Spot the False Premise(s)!
By I’m as up for some Stanley Fish-bashing as anybody, but this is deeply weird:
Fish’s importance resides mainly in that he is an exemplar of recent academic trends. He chiefly represents himself—he does that quite well—but he may also represent something of the postmodern academic life: its self-satisfaction, its self-promotion, its glibness. If the humanities are in trouble today, humanists like Fish are one of the reasons.
[…]
In fact the new academic prosperity undergirds Fish’s argument. What bothers him is the split between the new wealth and professorial self-image. The “new dilemma facing many academics” is “how to enjoy the benefits of increasing affluence” while maintaining an attitude of disdain toward luxury goods. His complaint about substandard conference accommodations rests on the same footing.
We are all Stanley Fish! Why wasn’t I informed?
Jacoby is himself an academic, which makes the fact that his assumptions about the typical affluence and prestige of American academics apparently come from 1)reading articles about Stanley Fish and 2)David Horowitz columns all the more deeply weird.