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He lures big names to the U. of Illinois at Chicago, but some doubt he understands its mission
STANLEY FISH knows how to get people talking--especiaily about him.
A year ago, Mr. Fish, then a professor of English and law at Duke University, packed his bags and drove out of Durham. His destination: the University of Illinois at Chicago. His mission: to remake it.
Mr. Fish's decision to become the dean of u.j.c.'s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences was perhaps the weirdest move of the academic season. He traded a cushy professorship for a quixotic deanship. Abandoned a Gothic wonderland for a concrete jungle. Left a blue-blood private institution for a blue-collar commuter college, a public one to boot.
This wasn't just a change of address. It was a change of identity.
That's exactly what the folks at u.i.c. are banking on. For 50 years, the Chicago campus has been stuck in the shadows, eclipsed by the system's flagship in Urbana-Champaign on one hand and the University of Chicago on the other. u.i.c. had good scholars and big grants, but never enough of either. It had Ph.D. programs, but they were nowhere in the rankings.
What it did have was concrete-and plenty of it. The architectural style on the campus says it all: neo-brutalism.
Suddenly, miraculously, into this maze of boxy buildings with windows the size of slits, strolled the glamorous Stanley Fish, the short man with the larger-than-life reputation. On his arm was his wife, Jane Tompkins, herself a notable literary scholar and a crusader for education reform. She took a part-time post in the School of Education.
WHAT HE'S DONE
The abridged version of Mr. Fish's accomplishments: He made Milton trendy. He founded reader-response theory. He put Duke's sleepy English department on the map, and its press, too. In his spare time, he wrote nine books and too many articles to tally. And he made a career out of being a contrarian.
After years in the limelight, the mediasavvy Mr. Fish has become famously infamous for his quirks: his Jaguars, his sports fixation, his unabashed devotion to USA Today. ("It's the best paper in the country," he says.)
Of course, he has endured a few knocks along the way. He took...