Stanley Fish's most recent contribution to The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Is Everything Political?," should be required reading for all administrators, faculty, and students--especially faculty and grad students in the humanities. In this short, hardhitting column, Fish destroys what has become, on too many campuses, a sort of pseudo-intellectual rationalization for not thinking well and not doing one's job, showing how the phrase "everything is political" is actually a self-negating claim that does nothing to advance argument, raise consciousness, provoke thought, or teach ethics. Why is Fish interested in such a lame claim? Because even though its lameness should be obvious--if "everything" is political, than everything might as well not be political; if "everything" is political, then important distinctions between kinds of things and kinds of acts, between contexts and behaviors and beliefs, disappear; if "everything" is political, then politics itself gets emptied out--the notion that everything is political holds tremendous sway on campuses.

What kind of sway? Thought control, for one. Fish links the prevailing idea that "everything is political" to the administrative debacles about student and faculty speech in the wake of 9/11, pointing out that admins who make it their business to adjudicate sensitivity, who punish or censure those who express unpopular beliefs, are not doing their job. The "everything is political" thesis also causes great confusion among students and faculty about the difference between being a scholar, a teacher, or a student, and being an activist. Fish is delightfully clear on a point that seems to give folks in the humanities no end of trouble, and he is uncompromising in his commentary about the all-too muddled concept of the "scholarship of engagement." "Literary criticism and partisan politics are both political in this general sense -- any style of their performance will be controversial in the field -- but the point of the one is to produce a true account of a poem, while the point of the second is to win elections. If you mix them up and try for an account of a poem that will help a favored candidate or advance a political cause (unlikely but possible scenarios), you will only be pretending to practice literary criticism, and you will be exploiting for partisan purposes the discipline in whose name you supposedly act," Fish writes, adding that "This is more than a logical point; it is a point about bad academic practices and the sloppy thinking that accompanies them."

It's no accident that administrators and literary critics are the folks who fare worst in Fish's essay: where admins are notorious careerists who routinely abdicate their tougher responsibilities for the short-term crowd-pleasing gains of public relations, the people over in English have ridden the "everything is political" wave longer and harder than just about anyone else on campus. In fact, English has the dubious distinction of being the one academic discipline whose practitioners are by and large frankly embarrassed to be practising it. As anyone who has worked or studied in an English department for any length of time can tell you, traditional literary study--and traditional literary scholars--are the bane of the field's existence. Why? Because they are apolitical. They do not accept the governing, central, unassailable truth about the world: that everything is political. With the help of the Jamesons and Foucaults and Althussers and Spivaks of the world, English departments sold their souls during the 1980s (they mortgaged it during the 60s), and have spent the intervening years desperately trying to prove to themselves that they are socially relevant, that they are the radical interrogators of oppression and the transgressive theorists of progress, that they are the subversive instigators of truly enlightened thought, that they are uniquely equipped to describe the workings of power and resistance and desire, that they are the vanguard of ideological demystification, that they are, in short, so much more than mere literary critics, that they are, indeed, political, and that everything they do, and say, and think, is political too. "Being political" is increasingly how English departments, particularly in their younger constituencies, in their junior faculty and their graduate students, justify their existence to themselves. It's peculiarly self-hating and self-defeating behavior; it's hard to imagine literary study surviving far into the future when more and more members of English departments don't even really read literature, let alone value it.

All this is to say that as right as Fish is about the anti-intellectualism of the "everything is political" stance, it is nonetheless a stance that certain people in certain corners of the university are deeply invested in, a stance to which they have committed themselves for upwards of a generation now. The people in English, for instance, can't throw the stance off like an unbecoming hat or a pair of shoes that pinch. It's what they know, and it's who they are. Take it away, and they cease to exist.