NYT Fish's "Academic"-Wannabee Brain-Scramble
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: NYT Fish's "Academic"-Wannabee Brain-Scramble
Date: Mar 17, 2009 12:01 AM
"Whether or not divestiture and other actions taken by academics were
decisive in, or even strongly contributory to, ending the apartheid
regime is in dispute. What should not be in dispute is that those
actions, however salutary and productive of good results, were and are
antithetical to the academic enterprise, which **** while it may
provide the tools (of argument, fact and historical research) that
enable good and righteous deeds, should never presume to perform
them." ****
ARTICLE BELOW
====================================
Well, then, this blabbermouth "academic"-wannabee needs
to look up what the word mean means.
http://dictionary.die.net/mean
It means "What do you INTEND?" or "What is your
PURPOSE."
Why teach stuff to kids that has no meaning to you?
'That you don't INTEND to be ultimately actionable?
If stuff is TRUE - and the purpose of statistics is
to prove a phenomenon does not occur due to chance -
then it is inherently ACTIONABLE, and if it is inherently
ACTIONABLE, and that action is a bad thing, like fission
and nuclear bombs, then the kids certainly need to know
about things like fallout/radiation poisoning.
Here's another one:
http://dictionary.die.net/discipline
If you ask me, this guy Stanley Fish hasn't spent too
much time at any academic institutions, although he
writes as if he really wants people to think he has.
Take it to an application:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1894359?ordinalpos=18&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8384628?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=1&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed
I will translate what I am sure *all* the biology
professors at Yale teach their students, that being
the part about what mean means and what discipline
means:
"IF: You Want to Detect Most Cases of Lyme Disease,
AND: Given that Most Cases of Lyme Disease
have Antibodies Against Flagellin,
BUT: It is Necessary to NOT DETECT Other Bacterial Flagellins,
ACTION: PARSE the DNA to Select a Specific Fla Region.
TEST.
VALIDATE.
REPORT."
Now: As there is no "controversy" over "Lyme Disease,"
you can see that this is due to "academics" believing in
what they teach, adhering to a discipline, and doing what
they mean.
Besides scientific disciplines and languages,
there is only untestable nonsense.
(I wonder if the New York Times could ever find
a smart person to write an article some day...)
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
http://www.relapsingfever.org
======================================
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/to-boycott-or-not-to-boycott-that-is-the-question/?pagemode=print
Stanley Fish - Think Again
March 15, 2009, 10:00 pm
To Boycott or Not to Boycott, That Is the Question
In response to last week’s column on neoliberalism and higher
education, Sobriquet writes that neoliberalism, like neoconservatism,
is “an opaque catchphrase coined by wannabe pundits” that doesn’t
“refer to anything.” That judgment finds support in an essay soon to
be published in Studies in Comparative International Development. The
authors, Taylor Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse (political science
researchers at UC Berkeley), report that while in recent years
“neoliberalism has become an academic catchphrase,” its use “remains a
puzzle” because it is “left undefined . . even by those who employ it
as a key independent or dependent variable.”
This corresponds to what I found in my reading. It wasn’t that I had
been unaware of the term; it was just that it never seemed to be doing
much work; its force, as a Boas and Gans-Morse remark, is often more
rhetorical (take that, you accursed neoliberal) than analytic. I
didn’t feel I had to have a firm grasp on it in order to continue
reading; that is, until I found the word being applied to me.
Boas’s and Gans-Morse’s other point is that neoliberalism is used in
so “many different ways . . . that its appearance in any given article
offers little clue as to what it actually means.” This is borne out by
the commentators, many of whom vehemently disagree with me and at the
same time disagree with one another. Neoliberalism is just another
word for neoconservatism; no, they’re different; neoliberalism is 19th
century laissez-faire capitalism; no, it isn’t; neoliberalism is what
“new Democrats” Bill Clinton and Al Gore urge; neoliberalism is Adam
Smith on steroids; neoliberalism is Marx’s dialectical materialism;
neoliberalism is just capitalism; neoliberalism is J.S. Mill’s
libertarianism; neoliberalism is plain old cost accounting;
neoliberalism is Bushism; neoliberalism is classical liberalism;
neoliberalism is what Ayn Rand promoted; neoliberalism is globalism;
neoliberalism is avarice; neoliberalism is Law and Economics.
The variety of views about neoliberalism was matched by the variety of
views about me, which ranged from gratitude (“I enjoy running into
something so calmly, methodically, and complexly reasoned in the
newspaper”) to admiration (”Well worth reading. The author does an
admirable job”) to derision (“What a massive whiff of hot air”) to
contemptuous dismissal (“The title of this column should be ‘Think
Before Writing.’) One poster even made fun of a sports jacket he says
I wore 40 years ago; he must have been waiting all those years for an
opportunity to sneer, and he got it.
The praise and dispraise came along with opposing characterizations of
my position. I am a neoliberal; no, I’m a critic of neoliberalism. I
am for American higher education. I am against it. I am an apostle of
free enterprise. I make fun of it. A.C. gets it right when he or she
complains, “After reading this entry twice, I’m still not sure where
professor Fish stands on this issue.”
Reading it 200 times wouldn’t help, for I don’t stand anywhere; that’s
the (non) point of most of these columns, not to endorse or reject
agendas, but to follow out the lines of argument that accompany them,
to see how those arguments work or don’t work, to see where they lead.
In the last line of the column I say that the arguments of the
academic critics of neoliberalism lead straight to support for and
participation in the boycott of Israeli academics. (Which isn’t to say
that all critics of the neoliberal university are necessarily pro-
boycott, only that it is easier for them to arrive at that position
because they are already halfway down the road.) Several posters
wondered how I could get from here to there. Here’s how, in five easy
steps:
(1) The academic critics of neoliberalism complain that one effect of
the neoliberization of the university has been the retreat by faculty
members from public engagement, with the result that intellectual work
becomes hermetic and sealed off from political struggle. “We need,”
says Henry Giroux, “to link knowing with action, and learning with
social engagement, and this requires addressing the responsibilities
that come with teaching . . . to fight for an inclusive and radical
democracy by recognizing that education in the broadest sense is not
just about understanding . . . but also about providing the conditions
for assuming the responsibilities we have as citizens to expose human
misery and to eliminate the conditions that produce it” (“Against the
Terror of Neoliberalism,” 2008)
(2) In the eyes of many academics, a great deal of human misery is
being produced by Israel’s policy toward Palestinians. Eliminating it
is everybody’s business.
(3) This includes academics who cannot stop at just talking about
injustice, but must do something about it, must act.
(4) The political resources of academics are limited, but one way
academics can show political solidarity is to put pressure on
colleagues who are silent in the face of injustice: “The boycott or
the divestment campaign is the mode of political protest that is left
after all other forms of struggle have been tried”; it is “the
politics of last resort” (Grant Farred, “The Act of Politics Is to
Divide,” Works and Days).
(5) Therefore, it is appropriate and even obligatory to boycott
Israeli academics and Israeli universities “that have turned a blind
eye to the destruction and disruption of Palestinian Schools” (David
Lloyd, Daily Trojan). “If, in the midst of oppression, these
institutions do not function to analyze and explain the world in a way
that promotes justice . . . but rather acquiesce in aggressive
neocolonialist practices, then others may legitimately boycott
them” (Mona Baker and Lawrence Davidson).
Nor will they be saved by the invocation of academic freedom, for
rather than protecting Israeli academics, academic freedom, as the
boycotters understand it, demands reprisals against them for having
stood by while the freedom of Palestinians was being violated. “There
is a whiff of hypocrisy,” says Steven Rose, when after failing to
protest against the atrocities of their government “Israeli scientists
complain that those of us . . . who refuse to collaborate with
them . . . are attacking their academic freedom” (The Guardian, May
27, 2004).
David Lloyd drives the point home: “Israeli institutions are complicit
in immense infringement on Palestinian academic freedom, so it’s
really hard, it seems to me, for Israeli institutions to claim the
rights of academic freedom that they are so systematically denying to
their Palestinian counterparts.”
Lloyd’s last phrase — “their Palestinian counterparts” — raises a
question that helps us to see what has happened to academic freedom in
these statements. Counterparts in what respect? Not, obviously, as co-
religionists or citizens of the same polity, but as academics — men
and women trained to engage in research and to follow lines of
intellectual inquiry wherever they might lead.
Whatever their political or religious or geographical situations,
scholars throughout the world are linked by a set of concerns to which
they have a responsibility that is distinct from (although not
necessarily antithetical to) the responsibilities they may have in
other respects. The strength of an academic discipline, Murray
Hausknecht observes, “depends on maintaining relationships across
national borders.” (Dissent)
Academics, Hausknecht explains, “can be likened to citizens of a
nation,” and while they are also citizens in political units
(particular nations and finally the world), if we conflate the two
citizenships by making academic judgments (whether to accept a paper
in a journal or invite a speaker to a conference) on political
grounds, we do great damage to the scholarly community, the nature of
which “is exemplified by academics who publish papers in foreign
journals, attend international conferences, and collaborate with
colleagues in research projects.”
But it is just such a conflation that the boycotters insist on, as
Grant Farred makes clear when he declares that “academic freedom has
to be conceived as a form of political solidarity.” Political
solidarity, not academic solidarity. Farred denies to academic work
any distinctive identity (he of course would receive this as a
compliment, not an accusation), and insists that decisions about how
to engage in it — where, in collaboration with whom — should be guided
by political considerations, by a determination of whether this or
that scholar is on the right side.
For the most part, opponents of the boycott do not engage on this
point, but instead put forward arguments that are weak, either because
they are counterproductive or merely strategic. In the
counterproductive category is the charge that the boycotters are anti-
Semitic. Rather than shaming or cowing those it is aimed at, this
accusation only produces indignation, both on the part of those who
favor a boycott and are Jewish (like its founders Steven and Hilary
Rose) and those who declare that they have been fighting all forms of
racism, including anti-Semitism, for their entire lives.
The charge of anti-Semitism also provokes two responses of principle:
first that one can and should distinguish between opposition to the
policy of a state and prejudice against that state’s racial majority
(Are you telling me I can’t criticize Israel without being a racist?);
and second, that the invocation of anti-Semitism has the effect, if
not the intention, of chilling speech (a First Amendment no-no). How
can one “vigorously advocate the idea that the Israeli occupation is
brutal and wrong . . . if the voicing of these views calls down the
charge of ant-Semitism?” (Judith Butler, “No, It’s Not Anti-Semitic”
London Review of Books, August 21, 2003).
A second line of anti-boycott reasoning invites counter-responses that
merely continue the debate without in any way clarifying it. It asks,
why single out Israel when European and North American academics
regularly engage with researchers from countries (including, perhaps,
the United States) with well-documented records of human-rights
abuses? The trouble with this debating point in the guise of a
question (you’re supposed to realize that you’d end up boycotting
everyone) is that it implies that if Israel were the only state
performing bad acts it would be O.K. to embargo its academics.
The real question is, should the policies (whatever they are) of a
country an academic happens to live in ever be a reason for denying
her the courtesies academics extend to each other in recognition of
the collaborative nature of the work they do? (Yes, I would include
academics from the Third Reich.) That question has the advantage of
facing squarely the issue of what academic work is and isn’t, an issue
that is obscured if you’re just toting up and rank-ordering atrocities
as a preliminary to determining which scholars you will or won’t deal
with.
Boycott opponents do no better when the focus is narrowed to just
Israel and Palestine and they argue, as Anthony Julius and Alan
Dershowitz do, that it is incorrect and a suspicious distortion to
regard Israel “as the pure aggressor,” and the Palestinians “as pure
victims” (“The Contemporary Fight Against Anti-Semitism”).
But again, the degree of culpability assigned to the two states (and
of course that is a matter that will never be settled) should not
yield a formula for treating its academics differently (you guys can
come to our conference, but you lot can’t). Even if it were agreed
that Julius and Dershowitz are right and there is blame all around,
that agreement would say nothing about whether or not to boycott,
unless you believe that the question is an empirical one that can be
answered by history and analogy.
Because anti-boycotters offer arguments that trade in comparisons and
calculations of relative guilt, they are vulnerable to the boycotters’
trump card: If you supported the boycott of South Africa and the
disinvestment by universities from companies doing business in or with
that country, you are obligated, by your own history, to support the
boycott of Israeli academics. Hilary and Steven Rose reported in 2002
that they knew many academics “who thought that cooperating with
Israeli institutions was like collaborating with the apartheid
regime” (“The Choice Is to Do Nothing or Try to Bring About Change,”
www.guardian.co.uk/Archive).
In response, anti-boycotters say that (1) boycotting is a “blunt
instrument” that harms individuals and institutions indiscriminately;
(2) it wasn’t the boycotts that brought down the South African regime;
(3) the boycott against South Africa was economic and was not aimed
primarily at scholars, and (4) despite the loose use of the word by
boycott promoters, Israel is not an apartheid state, for it accords
its Arab citizens political rights that were denied to blacks in
apartheid South Africa.
But the effort to detach Israel from South Africa by claiming that the
sins of the latter were much greater than the sins of the former has
not been successful, in part because those who make it are trying too
hard. (You can almost see the sweat on their foreheads.) The American
Association of University Professors ties itself up in knots
explaining that while its own history includes “support for
divestiture during the anti-apartheid campaigns in South Africa,” it
nevertheless opposes this boycott. The rationale seems to be that
South Africa was a special, one time case — “South Africa is the only
instance in which the organization endorsed some form of boycott” —
but that is hardly going to satisfy those who are prosecuting the “if-
you-protested-injustice-then–you-should-protest-it-now” argument.
The better course would be for the AAUP and other boycott opponents to
accept the equivalence of the two situations, and repudiate what they
did in the past. Not “what we did then is different from what we
decline to do now,” but “we won’t boycott now and we were wrong to
boycott then.”
Whether or not divestiture and other actions taken by academics were
decisive in, or even strongly contributory to, ending the apartheid
regime is in dispute. What should not be in dispute is that those
actions, however salutary and productive of good results, were and are
antithetical to the academic enterprise, which while it may provide
the tools (of argument, fact and historical research) that enable good
and righteous deeds, should never presume to perform them.
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