Fish As University Politician
As chair of the Duke English department from 1986 to 1992, Fish attracted attention and controversy. 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. His time at Duke saw comparatively quite light undergraduate and graduate coursework requirements, matched by heavy graduate teaching requirements. This permitted professors to reduce their own teaching. 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. The department's dissipating prominence in the 1990s was featured on the front page of the New York Times.
Within the first years following Fish's departure as chair, many of his most prominent hires left, including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (citing anti-intellectualism and homophobia), Michael Moon, and Jonathan Goldberg. By 1999, Fish's wife, Americanist Jane Tompkins, had "practically quit teaching" at Duke and "worked as a cook at a local health food restaurant."
Read more about this topic: Stanley Fish
Famous quotes containing the words fish, university and/or politician:
“When the weather is bad as it was yesterday, everybody, almost everybody, feels cross and gloomy. Our thin linen tents—about like a fish seine, the deep mud, the irregular mails, the never to-be-seen paymasters, and “the rest of mankind,” are growled about in “old-soldier” style. But a fine day like today has turned out brightens and cheers us all. We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The university is no longer a quiet place to teach and do scholarly work at a measured pace and contemplate the universe. It is big, complex, demanding, competitive, bureaucratic, and chronically short of money.”
—Phyllis Dain (b. 1930)
“It must have looked as if the course
He steered was really straight away
From that which he was headed for
Not much concerned for them, I say;
No more so than became a man
And politician at odd seasons.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)