I think dementia is a subjective experience which hinders interpretative ability

Stanley Fish has always been an insane hypocrite, but he's not even bothering to make a coherent argument anymore.

The thesis for his latest blog entry is that professors are omnipotent and are mentally molesting your children at your expense. Except he elucidates said thesis in such a way that only Andy Rooney and possibly Thomas Friedman could understand how he arrived at it.

He takes the case of an anarchist physics professor at the University of Ottawa who has obviously gone batshit and isn't teaching science anymore but rather teaching political activism and yelling at his students to fight the power. Apparently there are some letters between the professor and the dean in which the latter asks the former to stop being insubordinate and do his job and the former tells the latter that being insubordinate is his job and I'm pretty sure at this point the former is winking into the camera and knowingly stroking his beard while the latter is shaking his fists and screaming at the ceiling fan in a vain attempt at making it fall on both of their heads.

But nothing gets by Fish! The man who destroyed Duke University proceeds to contradict this Canadian professor's claim by citing an Arizona court case which ruled that a teaching method could be grounds for dismissal. Brilliant, but he's forgotten that Arizona is not in Canada, you know, where the Canadian professor teaches. At a Canadian university. Oops!

But that's just a minor error, really. Fish's point is that these types of radical professors have jobs for life, can never be fired, and can therefore do whatever they want. Except this guy WAS fired. He received exactly the kind of punishment which Fish bemoans is lacking in North American schools.

So therefore I'm not really sure what his objection really is. Because he says that this case, a case, I repeat, in which a tenured professor with specific professorial duties was dismissed from his position for not abiding by those duties, confirms his belief that professors are exempt from the standard outside the ivory tower which holds people accountable for the responsibilities of their professional positions. What the hell? I know I've underlined that twice in this entry but that's because I'm still trying to process. I don't believe he's actually really saying this shit. Maybe he didn't have anything better to write about? Maybe he just really likes that special feeling you get when you complain? The man is inscrutable.