Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938) is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual.
From 1999 to 2004, he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he served as distinguished visiting professor at the John Marshall Law School from 2000 until 2002.
[9] After resigning as dean in a high-level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC,[10] Fish spent a year teaching in the Department of English.
[13] In April 2024, New College of Florida described him as presidential scholar in residence in invitations to a discussion with Mark Bauerlein on free speech, academic freedom, and political expression.
Fish explains in his partly biographical essay, "Milton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour" (published in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech .
In 1963, the same year that Fish started as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, its resident Miltonist, Constantinos A. Patrides, received a grant.
There is no room to consider that Milton's poetry might be wise about human weakness, and that Paradise Lost, for instance, might be more notable for its sense of tragedy than for its doctrinal correctness.
Fish, according to Lingua Franca, used "shameless—and in academe unheard-of—entrepreneurial gusto" to take "a respectable but staid Southern English department and transform it into the professional powerhouse of the day", in part through the payment of lavish salaries.
In April 1992, near the end of Fish's time as department chair, an external review committee considered evidence that the English curriculum had become "a hodgepodge of uncoordinated offerings", lacking in "broad foundational courses" or faculty planning.
[19] As a frequent contributor to The New York Times[20] and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fish has been the target of wide-ranging criticism.
Writing in Slate magazine, Judith Shulevitz reported that not only does Fish openly proclaim himself "unprincipled" but also rejects wholesale the concepts of "fairness, impartiality, reasonableness."
And this, finally, is the critical issue in the contemporary university of which Stanley Fish is a typical representative: sophistry renders truth itself equivocal and deprives scholarly learning of its reason for being... .
"[24] In the essay "Sophistry about Conventions", philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that Fish's theoretical views are based on "extreme relativism and even radical subjectivism."
Offering an alternative, Nussbaum cites John Rawls's work in A Theory of Justice to highlight "an example of a rational argument; it can be said to yield, in a perfectly recognizable sense, ethical truth."
"[25] Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae and public intellectual, denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogeneous and sheltered ivory tower of Duke.
[26] David Hirsch, a critic of post-structuralist influences on hermeneutics, censured Fish for "lapses in logical rigor" and "carelessness toward rhetorical precision."
Hirsch compares Fish's work to Penelope's loom in the Odyssey, stating, "what one critic weaves by day, another unweaves by night."