I am running around and have now only a second,  but I want to compliment you on your most recent, substantive and thoughful posts--as above-- that raise such meaty issues for thought and discussion, especially on a weekend.

But you see, Stanley Fish does not take mere political positions or argue from any self-deluding position of "principle." When Stanley Fish advocates a policy that treats employees as pure commodities, this is not a political position in favor of dehumanizing people and treating them like commodities, nor is he arguing from any implicit principle of market utility. That's just the way the world really works. Because, you see, only people other than Stanley Fish go through life blind to the political or moral implications of their prejudices and preferences.

With Stanley Fish, who is a great thinker and a provocative writer no matter the self-devouring limitations of his schtick, it helps to realize that his resemblance to General Zod is not merely physical. He starts from an assumed position of unassailable righteousness from which self-examination is impossible. There's an old joke about the Reggie Bar, a candy bar endorsed by Reggie Jackson: When you unwrap it, it tells you how good it is. Fish's writing is kind of like that.

I read Fish’s essay. I agree with his central argument which turns on the distinction between academicizing and personalizing. I think he is right that the goal of a liberal arts education is to pass on knowledge about subjects and foster the skills necessary to master it disinterestedly and that possessing those skills and receiving that knowledge vouch for not much else in the world beyond one’s degree, save what is related to the exercise of those skills and knowing what one knows.

I don’t know why what he argued attracts the criticism that his concern over classroom advocacy is greater than warranted. This is, I think, to miss his argument as it relates to the classroom. He is not, as I read him, writing in answer to a great crisis in liberal arts education. He is, rather, defining and defending a conception of it—one he holds as absolute. Therefore, to criticize him as going overboard is to misread him. His prescription is not to be measured by the extent of the disease; it is to be measured by the strengths or weaknesses of his arguments. On that—as far as the classroom is concerned—I read nothing in your post.

But I, as you, was prima facie struck by his notion of the university paying its staff—ranging, I imagine, from its laborers to its faculty— the lowest wages the market will bear consistent with attracting the best people for the job. But on reflection, why shouldn’t that be the ideal in its hiring and paying practices that the university strives for? The university has to act legally—including all fair labor practices. But within that, Fish argues, the bases for decision should be educational considerations—what enures best to the university fulfilling its central goals—disinterested teaching and research. I’d need to know a non institutionally-grounded justification for departing from this market principle say in the case of paying laborers.

But I do think, as with you, with his notion of unalloyed ethical detachment in the university’s investment policies, Fish goes too far. And there your comment about “the perfect being the enemy of the good” seems correct to me. One can imagine the infinitely expanding list of verboten investment targets Fish starts to outline and one can sympathize with the concern, but reason and common sense can surely identify commonly agreed upon cases where either: the university simply shouldn’t put its money; or, more on Fish’s criterion, the external costs of a good investment return outweigh the benefit of that return for the institution.

Finally of course any university has to makes decisions all the time, as do any institutions or enterprises, which implicate ethical and moral judgments. Fish argues, as with its labour policies, that the decisions, which must be lawful, need to be guided by institutional self interest. And again that may be an answer to your critique. For ethical considerations can be folded into the larger criterion of what is good for the institution’s self fulfillment.

It’s too bad here, on reflection, that for Fish’s essay the sideshow has swallowed the circus. For the burden of his essay is what ought to go in classrooms, but the emphasis here has been elsewhere.

Rhubarbs, apart from not enjoying your presumptuous “But you see”, I disagree that Fish does not argue from principle. He is principled in his approach to teaching and he is principled, I’d argue, in his approach to university policy making generally. And for the latter that is—as I just described—what’s best interest for the educational enterprise. He takes that too far, admittedly, in his advocacy of ethically neutral decision making, save for the values integral to the university as an institution; but on the other hand, as I noted, there is a cost benefit analysis the university, on Fish’s account, will presumably make in its consideration of the ethical dimensions of its decisions.

He is of course not blind to the moral and political implications of his, the university’s decisions; he rather tries to locate the proper bases and context for its decision making.

Finally, why try to take Fish apart ad hominem—candy bars and all? Why not meet his arguments head on with counter arguments and counter examples?

basman, in my own defense I would simply say that as much as I respect Fish, his pretense to a-principled neutrality is a bit infuriating. His ideas are generally so interesting that even if one disagrees with him, one has to admire his work, and more often than not he is actually quite persuasive. But his schtick -- and it is a schtick, in terms of being an obvious pose that doesn't even stand up to the scrutiny of his own methodology, which he thinks he gets away with by pretending not to have principles external to the matter at hand nor political aims -- wears thin, and often leaves the reader with little to respond with other than a little deflating ad hominemism. Because you know in advance that if you point out the central contradictions in Fish's work, he will simply deny that he has any external principles or fixed political preferences, and so the fact that the application of his recommendations would just happen to create outcomes that square perfectly with a distinctly identifiable political position is mere coincidence and we shouldn't bother with that and by the way, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

But to step away for a moment from simply throwing tomatoes at his effigy despite my admiration for him as a thinker, if an academic institution could purchase qualified slaves to teach courses -- and we need not concern ourselves with chattel slavery in the mode of black slavery in America prior to 1865; think of a Greek or Roman or Hebrew slave -- would Fish have universities buy slaves? If not, why not? And if not, what about importing qualified people from impoverished nations and paying them room, board, and lunch money? You could staff hundreds of American colleges this way -- with good professors! -- were it legal.

If one really is uninterested in the non-market implications of treating workers as pure commodities, then one must conclude that the slave-professor is the perfect ideal, since it maximizes the efficiency of cost. The third-world imports earning subsistence wages would be a near competitor for pure cost efficiency. If one does not embrace either option, it must be because one finds non-market values -- "principles," if you will, or even, say it's not so Stanley, external political preferences -- expressed in the employment transaction.

Besides, an important element of the joke about Reggie Jackson, which equally applies to Fish, is that no matter how much he tells you how good he is, he really is that good.

Rhubarbs, I'll leave your first paragraph be. It's a meta criticism that isn't helpful in understanding what ever the contradictions in this particuar essay are. I'm not saying you can't point them out, but I won't know them until you particularize them.

The examples in your second paragraph for what you want to argue are surreal, respectfully. Give me concrete, real world examples that expose Fish's contradictions, if you care to.

Your penultimate paragraph escapes me, as it seems to proceed from your un(sur)real examples of your second paragraph. Who cares what the slave-professor is the perefect ideal of? Meet the point: what is the non insitutional justification for paying staff more than the market bears within the framework of legal hiring? To whom does the university owe a duty to pay more than going rates and why? Does every employer who pays his/her/its workers the going rate in a legal employment setting treat workers as pure commodities? On what principle do you say that? (Your notion here reminds of vulgarised Kant about  using no one as a means. When I pay my employee the going rate, with minimum wage standards forming a democratically agreed upon floor, I am thereby--ipso facto--making a means out of my employee in any Kantian sense? No!  I am willingly paying my emloyee the wages he agrees to receive for his services to me.)

Okay then about the Reggie Jackson joke. I took it it differently when I first read it. And Fish is pretty good at that.

Finally, I just repeat that it is too bad the the discussion in this mini thread is diverted from Fish's central argument, which I find persuasive.

I haven't read anything by Fish, but based on the discussion here, I'll look him up. I enjoyed reading the thoughtful, if brief, back and forth between basman and rhubarbs -- this is what makes the comments section great. I'd like to offer some perspective on the question of "market wages", from the perspective of a University professor (physical science, not liberal arts, and at a state university, which may color my reaction somewhat).

For faculty, the idea of a free market that one could refer to in setting wages is almost purely hypothetical. The "market" for University professors is not even remotely fluid and free, and while you can get some general idea of what a "market wage" might be by averaging over many people and institutions, there are enough non-economic drivers in hiring decisions and an odd combination of inertia and randomness to the salary structure. My experience is that it is not easy to assign a "market wage" in practice. And besides, both in teaching and research there are a range of talents, and the people are not interchangeable parts. All of this makes a commodity-type argument highly suspect.

Some faculty are indeed "free agents" who move from institution to institution regularly; they are called adjuncts, and they enjoy generally shitty wages and a complete lack of security. Most full-time faculty, on the other hand, hold long-term positions and rarely move, and many receive salary increases over time that may have little relation to their performance or "marketability". Having faculty positions being long-term makes a tremendous amount of sense from the point of view of both research and mentoring students: both are long-term activities that require long-term commitments from both the institution and the faculty member. The same is true of a well-developed class -- it takes time to get it right.

Some University staff are more interchangeable, because their jobs require less specialized skills (like a secretary, for example). But I do not think it is a common problem that these people are paid more than market wages. In reality, they are often paid less than market wages, in that they could make more money working for a private company. This is particularly true for staff who do have specialized skills, like IT people. In my experience, the good staff people who stay a long time do so because they value the environment they work in, and would not trade that for the higher wages they could make in the private sector.

To sum up, for practical reasons any organization carrying out a long-term task (like research, for example), needs to give priority to staff stability. When you are working at the cutting edge of anything, you can't waste time dealing with a revolving door of people. This becomes less important for the more applied research and development, in which you can often break the long-term task into a series of well-defined and self-contained parts. But even in engineering, where a large staff may work on a big project, people are not interchangeable and the "market wage" for the "best person for the job" is often poorly-defined.

From a philosophical point of view, I don't see why paying the lowest possible wages or focusing on the "commodity" aspect of the workforce should be a goal of a University. The quote may be taken out of context, but "paying the lowest possible wages" and "redressing economic disparities" are not opposites of each other. It seems to me that a particular political viewpoint is required to put those two as contrasting approaches.