Stanley Fish

In November 2010 he joined the board of visitors of Ralston College, a start-up institution in Savannah, Georgia. He has also been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985.

He argued in January 2008 on his New York Times-syndicated blog that the humanities are of no instrumental value, but have only intrinsic worth. He explains, "To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said diminishes the object of its supposed praise."

During his tenure there, he recruited professors respected in the academic community, and attracted attention to the college. After resigning as dean in a high-level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC, Fish spent a year teaching in the Department of English. The Institute for the Humanities at UIC named a lecture series in his honor, which is still ongoing. In June 2005, he accepted the position of Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University, teaching in the FIU College of Law.

Fish received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 1994 for There's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too.

Fish taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before serving as Arts and Sciences Professor of English and professor of law at Duke University from 1986 to 1998. From 1999 to 2004, he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he served as distinguished visiting professor at the John Marshall Law School from 2000 until 2002. Fish also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice and was the chairman of the Religious Studies Committee.

As chair of the Duke English department from 1986 to 1992, Fish attracted attention and controversy. Fish, according to Lingua Franca, used "shameless—and in academe unheard-of—entrepreneurial gusto" to take "a respectable but staid Southern English department and transform it into the professional powerhouse of the day", in part through the payment of lavish salaries. His time at Duke saw comparatively quite light undergraduate and graduate coursework requirements for students, matched by their heavy graduate teaching requirements. This permitted professors to reduce their own teaching. In April 1992, near the end of Fish's time as department chair, an external review committee considered evidence that the English curriculum had become "a hodgepodge of uncoordinated offerings", lacking in "broad foundational courses" or faculty planning. The department's dissipating prominence in the 1990s was featured on the front page of The New York Times.

Fish started his career as a medievalist. His first book, published by Yale University Press in 1965, was on the late-medieval/early-Renaissance poet John Skelton. Fish explains in his partly biographical essay, "Milton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour" (published in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . And It's a Good Thing, Too), that he came to Milton by accident. In 1963, the same year that Fish started as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley its resident Miltonist, Constantinos A. Patrides, received a grant. The chair of the department asked Fish to teach the Milton course, notwithstanding the fact that the young professor "had never — either as an undergraduate or in graduate school — taken a Milton course" (269). The eventual result was Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; rpt. 1997). Fish's 2001 book, How Milton Works, reflects five decades' worth of his scholarship on Milton.

Fish was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He was raised Jewish. His father, an immigrant from Poland, was a plumber and contractor who made it a priority for his son to get a university education. Fish became the first member of his family to attend college in the US, earning a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959 and an M.A. from Yale University in 1960. He completed his Ph.D. in 1962, also at Yale University.

Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938) is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, although Fish has no degrees or training in law. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.