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Monday, October 16, 2006

An FIU Professor
Mounts a Defense



"Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami," it says here, so I figured he'd be writing a first-hand account of his football team's rumble the other day with the University of Miami. Instead, his latest piece is about a much less exciting rumble -- the one at Columbia University, where students shut down the speech an anti-immigrant speaker a student group had invited was trying to make.

Fish makes an odd and unconvincing argument, in which virtually all invited speakers at universities represent a theatrical rather than intellectual phenomenon: Fish himself is, like Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, the anti-immigration guy, and I guess just about anyone else, a "spectacle" rather than a lecturer or a polemicist or a discussant on a serious topic.

Just as you don’t want your rock concert to end in the destruction of property or the injury of spectators (although you do want a little unruliness; it belongs to the genre), so you don’t want the provoked energies of those present at a campus spectacle to break up either the program or the furniture. After all, tomorrow is another day and a new act will be coming to town (on October 10th it was I), and it won’t come if the university gets the reputation of assembling crowds which it cannot then control.


Given that invited speakers are essentially trained seals or freak shows, the Columbia guy shouldn't have been surprised that things degenerated into Jerry Springeresque squalor. Yes, students hounded him off the stage, but "He has no constitutional right not to be shouted down or hounded off the stage. No government has abridged his freedom of expression." Nor were the students guilty of misconduct, since the event was rigged to excite them, and like Pavlov's dogs they got excited: "[T]he students ... were doing just what they were expected and (in some sense) directed to do..."

The only fault lay with the security guys from the university who were supposed to provide crowd protection....

So in a way Fish does speak to recent events on his campus, especially when he says:

Extracurricular means outside (the Latin extra) the curriculum and therefore outside the protocols and values that govern the classroom. And this means, in turn, that the norms by which extracurricular activities are to be measured belong not to morality or philosophy or constitutional law (all versions of what I call “big think”), but to show business. The question to be asked is not did it further free speech or contribute to a robust democratic culture or provide a genuine educational experience? Rather the questions to be asked are: Did it rock? Was it a blast? Was a good time had by all?


The extracurricular FIU/Miami rumble rocked! Not everyone had a good time, to be sure, but by show biz standards the event was unbeatable: Everybody's talking about it.