January 14, 2000

Stanley Fish's View of Academic Freedom

To the Editor:

Stanley Fish's "Academic Freedom: When Sauce for the Goose Isn't Sauce for the Gander" (Opinion, November 26) is erudite and clever. He has, however, done more to debunk a caricature of academic freedom than to demonstrate that "[a]cademic freedom is a bad idea" -- which he, nevertheless, claims to support. It is, regrettably, easy to agree with much of what Dean Fish has to say about academic boorishness and pettiness, moral relativism and its