Episode 11: Stanley Fish
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Analyzing the Meaning of “Free Speech”
How does the First Amendment really work? Why is it important to understand the difference between free speech and free action? What role, if any, should social media companies like Twitter or Facebook play in policing the online speech?
Stanley Fish is a literary theorist, legal scholar, and New York Times best-selling author. He is also a professor of law at Florida International University and a visiting professor of law at the Cardozo School of Law. He explores all of these questions in his most recent book, The First: How To Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, And Donald Trump.
In this episode, we’ll hear more about The First Amendment, what it does and doesn’t protect and what kind of speech it regulates. We’ll also discuss some of the contradictions of free speech in 21st-century society. Plus, Stanley’s argument for why academia should always remain “an ivory tower.”
Episode Quotes:
On free speech protections in private life:
“We produce and listen to and consume speech, but the First Amendment, in general, has nothing whatsoever to say about that large swath of human life in which speech is being produced. And many people believe that the legal, constitutional prohibitions against abridging free speech carry over into the sphere of private life, but they do not.”
On the diminishing public attention span:
“The large amount of interaction between ideas in the public takes place in the instant[...] the point is simply to make your point as vigorously as possible, and then get out of the way and go on to the next point. [It’s] the very opposite of inviting considered reflection and deliberation.”
On academia as an “ivory tower”:
“The arguments against the academy being an ivory tower are wrong. The academy is and should be an ivory tower. And when it ceases to be, it loses its distinctiveness, the distinctiveness of the task that it can perform, and therefore the distinctiveness of the value or service it can provide in the society. If universities are just political agents with classrooms, let's get rid of the classrooms and go right to it.”