What is striking about Fish’s article in the NY Times is his incredible lack of academic morality.
It is as if Fish is taking the side of Werner von Braun, the engineering genius behind the V2, who used slave labor to build his rockets while proclaiming that he was just serving science.
I was especially offended by these passages (redacted)
” history degrees means that (these professors) have read certain books, taken and taught certain courses and written scholarly essays, often on topics of interest only to other practitioners in the field. … this disciplinary experience qualifies them to ask and answer discipline-specific questions, (but their) .. academic expertise is not a qualification for delivering political wisdom.
(Political commentary is not) their job, although they seem to think it is: “It is all of our jobs to fill the voids exploited by the Trump campaign.” (I’m not sure that I understand what that grandiose sentence means.) No, it’s their job to teach students how to handle archival materials, how to distinguish between reliable and unreliable evidence, how to build a persuasive account of a disputed event, in short, how to perform as historians, not as seers or political gurus.
Were an academic organization to declare a political position, it would at that moment cease to be an academic organization”
While I do not want to be accused of hyperbole and fear mongering, Fish made me think of the famous quote from Martin Niemoller.
On Monday a group calling itself Historians Against Trump published an “Open Letter to the American People.” The purpose of the letter, the historians tell us, is to warn against “Donald J. Trump’s candidacy and the exceptional challenges it poses to civil society.” They suggest that they are uniquely qualified to issue this warning because they “have a professional obligation as historians to share an understanding of the past upon which a better future may be built.”
Or in other words: We’re historians and you’re not, and “historians understand the impact these phenomena have upon society’s most vulnerable.” Therefore we can’t keep silent, for “the lessons of history compel us to speak out against Trump.”
But there’s very little acknowledgment of limitations and subjectivity in what follows, only a rehearsal of the now standard criticisms of Mr. Trump, offered not as political opinions, which they surely are, but as indisputable, impartially arrived at truths: “Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a campaign of violence: violence against individuals and groups; against memory and accountability, against historical analysis and fact.” How’s that for cool, temperate and disinterested analysis?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that this view of Mr. Trump is incorrect; nor am I saying that it is on target: only that it is a view, like anyone else’s. By dressing up their obviously partisan views as “the lessons of history,” the signatories to the letter present themselves as the impersonal transmitters of a truth that just happens to flow through them. In fact they are merely people with history degrees, which means that they have read certain books, taken and taught certain courses and written scholarly essays, often on topics of interest only to other practitioners in the field.
The Historians Against Trump are proclaiming from the bench, not a literal bench, but the bench of their faculty offices and university positions. They are saying, here is our view of the election and you should pay particular attention to it because we are academics; indeed in speaking out, we are doing our academic job. Justice Ginsburg is saying, here’s what I think about Mr. Trump; take it for what it’s worth. For the historians, their credentials are the whole point; for Justice Ginsburg they are beside the point.
Perhaps Justice Ginsburg should have been more reticent in order to avoid even the appearance of impropriety (the suspicion will be that her partisan views will spill over into her judicial performance). But whatever the possible inappropriateness of what she said, she did not say it as a Supreme Court justice; she did not invest her remarks with that authority. The Historians Against Trump invest their remarks with the authority of their academic credentials, and by doing so compromise those credentials to the point of no longer having a legitimate title to them, at least when they write and publish their letter.