Stanley Fish in Conversation with Ilan Stavans at Amherst College

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

Channel: AmherstCollege

Views: 1,498

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: amherst college, amherst, college, massachusetts, liberal arts, academia, student, higher education, campus, academic, new england, school, undergraduate, public affairs

Id: aKHG7k1FM30

Length: 107min 26sec (6446 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019