In 1995 I got a call out of the blue from an editor at this newspaper who invited me to write an op-ed. "About what? I asked. "Anything you like," she replied. That was obviously an offer I couldn't refuse, so I set about writing, schooled by my wife, who had been a book reviewer for The Raleigh News and Observer. She taught me to forgo the academic habit of withholding the goods until the end and explained how in this genre the main point should be announced immediately because readers might not wait around while I indulged myself in the pleasures of building a pretty argument. (This is a lesson I have hewed to only intermittently.) The result was a piece titled "How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words." The editors liked it, readers seemed interested, and I was hooked.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Stanley Fish
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In the next 10 years I wrote five or six pieces a year, usually at the editors' invitation, and in 2006 I was asked to write a regular column, first under the rubric of "Think Again" (a title bestowed by the then-op-ed page editor David Shipley) and then as a member of the Opinionator team and most recently as a contributing writer. Now, some 300 essays later, the party's over and this is my last column, at least as an author whose work appears at an appointed time either once a week or twice a month.
Looking back, what I will remember most are the readers and their comments. The relationship between us was often adversarial, sometimes because of a disagreement with the views I had expressed, sometimes because of a frustration with my unwillingness to express a view at all. I explained (too often) that I was typically less interested in taking a stand on a controversial issue than in analyzing the arguments being made by one or more of the parties to the dispute. I was making an argument about the structure of argument, and the fact that I came down hard on the reasoning put forward by one side didn't mean either that I rejected its position or embraced the position of the other side.
So, for example, when I found the writings of the "New Atheists" — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens — shallow, callow, historically uninformed and downright silly, that didn't mean that I was a religious believer. Bad arguments can be made on behalf of a position you may well hold, and by pointing out their badness you don't (necessarily) reject the position. "I believe X, but think that the case you guys are making for X is faulty" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. (I say that all the time about the Obama administration.) In the columns that provoked frustration, I stopped short of offering the "I believe X" part, leaving readers to wonder where I stood. I tried to stand on the side of cogency and against slipshod reasoning, which meant that I stood on neither side of a substantive question like "Is there a God?" or "Does religion do more harm than good?" I might of course have answers to those questions, but it wasn't the point of the columns I wrote to reveal them. Let me hasten to say that I wasn't trying to be objective (a label pinned on me by both my detractors and defenders) or to be above the fray; I was in another fray, making points about making points, and reserving the deeper, moral issue for another day, which usually never arrived.
I say "usually" because on occasion my anatomy of a structure of argument bled right into a substantive position. This was so recently, when I analyzed the case being made by some academics for boycotting Israeli universities. They reason that a boycott is justified because as the result of Israel's actions, "Palestinian universities have been bombed, schools have been closed, and scholars and students deported." I quote from a statement by the American Studies Association, which just a few days ago endorsed the boycott and did so in the name of academic freedom, defined (correctly) by the statement as "the necessity for intellectuals to remain free from state interests and interference." Yet, in the next breath, the Association is busily assuming the interests of one state against another and acting accordingly, on the reasoning that the academic freedom of Palestinians has been "severely hampered" by Israel's policies. Or, in other words (my words), "the state of Israel has done bad things to the Palestinians and therefore we should do bad things to Israeli universities."
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