How to Win an Academic Argument
n a 1976 essay — "Interpreting the Variorum," published in Critical Inquiry — I coined the term "interpretive community." An interpretive community is not made up of persons who, because they share some of the same ideas and aims, get together and form a club, as Star Trek fans do. Rather, an interpretive community is made up of those who, by virtue of training, experience, and practice, have internalized the norms of some purposive enterprise — law, education, politics, plumbing — to the point where they see with its eyes and walk in its ways without having to think about it.
In a short time the interpretive-community idea caught on and was applied to different problems in different disciplines. After a while many people forgot where the term originated and used it without attributing it to me. In effect, I was being plagiarized all the time. (Wikipedia, at least, gives me proper credit.)
Why am I distressed at the casual appropriation by many of a two-word phrase? The answer has to do with the system of currency in the academy. In that system big ideas count for more than small points, and as it has turned out, "interpretive community" is a big idea. If you are known as the originator, and therefore the proprietor, of a big idea, your academic stock is to some extent secure; for that identification goes along with you even if you have not touched the idea in years, much as the winner of an Academy Award is introduced as one long after he or she has made any well-received films.
All of this follows from the fact that what is valued in the academy is originality. Both plagiarism as a culpable act and the academic enterprise as a field of competition make sense only if originality is presupposed as a possibility and a value. When I came up with the idea of an interpretive community, I was suddenly the possessor of something of value, something others might borrow and modify to the extent that they found it helpful in their professional labors. I couldn't patent the idea or copyright it, but I could regard it as a piece of "intellectual property" and require as a matter of professional courtesy, if not as a matter of law, that users acknowledge my ownership when invoking the phrase. (As I have noted, that hasn't quite worked out.)So that's the basic economy of the academy: You advance and prosper to the extent that the solutions you offer to intellectual puzzles are found persuasive and are subsequently credited to you as their originator. Promotions, honors, and influence follow.
For some time, however, the components that make up this "originality picture" have been under challenge. First of all, the idea of a single author whose willed intention produces a text or an image that can be identified as "his" or "hers" has been attacked by philosophers, art historians, historians of science, theorists of the internet, literary critics, and a host of others often influenced by essays such as Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" and Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?" In Barthes's words, "it is language that speaks, not the author," who is merely its local and temporary habitation.
It follows that originality is not a claim one can make, given that one can say only what the system allows one to say; one can say only what has been said already.
And yet — and this is the point I have been winding toward — those who celebrate this brave new world where the claim of originality can never be cashed in, sign the essays they write, gather together in manifestos and anthologies advertised as offering a new saving truth, and in general comport themselves as academic entrepreneurs who have something to sell and therefore something they own. I don't intend this as a criticism. The fact that these authors-despite-themselves are claiming originality for their arguments against originality is not so much a contradiction as it is an inevitable consequence of having entered the arena of academic argument, where the imperative is to be the originator of something new and where the assumption is that you wouldn't be putting yourself forward were you not making that claim.
You might think this is just common knowledge, but it isn't. It is knowledge peculiar to academic life; and it is knowledge students who enter that province as novices will have to learn, often with difficulty. They can turn for help to Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (W.W. Norton, 2006). Graff and Birkenstein begin with a simple premise: "academic writing is argumentative writing, and we believe that to argue well you need to do more than assert your own ideas. You need to enter a conversation, using what others say (or might say) as a launching pad or sounding board for your own ideas."Graff and Birkenstein write for undergraduates, but they are not the only ones who need help. Years ago a graduate student came to ask my advice about a dissertation she was planning to write. Her topic, the relationship between Supreme Court decisions and the history of race relations, was a reasonable one and her enthusiasm for it was evident. I asked her to write a prospectus stating her thesis and the arguments she would make to support it. When I looked at what she had given me I found that her writing (and thinking) was driven by moral outrage rather than scholarly inquiry. Instead of allowing her conclusion to follow from the evidence, she began with her conclusion (that the court was complicit with everything bad that had ever happened) and then proceeded to reaffirm it in every paragraph.
I told her that if this was to be a piece of academic writing, she would have to first make a case for why anyone in the field, as opposed to someone she was talking to in a coffee shop, would be interested in what she had to say. That case would have to include a survey of previous scholarship (always treated with respect even in the act of disagreeing with it), especially the scholarship of established leaders, and an account of how what she proposed to do would fit in, where "fitting in" was understood to include revising and even disrupting received wisdom. Once that was done, I told her, an indictment of the court might be the earned result of the materials she marshaled, but it shouldn't be the starting point to which the materials were made to conform. In short, I gave her the short course in academic argument.
It didn't take. Her revision was cosmetically improved, but right beneath the surface were the same moral urgency, premature judgment, and already cooked conclusion that had bothered me in the first place. I explained it all over again and sent her away to give it another try. She didn't come back and I don't blame her. She wasn't unintelligent — far from it! She just didn't want to do academic work, strictly speaking; she wanted to do social justice and she happened to be in a program where political advocacy and academic work were not distinct categories. What I was telling her just didn't jibe with what she was hearing from her teachers and fellow students.
The very fact of such a program presents a difficulty for my assertion that in academic work, some kinds of argument are obligatory and other kinds suspect. If entire departments regard as legitimate the kinds of arguments I say are not properly academic, my category of "properly academic" is in danger of becoming idiosyncratic and tendentious. If a professor wants to turn a classroom into a staging ground for his or her political views, there may not be anything to stop him.To be sure, there are gatekeeping mechanisms that operate to send away work that rather than seeking to advance our understanding of an issue seeks to advance a political agenda and turn students and readers into activists. Learned journals often serve that function, as do those who organize panels at meetings.
But if the learned journals are keeping you and your friends out and labeling what you do "unprofessional" or "nonacademic," you can start a journal of your own and devote its first issue to explaining why the current definitions of "professional" and "academic" are too narrow and mask an ideological position that is not announcing itself. In the academy it is always possible to set up a "rogue" territory where what is done is frowned upon by the conservative establishment. The graduate student who asked me for help came from such a territory.
hat this means is that what is and is not a proper academic argument is itself something continually being argued about. The argument can even extend to the point of calling the entire enterprise into question.
Professional norms in the legal academy elicit arguments about their own efficacy; reasons are given for doubting the very existence of legal reasoning. In the early part of the 20th century, self-described "legal realists" inveighed against legal rules, legal concepts, and legal autonomy, characterizing the whole supposedly rational structure as a sham, a myth, a deliberate obfuscation, and urging lawyers and judges to attend to the facts on the ground and the needs and lives of real persons, all of which, they said, are bypassed when abstract categories speak not to any realities but to each other in a spectacularly empty manner.
Later in the century, members of the Critical Legal Studies movement added to the realist arguments the postmodern, deconstructionist arguments that language is irremediably indeterminate; that rules, no matter how finely drawn, do not yield stable and predictable outcomes; that because the deployment of legal terms can lead to any outcome, the manipulator of those terms desires there is no such things as the rule of law; that the distinction between law and power cannot be maintained; that everything standard legal doctrine wants to keep out — politics, subjectivity, ideology — is already in; and that the whole bankrupt, shaky edifice is designed to further the interests of the haves and keep the have-nots in their place.
And yet, the force of these arguments aimed at blowing up the establishment was more than a little blunted by the fact that they were appearing in the very establishment pages of law reviews at Harvard, Stanford, Texas, Wisconsin, and Yale.
In the liberal-arts world, the assaults on the assumptions, methodologies, and very structure of the enterprise were even fiercer. From the late 60s on, the corrosive touch of postmodern theory seemed to lay waste to the disciplinary landscape. And yet, when things quieted down and the voices preaching apocalypse and the countervoices sounding the alarm subsided, all the disciplines and departments were still standing, doing recognizable business under the old rubrics, although the business was somewhat changed by the very arguments the establishment had pushed away.
An academic discipline can tolerate any challenge so long as the challenge is conducted within its precincts. Supposedly subversive arguments are absorbed into the very intellectual structures they claim to overthrow. Challenges to the very core of the enterprise tend to operate on the margins, where they are regarded almost as entertainments ("Did you hear what those postmodern nuts are saying now?"), as Old Man Discipline just keeps rolling along.
t is within that entrenched conservatism (and with due allowance for dissenters trying to push the envelope) that one can confidently pronounce on what arguments are acceptable and unacceptable in the academy. Although theoretically any topic is ripe for academic consideration and debate, some arguments do not make it into the arena. The academy has a list of subjects that are not considered to be candidates for serious attention. First on the list is Holocaust denial, which in the academy occupies the same category as round-earth denial and astrology, although in the nonacademic world it attracts passionate adherents.
The roster of Holocaust deniers contains historians, heads of state, public intellectuals, and entertainment stars. Of course there are historians, heads of state, public intellectuals, and entertainment stars on the other side, and one might expect that the debate would be just the ticket for a university classroom where, it is often said, the search for truth is to be conducted in a spirit of open inquiry with no holds barred. Here is the Canadian lawyer Barbara Kulaszka making just that point on the website of the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust-denial organ: "Let this issue be settled as all great historical controversies are resolved: through free inquiry and open debate in our journals, newspapers, and classrooms."
Not this controversy, however. Holocaust denial has been rejected as a respectable position in nearly all Western democracies, many of which have declared it malum in se — evil in and of itself — and passed laws prohibiting and criminalizing the dissemination of its arguments. If the United States were such a country, the absence of Holocaust deniers in the academy would be easily explained: It would be illegal to make their arguments (as opposed, again, to studying them), and universities are not in the habit of hiring lawbreakers. But denying the Holocaust is perfectly legal in the United States, where the First Amendment has been consistently interpreted by the courts as forbidding "viewpoint discrimination"; therefore Holocaust deniers, like astrologists, must be allowed to have their say.
How is it then that you won't find any Holocaust deniers having their say in history departments? (You might find persons who deny the Holocaust teaching in departments, like electrical engineering, where neither denial nor affirmation is pertinent to the subject matter; the academy doesn't want to keep out people who believe disreputable things; it wants to keep out people who teach disreputable things.) The answer is that the discipline has decided that rather than being a legitimate form of historical "revisionism," as deniers claim, Holocaust denial is just the dressing up of lies and distortions in academic garb.In 1991, the American Historical Association said as much when it issued this statement: "No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place." Now you might read that as saying "as historians we've looked into the matter, gathered evidence, conducted polls, sent out questionnaires, et cetera, and what we've found is that no academic holding a position in a history department questions that the Holocaust took place." But in fact the statement follows not from empirical research but from a stipulative definition of what the phrase "serious historian" means: It means someone who affirms the Holocaust. If you deny it, you will not receive an appointment to a history department no matter what your credentials. This is the academy declaring, with no other justification than the institutional force it exerts, that we're not going to give this stuff the time of day.
What this shows is that despite the familiar claim that the academy is dedicated to open inquiry, it is not, in fact, committed to giving every idea a hearing, no more than a court is committed to considering every argument offered to it. The academy is dedicated to inquiry into the topics it deems properly academic — yes, the process is circular — and it will send ideas it has judged to be off the wall away without so much as a hearing.
This does not mean that there is no hope for Holocaust deniers — or, say, proponents of creationism. The academy is not a static place and the roster of acceptable and unacceptable arguments is not fixed. In Chaos of Disciplines (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Andrew Abbott calculates that "20 years is about the length of time it takes a group of academics to storm the ramparts, take the citadel, and settle down to the fruits of victory." During the process, the two groups — the stormers of the citadel and its defenders — will have different lists of acceptable and unacceptable arguments. When the process is over, one list will be the discipline's official one, until, and inevitably, the process starts all over again.
Fluctuation in the content of the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable arguments is less significant in the long run than the fact that the distinction, in some form, is always in place.
Academics know what they can say and what they cannot say, and that knowledge remains a hallmark of their membership in the enterprise.
hat are the effects of academic arguments? While the academy and the law are alike in the narrowness of the range of arguments they allow to be made, they differ in the consequences that follow once an argument has succeeded in the discipline. A successful academic argument has as its fruit the judgment that one scholar is right and another wrong about a disputed matter. A successful legal argument has as its fruit the dispersion of rewards and penalties not only to those who are party to the instant case, but also to those down the line (friends, relatives, associates) who will be affected by the decision.
To be sure, the loser in an academic argument may suffer a diminution of his or her reputation, may fail to be offered a plum job, may not be elected president of the discipline's association, but this is a far cry from losing your property or losing your money or losing custody of your child or losing your freedom or losing your life. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that it is a feature of academic warfare that its outcomes are supposed to be inconsequential in the larger order of things.
But wouldn't it be different if the topic of discussion were the alternative strategies for dealing with Iran or the reality of global warming or the merits and demerits of "broken windows" policing or the tactics of the Tea Party?
Actually, no. The structure and effect of the discussion would be exactly the same as long as it was an academic discussion and not something else. You can — and, if you're a classroom teacher, should — study the rise of the Tea Party without at any point rendering an up or down judgment on its philosophy or agenda. You can turn an analytical lens on the broken-windows theory of policing and still be miles from announcing that you would support or reject it were you a member of a city council. The consequences of there being a Tea Party are considerable and the consequences of community policing are arguably greater, but there are no consequences to the academic study of either, except for the consequence in a classroom of a clearer view of the subject or the consequence for a career of having written a seminal article. These are not small consequences in the internal world of the academy, but they do not spill over into the larger world where they provoke men, women, and armies to action.
To be sure, national and even global consequences may follow if what you have said in class or written in a scholarly essay is picked up and cited by someone who is in a position to advance an agenda. But such consequences are contingent; they are not built into the academic enterprise and they may or may not occur. What can always occur, if you work hard enough, is that you and your students end the semester with a deeper understanding of an issue, an event, a text, an idea, a physical phenomenon, and that should be more than enough, although it is not for many instructors.
Academic arguments don't move mountains, they move minds (which may down the road move mountains, but again that is a contingent outcome), and thus in a way they are weightless, that is, without weight in the give and take of political strife unless they are appropriated for political purposes. But their weightlessness is their glory, and that is why they are different from domestic arguments, political arguments, and legal arguments. Like virtue, the making of them is their own reward. Other rewards are left to time and heaven.
Stanley Fish is a professor of law at Florida International University and a visiting professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. This essay is adapted from his new book, Winning Arguments, out now from Harper.
A version of this article appeared in the September 2, 2016 issue.
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