Excellent line! But, isn’t that always the way with the Baby Boomer generation: dissipation for me in my youth, but you Gen Xers and Gen Yers still have to respect my authoriTAY now that I’m an old coot! Thanks for the up-close and personal look at Fish. (BTW, I wasn’t going to spend money on the book–I just liked the advice about dealing with state legislators!) His advice to faculty seems to run counter to what we’re told by everyone else–that we need to make our research “relevant” and “broader.” Oh well, Fish is nothing if not a contrarian, as well as someone who’s never taken the brand of home cure he’s peddling now.

As for the bullying stuff: if Fish (or anyone) behaved that way to his colleagues, then it’s bullying. But if he slapped around some state legislators in an effort to get them to respect his professional expertise, then I’m OK with that. I think it’s just fine to take it to The Man–but never to those near you or especially not below you on the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Academic Being.

I kept waiving my arm during his lecture but he didn’t call on me — because what I wanted to say was, you’re like a parent who spent his youth in an opium den telling his kids just say no. If he had followed his own advice, we’d have at least one more great book on Milton or reader-response theory and a lot fewer third-rate newspaper columns.