MY LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

WRITTEN ON SUNDAY, 23 JULY, 2006

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To the Editor:

..........In re. Stanley Fish's Op Ed piece, "Conspiracy Theories 101" (July 23, 2006), on the subject of Kevin Barrett and 9/11, I think it important to note that Fish is hardly one well justified to speak as he does. The important notion, he writes, is that no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

..........Back in 1991, as I mention in my new book, A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit, an enormous change started going on inside academia. That change, which I decried then and decry again in my book, had to do precisely with using power to trump truth.

..........Back in 1991 I wrote that "the process of education is being replaced by a process, if it really can be called that—perhaps it should be called an 'atmosphere'—of coercion, increasing suspicion and innuendo, something tantamount to intellectual thuggery."

..........I then quoted from article by Fred Siegel (The New Republic, Feb. 18, 1991, pp. 28, 30):

.........."Stanley Fish, chair of Duke's English department, professor of law, and self-described 'academic leftist,' is giving a dazzling performance. The overflow audience sits rapt as Fish, who made his reputation as a critic of Renaissance poetry and a theorist of 'self-consuming artifacts,' demonstrates the inability of words to represent reality. Time and again he shows that what is clearly X in a legal text can, by dint of imposed interpretations, become not X. For Fish, texts are merely pretexts—exercises in 'nothing but manipulation and power.' Asked during the question period if the First Amendment isn't something more than an expression of power, Fish rasps, 'Free speech? Yeah, tell me another one.' A graduate student, puzzled by the way Fish has folded the world into the alphabet, asks the professor where his kind of 'academic leftism' is going. 'I want them,' responds Fish, referring to students and faculty, 'to do what I tell them to.' Later, he explains to a small group: 'I want to be able to walk into any first-rate faculty anywhere and dominate it, shape it to my will. I'm fascinated by my own will.'"

..........Fish insists today that instructors not [abandon] teaching for indoctrination. I'm happy to hear him say so. He says further that Kevin Barrett has shared with students his strong convictions about 9/11, providing no evidence that Barrett has in fact opted for indoctrination. In Fish's case, though, there's a record in print showing that he did the very thing he now condemns, when he miserably—and proudly—tossed away the distinction between truth and the mere assertion of power.

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............................................................—Eric Larsen
............................................................—Professor Emeritus,
............................................................— John Jay College, CUNY