moment. You don't get that every day. That school of fish sounded like dr. Seuss
talking about it talking about professor that they did the public intellectual I
want to start way being you being this public intellectual but also a
positioned in the Academy as you are with a recent op-ed piece that you
published in The Wall Street Journal maybe not month ago two weeks ago in
which you talk about being invited and then disinvited from Seton Hall and you
say that you were that you were not censored in the gist of it him we have
invited you and not yet this invited you here so I'd like to start with this
sense of a 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 mm-hmm 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 should 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 it's not crucial to Seton Hall University and I think that's
absolutely right she subsequently apologized and I met with it last week
and I was given an entirely different version of the story and I don't want to
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 have 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 and I
didn't ask her at this lunch because it wasn't the appropriate context in which
to posed the question well if there were signals crossed
what preventing what prevented you from issuing the invitation anyway so that's
the entire story an apology that wasn't an apology but an apology that passed
the buck to someone whose signals had been crossed there there it is now the
ideas that Seton Hall didn't want to hear at least according to what I was
told when the shamefaced gentleman 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 is
surely 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 an that's a position that a lot of people would disagree with and
presumably someone on that committee disagreed with that position strongly at
least that's the only reading I have now why wasn't I censored I wasn't censored
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 a clumsy lot and I say that of
course very much aware that I was one my 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 let me assure you that I don't have a criminal past No so it was read it was
withdrawn I said in the op-ed for reasons that were non intellectual and
therefore non education and that's the and and that's the objection that 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 the action that 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 non-academic and frankly political
grounds it turns out so happens that the last course I taught in the liberal arts
arena was of course called major poets of the 17th century and the poets I
taught were John Milton John Donne Ben Jonson George Herbert and Andrew Marvell
not I think a list that could be quarrel 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 Jonson wrote a mask that is a quart
production called the mask of blackness in which Queen Anne and 11 of her
handmaidens appeared in blackface Milton in one of his prose tracks just said
that Asian and Semitic peoples were particularly prone to being slaves and
in a poem called anagram John Donne writing a parody of the usual
celebration of the lady's virtues and beauties described his mistress as
having a complexion that made Moore's look white so there's that stuff but
that's about it you know if I were going to 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 abdicating my
pedagogical responsibilities because that's not what most of the poems
written by these poets are about what you should do I said in this op-ed is
teach the material and not in fact tale of the material according to some
political or social pressure that is now being exerted so I wanna I want to
continue on or pursue the idea of the the current generation of students that
is activists and has a vision of what should and shouldn't be taught and in
there's a there and ask you to summarize some of the views that you have and you
expressed in the book about microaggressions about the trigger
warnings and so on I myself a joint you 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 goes in it you believe
however that a alerting students to what is about to come is a color linked to
them and it's not what we should do on campuses though I don't think it cuddles
them that's the argument of Jonathan hate and Greg lukianov in in their book
they don't think students should be coddled and therefore they're against
trigger warnings and such things I have no interest in students being coddled 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 it's perhaps they might be at the end of
the course it's maximum maximum form I want to
teach you 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 you tell your students only three
grandmother's deaths 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 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 interested in in 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 case as it
was this 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 vs Larry Flynt which is about
pornography and about a famous Supreme Court case a hustler versus Falwell
which I happen to believe was incorrectly decided but that's a whole
other set of questions but I told the students 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 and of course now of course there are
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 will 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 and a
series of readings that in sequence illustrate and lead to the exploration
of the large issues that of the content of this subject matter whatever it is if
you're not getting that as a student and in fact if you're getting rather some in
structure 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 do 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 and well I don't bring
my views into the classroom in in a direct way except I did in fact
tell my students that I thought that the hustle of case was wrongly decided but I
invited a good friend of mine from NYU who is who in fact had a role in the
movie and it's a noted First Amendment scholar and who has views directly
opposed to mine and so we had a good time and then can I ask you I'm going to
pursue that that the topic of rights on campus and outside a but before I go
there could you offer us a diagnosis or an explanation sadly of why the current
generation of students has they the values that it does in it presents and
fights for those values in its own way how has in in how many years have you
been teaching 56 have has 57 one of those incredible numbers this students
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 legislators
and that rose 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 subversive forces the forces
that would turn the Academy away from its
it's its special assignment and instead make it the vehicle of what I would say
is something alien what's that special assignment the special assignments 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 sift 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 at least what we don't do in my
Academy well 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 turn things over in a deliberative
manner and stop short of the waters of action that doesn't mean that what you
give students are introduced students do might not lead them later on once the
door is closed the last class has concluded to take very specific actions
but you can't design that the only thing you can as a constructed design can
design is of course that delivers the pedagogical goods and the pedagogical
goods are as I describe them you introduce the students to the life of a
deliberative turning over of 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 hand it in at the end of the course what do you do
with a student's daily as a as of today in a class that shows that Polly
Cobin in the need to push the professor in a much more ideologically engaged way
which is often the case what do you be surprised if I tell you
that no student in my class ever does any such thing because you're not
surprised all right there are many you know everyone teaches differently and
there are many there are many ways of teaching can that can be differently if
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
partners 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 he might but if I might put it that way but somebody who
is a 40 or 45 teaching today may be either not yet tenured or on the road to
tenure ship yeah it might not have the benefit of the white hair saying
whatever he wants in not fearing the risk of the 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 didn't make
any difference didn't make any difference at all but I don't recommend
this method to others so let's take the hypothetical of us of a teacher who is
not me which we may perhaps thank God on many let's take someone who is more
shall we say amiable in his in his self presentation and less insistent in in in
in the 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 it's to any
academic point at all at this moment perhaps and only at this
moment the phrase teachable moment which I utterly despise come 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 urging question that is the
questions that students ask that don't belong in the classroom nevertheless can
be and 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 going to 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 aren't there many politically charged topics that come up
in classes and are you going to be in the mall to which my answer of course
is I'm not going to be in any of them I'm just going to 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 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 ah that's a hard one because to my
knowledge 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 the in English by the name of a woman
by the name of Sarah Flanagan who was rigorous and no-nonsense and was the
first person who said to me when I handed in something she said to me
something like well you you were 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
going to be and what are you going to do and you haven't thought of anything to
be and the possibility suddenly occurs to me that you might in the end be
nothing at all so that when this when Sarah Flanagan told me you do this and
you can do it fairly well I latched on to it and never let go the other teacher
that I'll mention briefly was professor at the University of Pennsylvania and by
the name of more recent Johnson a an 18th century scholar whose bearing and
urbanity and wit and satorious 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 on a number of important recent cases of
faculty members having made statements that reached out which within the campus
but outside of the campus walls and reverberating in society in a variety of
ways resulting sometimes in the dismissal of a particular professor a or
in and I want to get you'd also to that the rights of administrators or in
administrators who would say I defend the right of this or that a faculty
member who said something that I the administrator find disgusting and in
Europe 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 going to 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're 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 that 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
huh 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 a Dean or a Provost or a
Chancellor and you condemn someone's point of view even as you acknowledge
that you have no capacity to dismiss him or her you are positioning yourself
politically and because you keep I an recognisable office you are positioning
the university politically the university should never be positioned
politically because once it is a it's not any longer doing its job and be 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 a 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 op-ed pieces constantly in The New York Times and
they in The Wall Street Journal that might put a shiva university or a
florida international into uncomfortable position because of something professor
fish said should a professor have be encouraged to become a much more public
figure in to 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 well a book I wrote in 2008 the title of
it kind of answers of 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-ed so 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 there should be any
consequences visited by a university on 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
negative 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 condemned the
speech whose protection they have just announced I I believe that it's a very
bad thing for them to do but of course I've already said that 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 Matt Rasmussen 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 are women ruining the academy and he gives the answer in
the title probably he has another another a piece in which he explains
that all males all geniuses are 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 we spoke as a private citizen and
therefore we as the university cannot prohibit or sense of his his his words ,
vile and stupid as they are listen to that vile and stupid as they are she
should have been fired at least he would have if I had the power to do so in in
the next moment now as long as the Rasmussen is not structuring his
teaching according to his strong political ideological views there's no
reason at all academically to move against him and how and who who decides
that who can monitor that should somebody come in and legislate on how
that syllabus is built on what is what the content is while most universities
have as you know 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 and 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 most of the people who fill them out do
so out of for negative reasons reasons of
bitterness disappointment and hostility the the idea that someone who has taken
a course in one 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 there's nothing good to be said about teaching
evaluations nothing good to be said but they're they're there and I you know my
my ranting against them one stuff isn't going to remove them so they're there
and in all the cases I write about in the book the amy wax case at the
University of Pennsylvania the Steven salaita 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 and a good percentage of the student body furious but on the other
hand all of the teaching evaluations for these three people were support we're
superb and showed that they you know that courses they their courses were not
soap boxes made into soap boxes for their political views that they 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's 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
I want to move out of campus and into social media a where I assume we're
going to get into even more intense a ideas from you
and you write about them in your book there is this the Mark Zuckerberg has
they testified before Congress many times many times and he has suggested
that there will be there will come a time when artificial intelligence will
be sophisticated enough to stop hate speech in on Facebook but until then he
in no one in his company will legislate what should or shouldn't be 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 a who eventually became presidents have a been a have been
expressing so I I'm not on nostalgia 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 their office
for students to be able to see you and talk et cetera
instead of sending your text yet 12 o'clock right right so I 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
overabundance 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
late in the mid-80s in thinking how incredible it was the amount of cereal
boxes that I could find on a supermarket it was an embarrassment of riches and I
chose one a which one Raisin Bran and I have gone with France instead they've
gone with Grape Nuts the oldest to say 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 I want to I want you to delve into the time in which we
leave where censorship is actually a reversal an abundance that can paralyze
you and even nullify us well I must say that I am a nostalgia I long for the
days when there were three television networks and other other other what
antediluvian features of life but the question you poses is a serious one and
all of the questions that you impose of course are serious ones the answer
requires me to identify a what shall we call it a 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 lore 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 day light will show us what they are and
they wither away and die and as I said 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 these defectors the other statement is
very much the same of brand Isis 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 have companies celebrations of
the first amendment was introduced in the 1920s in a dissenting opinion by
Oliver Wendell Holmes and it imagines and I think this is 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 your life who is 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 celebrate most ACLU type celebrations of 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 the
scenario we have something much more insidious
the the villain hero 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
want to be is trans you won't last two weeks okay so transparency is a bad idea
what transparency 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 in the debt but here's what really happens if in fact
you remove gatekeeping mechanisms if you no longer are interested in regulating
the flow of data or the flow of speeches it might be which are two concepts that
often but 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 because
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 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 simply isn't true the more speech the
better it's as we say false I want to pursue that thought but I want I want to
bring an image here that might be useful I teach course on on on selfies in the
white selfies you know you do I do they like they and they let you they let you
good indeed and I I ask the students you know there's a you know a proliferation
of selfies if the connection between the selfie and the self-portrait have you
taken a selfie I've taken many selfies never took on alright so yes absolutely
I ask the students if if this if their 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
termometer of hate so to speak is there more hate in the world because of the
channels we're talking about hate speech a one of the topics of
book is there more hate in the world because of the channels to express it it
be that social media I know it's varieties or a 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 a throughout history but we're now capable
of a registering edge to monitoring it may be without the sensors or the
authorities that you're talking about is that the case it's no longer localized I
would agree that you know hate speech and hate the version that we all feel in
a variety of ways toward the other that's always been a feature of human
life in the general battle between that we've seen social philosophy these days
between tribalism on the one hand and cosmopolitanism on the other hand
whatever that whatever wherever you stand on that question and I am an
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 passed the
Country Club not a country club a beach club rather this is on the beach that
had a policy that no 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 on gods or
anything so I went into the beach club and wandered around and very shortly
someone came over to me said are you a member and I said yes and
then he said and what's your name I said Harvey Goldman but but now you know you
know but that was contained this was one beach house along that along the
Narragansett Rhode Island sure no one thought very much about it you know
there it was everybody knew that there were these 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 waiting world or to the
innocent world your forms your forms of wait before I go to the next point why
didn't you use your name I might think you use a French name I mean Stanley
fish also sounds Jewish yeah does it I don't know why I just don't I
just thought well I shouldn't tell them Who I am so I'll think of some other
name and that was the thing that popped into my head
let's call it a failure of the imagination
is Trump a failure of the imagination - or a triumph oh well Trump is a triumph
of a certain kind no I mean this I write in in one of my chapters
well actually Trump is a recurring figure in almost every chapter and
there's some of Aegeus things are said in there and I don't say anyhow Regis
things about Trump because it's not an anti-trump book in any way but what I do
say tried to do in one of the chapters is analyze Trump's success as a as a
political figure especially with respect to the kind of speech he engages in
this is a book about speech and what I 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 just - 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 principled
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 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 which he 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 the
you know like the French he invents the world not every morning but every minute
the trunk world is invented every minute now the heart that the UH 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 why 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 do so so long as his
opponents still 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 a way to either conquer to 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 a status quo or do you think instead that Trump as you said it
presents new rules of speech new rules in politics that inaugurate a new way
that from here forward will be the status quo
well track 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 Rubenstein has written a very good book called deference massive
detailing of the ways in which the judicial deference especially and also
legislative deference to the executive has in effect created what george w bush
actually it wasn't george w bush but his 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 unit
Presidency was a part of Richard Nixon's rhetoric when he was in the course of
being impeached so chunks one of trumps lasting the
effects of one of the lasting effects of his tenure may be the pushing forward
again the furthering of the the expansion of the executive to the point
where what Nixon once famously said quote if the president doesn't 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 demeanour doesn't suggest it Obama believes in it
he really did and and acted in accordance oh the only thing that's
going to stop the emergence further emergence of 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 that was going to happen I would be making a
lot more money than I am we're coming here to an end at least
this part family and we'll invite the audience to ask questions there's a
microphone here to my left and to the audience's right I have a couple of
questions before that one of them has to do when I mentioned that there's and a
few elements that to me sound or feel outrageous if they are less really to do
with Trump in your book than with the way you present a certain arguments a
and that is the statement of your a you have been accused and you have always
insisted probably inefficiently because you keep on being accused that you are a
relativist a in that all that is connected with post-modernism in one way
or another there's a moment in which you talk about how Trump said
that he's was the largest crowd ever in the history of the America and there was
reporter who described this a reporter that said well but the photographs show
that that is not the case and then he said well but this this this was
information eventually went down to what this was information given to me right
but then you stopped that paragraph in and you say well let's 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 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 logical why a logic it seems to me that the
photographs in empirical evidence show that compared to the the Obama
inauguration in previous inaugurations not only Democrats put rip Republicans
there was there were a lot of them were more people and in fact in the Obama the
weather was much colder than during the 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
if you 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 you know a finger point there they are there
they all are well I was saying that's possibly a relatively crude method of
determining size you might want to determine size by first factoring in
what the weather was like in the various at the moment of the various on in
inaugurations oh there it might be I 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 there are 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 finish in the middle it'll exercise I say now don't
get mad at me I'm not because I'm not making these arguments I was 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 questions
to the question finally no fake news if alternative facts can be manufactured or
can be thought up would be better because manufacture 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 give 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 30
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
Simon Trump has scientific expertise now as a
that is what produces fake news not summed intention to deceive which of
course may be a part of it but the D authorization of traditional sites that
is si tes 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 in are as they are
reported and other sources which have the aspiration to to in fact report on
what is actually the case you are you advocating or you believe is the only
that we can go back to a time when there is one anchor in one channel that
delivers the news given the fractures compartmentalized multi-layered
polyphonic society in which we live very well put I don't know whether it could
happen and it didn't wouldn't have to be one you 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 without a general trust underlying operations
every one of us is at sea when it comes to what we believe of what we take to be
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 and the physical sciences humanities and physical sciences are are
in fact sought and sometimes found and of course universities that have allowed
themselves to be politicized this goes back to an earlier 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 ask me to the experts will strike back this is
time to a have members of the audience a ask questions if anybody's interested
again their microphone is to my left if you Richard if you want to come here I
want to ask you as the Richard is making his way in front of everybody
him if there is if you if you could say that that was my last question to you
Stanley that a 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 a basement can make
a statement that takes as much bola de T a scholar coming out from any university
because it is presented in that marketplace of ideas a that is the
Internet are we to be worried about the state of free of the freedom of speech
today when compared to the civil rights era the the the civil war period and so
on well I might call with the Assumption behind your question my argument in this
book it's that free speech is the source of our problems or at least of 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 and 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 over evaluation 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 the world in which
they're supposed eaten has arise has arrived and there is more and more
speech and then it turns out that more and more speech more the the mantra the
more speech the better is in fact not true I would hope that that would lead
to a revaluation 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 the non the nonentity
called free speech please yes thank you I I wanted to address the question of
the classroom and the question of politics in the class
I'm not sure the ideal of a sort of non-political teacher is really possible
or desirable so far I am one so I'm possible I may not be desired I
mean I mean in the sense 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 I'm gonna stage me of course on the French and 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
subject 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 were founded 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 the 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
dislike 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
now 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 saved the world on your own time I
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 academic and why
academic side that 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 reinsert the topic into what we might think of as academic urgency
well what you want to do is describe analyze compare historicize and all of
those things that we customarily do in in in our classrooms so again no topic
should not should be introductive 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 in courses on a political theory and of
course political issues turn up and in Supreme Court case in every Supreme
Court case that you that you can imagine but when I teach these materials and
also in poetry political issues are always turning up in in in in in 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 as an administrator how would you deal with a professor who was
otherwise competent but did introduce his or her political views fire him
were you fired at any point ah no
because you didn't mix the text in there because I also scared administrators to
death yes I I've recently been badly injured so it's hard for me sometimes to
turn around but Here I am I'm especially interested in your thoughts on trigger
warnings I kind of a application of how an institution like universities
involved with questions of free speech and 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 in what differentially that's the only situation in which I
provided something that might be called a trigger warning and I didn't do it
with the sense that I was providing a trigger warning in in in my class law
and 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 of one page one and a
half page paper every week the first question that I put on my on the
question sheet for the People vs Larry Flynt is Latin the People vs Larry Flynt
is not only a movie about pornography it is it is itself pornographic and then I
said is this something for which we cook should criticize the director or can you
think of ways of defending the directors choice to to 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 insofar as it was one
was not issued by me with a sense of the with 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 I wasn't you know
wasn't a good idea because that's not the kind of thing you do at a
Thanksgiving dinner but you want 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 you know we don't want we don't want to learn anything there's something
more complicated like about the cultural appropriation argument cultural
appropriation is a form of racism and we could get into that but it 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 my core guests aggressed
against a significant number of persons in this audience because of some things
that I have said in the manner in which I've said them at which point I'm
attempted to you know cite or quote the title of an old Eagle song get over it
so that's you know you've governed a class you take your lumps whatever they
are I will say there was one point in my teaching career this is long before any
of this occurred this would have been in 1984 I was teaching at Columbia and I
was teaching of 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 he did and identified herself as a member of a
certain Protestant 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 just about everything and she decided not to take
the course that was a perfectly reasonable thing for her to do but 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 a
religious faith there's a chapter nobody and ever I get interviewed about this
book no one ever talks about the religion chaplain and you haven't talked
about religious faith is not like other things to those whose lives are founded
in it they don't want to lose it let me give you a very quick examples my
favorite case in law is called Mozart versus 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 Vicki Smith and what Vicki was protesting was
the fact that her six-year-old child was required or seven-year-old child I
forget what no no would have been in the 6-3 how old's the older people in the
sixth grade I twelve okay twelve-year-old child was it was
required to read in the court in in in in an assigned book called the prentice
hall critical reader that's what it was Vicki for us not Vicki Smith the
prentice-hall critical reader which contained articles on you know
gender differences complain articles on witchcraft and some people who worship
wish it you know 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 missus force 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 so pressing 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
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 commonplaces 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 now remember that case it's really it's
a really important case religion is not like anything else go ahead okay 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 got to be
wrong and I reread I reread and eventually have an aha moment pieces
fall together oftentimes it's actually students who help me see it I'm hoping
that will happen again so you recently I think you were talking
about I think you were making an argument that decisions by universities
are College with respect to their investments yeah are not moral that
they're sort of not moral decisions they don't you shouldn't be morally judging
them for them given the limited nature of the goals that a college or
university has all they have to worry about is what what would it mean to be
good steward of the college yeah Broly and down 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 want to be a
good steward of 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 what if I decide to hire someone who treats their employees really badly
under pays them even if their works 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 was
given by drew 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 -
now that the university divest itself of fossil fuel stocks on the reasoning and
the reasoning is strong and powerful on the reasoning that fossil fuels are
endangering the the environment to the extent that they
perhaps are ultimately endangering the planet that's a pretty big argument and
not one easily dismissed or not one dismissed at all
what drew faust said in a statement is that she was going to resist any effort
to facilitate to politicize the operations of 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 dollars 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 you don't decide that you're going to
divest from stocks that are associated with fossil fuels you don't decide that
you're going to divest from stocks that have some relationship to the State of
Israel you shouldn't have decided to all of
those years ago to divest from stocks that in some way we're related to South
Africa remember that well that all that 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 know that forget the homeowner analogy but that's that then
you're not helping me 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 cares like wait a minute
looks like that's that's the moral argument my argument is the moral
argument yours is not next question so when talking about a
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 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
mm-hmm should the newspaper publish that
article if to their knowledge the Holocaust absolutely did occur that's a
complicated question first of all it's this newspaper how is this newspaper is
situated institutionally where does it get its funds and so forth I guess a
student newspaper gets his 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 the Supreme Court decisions are often contested but
according to a series of Supreme Court decisions the school has every right to
monitor the activities of the student reporters who work at a 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 there
I guess it's more about what are you worried about why don't we go in it this
way what are you worried about what what don't you want to happen are you worried
that the person who is denying the Holocaust is being denied that the net
denied the capacity to say what they want to 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 thinks it's false or do
you want to not make that distinction should not be expressed as a moral
judgement on what is being said we don't want that kind of thing said it might
you know it might pollute the atmosphere or something like that as opposed to we
don't want to publish things that are demonstrably false the letter 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
editor let's let's back up a bit and 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 of some years ago
Danish cartoons that is all right well have caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed
and so forth and so on which appeared in the newspaper and what country was it
Denmark where they don't have they don't have anything other other things to
worry about so they they obsess on this stuff and then what happened was all
over the country all over the world newspapers decided to publish
the the cartoons you know 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 follow up did they agree with the characterization or caricature of the
Prophet Muhammed 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 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 of your
student newspaper knew that this was false what was going to 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 I don't know you're totally perplexed I guess if I were an
editor and that thing came to me I wouldn't publish it would you 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 first fish I
read in presser Shaw's class a couple of years ago your your book are 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 to which i think is really catchy title by
the way and I was wondering something about your
view ever since I read that I'm glad to have the opportunity to ask you are
familiar with the now no longer used practice in Roman Catholicism of the
excommunication Vitton de say also don't talk to them or read them I know I don't
I think I may have but refresh my memory or or inform me or both
basically the church like identify someone and says okay this person hasn't
met the grounds for communication and we're going to apply this extra sensor
to them of also Catholics aren't allowed to read them or like discuss with them
forbidden books pretty much and you know one one fairly common position to hold
on this is that's bad because it 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 well first of all I'm not a Catholic so any position that I take is
limited in its I so I suppose relevance and resonance by that fact but I but I
would say that what the quote-unquote defenders of the faith we're doing was
defending the faith a V that's the business they're in see 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
more often they they do not a weighted said I say this in the book when I'm
talking about I'm talking about in the book in the 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 wish to turn away couples 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
green in words where you have a conflict between two irreconcilable points of
view on the other hand the point of view in which fidelity to deity into 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 storefront is in fact
obligated to service any customers that come that that come seeking goods or
services that I said a moment ago this is not something that can be reconciled
and this is what 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 Trump's if you'll 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 st. Thomas More and which
I taught earlier in the semester in a brilliant performance by the academy
award act morning actor Paul Scofield Thomas More 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 legitimately instituted laws that Parliament has
passed he wants to avoid it well finally he can't avoid it and as the result of
which his head is cut off it's 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 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 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
want to go back to that quote from the New Republic it is true one doesn't need
to agree with the professor fish but it is certainly worth listening to the
provoked they run with one's own version of it
Stanley thank you very much for coming