I’ve taken strong exception to the op-ed writings of prof. Stanley Fish before. But he gets much right in this piece about the controversy surrounding Kevin Barrett, a university lecturer in Wisconsin who is under fire for his view that 9/11 was “an inside job.”
Fish argues that Barrett’s critics and supporters are both wrong — the critics for arguing, in effect, that certain topics should be forbidden; the supporters for arguing, in effect, that anything goes in the classroom or lecture hall. The line is crossed, Fish holds, when a professor begins to proselytize for a particular viewpoint. As Fish notes, Barrett is a member of the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
Fish is agnostic on Barrett’s fitness as a teacher. If Barrett checks his personal convictions at the door, Fish maintains, then OK. If he uses the classroom as a megaphone to sell the “9/11 Truth” viewpoint, then not OK.
What Fish misses, and what I’ve tried to explain here, is that the pretense of objectivity is the “9/11 Truth” movement’s stock-in-trade. (Holocaust deniers operate in much the same way.) For Barrett to import the movement’s phony “we report, you decide” rhetorical tricks in a classroom setting does not resolve the issue. Of course, universities must tread extremely carefully when it comes to academic freedom. But they must tread equally carefully when it comes to lecturers who are mouthpieces for disreputable political causes.
Fish notes, only in passing, that Barrett is not teaching about 9/11 per se. He is teaching a course on “Islam: Religion and Culture.” The quality of Barrett’s work on that subject, thefore, is the relevant issue. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has decided to retain Barrett, citing “the free exchange of ideas.” But if Barrett is hawking flim-flam about Islam in the context of 9/11 — and there’s ample to reason to wonder about that — then the school should reconsider. There is such a thing as pedagogical malpractice.
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