The School of Fish (Stanley Fish‪)‬

IN AN OP-ED PIECE entitled "Why We Built the Ivory Tower," published in The New York Times, Stanley Fish, a literary archon of the theory of deconstruction that has ravaged the academy for years, conveys some departing thoughts, after his nearly half century in academia. (1) He packages these thoughts in the form of sage advice, though his basic thinking has changed little in either its nihilistic motives or its intellectual project. This is, after all, the very same Stanley Fish whom R. V. Young has warned us against in At War With the Word (1998) and, more recently, in a reconsideration published in these pages under the title "Stanley Fish: The Critic as Sophist." (2) That Fish's thoughts again grace the pages of the Times comes as no surprise. It is by now all too evident that this national newspaper is not on the side of moral criticism or of the moral imagination. To study its daily book reviews or its weekly literary supplement is to see how the Times routinely weakens the discipline of humane studies and the standards of discrimination which Fish and his disciples are determined to abolish. Hence, to read "Why We Built the Ivory Tower" is to re-encounter Fish's zealous attempt to "make an absolute out of the relative." This attempt is characteristic of the Fishes, at home and abroad, who in theory and in practice are "enemies of the Permanent Things."