Stanley Agonistes: An Interview with Stanley Fish

Jeffrey J. Williams Stanley Agonistes: An Interview with Stanley Fish Jeffrey Williams: I first want to ask you about the star system, befitting this issueofminnesota revieiv. Itseems such a fraught thing, which everybody is conscious of but also bemoans. What do vou think of it? Stanley Fish: Well, I think the star system is inevitable given that the coin or currency in our profession is in part prestige, so what you expect stars to do is to attract graduate students and to make a program more visible. If it's more visible, you'll get the kind of attention that will appeal to upper administrators, to boards of trustees, and to legislators if you're in a state university. The knock against the star system is that paying high salaries to so-called stars works at the expense of long-time members ofprograms, departments, and colleges, who then enter into a relationship ofsecond-tier citizens to those brought in from the outside and given privileges and perks they never had. To some extent, there will be moments when that tension is experienced and lived by a community, but it's not necessary , and I think it will pass. First of all, in most cases money spent to hire a star is not money taken away from those who have been in an institution for a long time; rather, if you didn't hire stars, the money that you saved is money that a department will never see. The reason that university members don't understand this is because they believe that the finances in a university operate according to the old diagrammatic pie, but this isn't the case. Universities' finances exist in pots of money, and at every level of the university there are cash reserves and funds which are, in effect, slush funds, which usually have other names—soft money, opportunity funds, and so forth. They are not funds available for the kinds of things about which long-term faculty members complain. Ironically, if you succeed in hiring people who are considered stars, the material conditions of your own working life will eventually, if not immediately, improve, because when people come in with large reputations and with perks and equipment as a part of a package, there's immediately a pressure to provide at least some of those benefits to others. Another way of putting this is to say that the entire tone of a unit will be enhanced if someone arrives who is being treated exceptionally well. The spirit changes. Now it's true, of course, that some who have been long-time inhabitants of a place and who have spent many years being disap- 116 the minnesota review pointed, being underpaid, being undernoticed, will have entered into a strange relationship with that unhappy situation. To put it simply, they've learned not only to tolerate it but to love it. They love it, in part, because they regard it as their badge of virtue. If we are being treated so badly, the reasoning goes, we must be superior persons. JW: This is what you talk about in "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," about the constitutive tendency of academics toward selfabnegation . SF: Yes, and that means that you must be very careful when you attempt to improve the conditions in the academic workplace either by bringing in stars or by other means, because there will be people who, although they seem to be the beneficiaries of your efforts, will resent them. JW: How do you think the star system has changed? It seems to me that the profession has shifted from a patrilineal model, by which a master teacher conferred his prestige upon a student, to the star model, which represents individuals largely without a history or lineage. SF: I think a lot of the changes have come about because of structural changes in the way business is done. When I was a graduate student in the late 50s and early 60s at Yale, there were no outside speakers coming in, there was no lecture circuit, there were many fewer journals than there are today and they were fairly tightly controlled by editors and boards of editors...