CFP: Micro-Symposium: Stanley Fish and the Meaning of Academic Freedom

Call for Papers: Micro-Symposium: Stanley Fish and the Meaning of Academic Freedom

FIU Law Review and the FIU College of Law invite contributions for a Micro-Symposium, Stanley Fish and the Meaning of Academic Freedom, to be published in FIU Law Review in 2014. Micro-symposium commentaries will accompany the papers and proceedings of a live roundtable discussion on academic freedom and Stanley Fish’s forthcoming book, Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution. Roundtable participants include Dean Robert Post (Yale), Frederick Schauer (Virginia), Fish, and several others. The program will be held at FIU College of Law on Friday, January 24, 2014.

In the book, Fish argues

The academy is the place where knowledge is advanced, where the truth about matters physical, conceptual and social is sought. That’s the job, and that’s also the aspirational norm—the advancement of knowledge and the search for truth. The values of advancing knowledge and discovering truth are not extrinsic to academic activity; they constitute it. . . . These goods and values are also self-justifying in the sense that no higher, supervening, authority undergirds them; they undergird and direct the job and serve as a regulative ideal in relation to which  current ways of doing things can be assessed and perhaps reformed. (The “it’s just a job” is not positivism; it does not reify what is on the books.)

It follows from this specification of the academy’s internal goods that the job can be properly done only if it is undistorted by the interests of outside constituencies, that is, of constituencies that have something other than the search for truth in mind. There are thus limits both on the influences academics can acknowledge and the concerns they can take into account when doing their work. . . . It must be conducted (to return to the l915 Declaration) in “in a scholar’s spirit”, that is with a view to determining what is in fact the case and not with a view to affirming a favored or convenient conclusion. If that is the spirit that animates your academic work, you should be left free to do it, although, with respect to other parts of the job (conforming to departmental protocols, showing up in class, teaching to the syllabus), you are constrained. 

Commentaries may discuss any and all legal, ethical, moral, social, practical, personal, and theoretical aspects of academic freedom, Stanley Fish's new book, or his extensive body of work on academic freedom or any other topic. Interested commenters will be provided manuscripts of Fish's book, on request.

Commentaries can be a maximum of 600 words, including text, footnotes, and title.

Contributions must be received by October 1, 2013. Submit to: [email protected].

Expressions of interest, requests for the manuscript, and other inquiries can be directed to Ben Crego, Law Review Editor-in-Chief, at [email protected] or to Prof. Ediberto Roman at [email protected].