The New York Times reports that academics — at least those who are able — are fleeing Florida (gift link).
But guess who’s signed up to teach at Florida’s New College: Stanley Fish. Len Gutkin of the The Chronicle of Higher Education asked him about it. A sample:
Given how controversial New College is, why do you want to teach there now?Russell Jacoby’s 2013 take on Stanley Fish still holds: “He has always bravely defended self-interest. With friends like him, the humanities needs no enemies.”
Well, the simple nitty gritty reason is that I’m 85 years old, and someone who asks me to teach courses is a godsend. So I responded affirmatively.
Do you worry at all that, given that something like a third of faculty members have left New College following the new administration, you’ll be taken to be making a statement about New College or about DeSantis?
Taken by whom?
Observers in academe who might feel that your prominence as a scholar and an administrator is being used to ratify the political project that New College has become.
Yeah, I can see that as a possible way of viewing this appointment. But such matters go under the general category of consequences that I can neither predict nor control. What I can control is the kind of teaching I do, and of course I wouldn’t want to get engaged in a classroom experience if I felt that that classroom was being monitored for political or ideological reasons. But I’ve had no hint of any such monitoring in my discussions.
The Chronicle interview contains many remarkable statements. Just one: Fish, who cheerfully admits that he long ago forgot whatever Greek he learned, claims that at Ralston University, the start-up “traditional” college he’s associated with, students with just six months of Greek were reading — and discussing — the Iliad in Greek. Gutkin, who studied Greek as an undergrad, says that seems “almost impossible.”
No, no, says Fish. The discussion, he claims, “was very precise about details of the verse and how it worked, and how various words interacted with one another or were opposed to one another.” But wait a minute, wait a minute:
How did you know, if it was in Greek?I am now thinking about a certain kind of gesturing.
Oh, I could tell that much. There’s a certain kind of gesturing with respect to texts that is known to any of us who have worked with texts for a while.
Two more Fish posts
Fish on Strunk and White : Review of Fish’s How to Write a Sentence
[Fish was previously the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University.]
comments: 4
and it is even much broader than FL: https://newrepublic.com/article/176854/republican-red-states-brain-drain
i'm waiting for the analysis by the state of ks public schools as to what programs they will be eliminating because they don't met the bd of regents requirements. See https://littleapplepost.com/posts/00cab8ee-2cc0-48b7-8532-7969cd6c8076.
after reading the article i'd be fleeing too!
kirsten
Yes, it is much broader. Thanks for the links, Kirsten,
I’m interested in seeing how these developments affect Illinois, surrounded as it is by red.
Linda knew Fish and his wife, knew them through academic dealings, conferences and such.
She introduced me to him. It was about some kind of project I was working on. This was like almost 20 years ago and he was was down living in florida and i was living in georgia, both of us retired, sort of.
I can't remember what the project was. Something about chicago maybe, but anyway I asked him and got a shrug. That was it. A shrug.
(Hi, John.) I talked with him once after an MLA panel. He told the woman speaking to him while I waited that she didn’t know how to think. He told me to come down to Johns Hopkins to talk to him. How? When? No specifics. Just come down.
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