Education Quote by Stanley Fish

Fish lands the knife where academia is most tender: not in what universities believe, but in their chronic inability to defend believing anything at all. “Higher education does not know how to speak for its interests” isn’t a complaint about bad PR; it’s an accusation of self-erasure. The line implies that universities have been trained - by donors, legislators, rankings, and a culture war economy - to treat their own mission as embarrassing, even illegitimate. When you’re ashamed of your reasons for existing, every public statement becomes a plea bargain.

The triad “defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective” works like a closing argument. Defensive: the institution speaks only when attacked, letting opponents set the terms. Cowardly: it hides behind procedural language (“values,” “dialogue,” “community”) that signals virtue without risk. Likely to be ineffective: because those evasions convince no one - critics hear weakness, supporters hear capitulation, and students learn that the university’s highest ideal is liability management.

Fish’s subtext is also a jab at the modern university’s favorite strategy: pretending it has no “interests,” only neutral expertise. That posture once offered authority; now it reads as slippery. In a moment when higher ed is asked to justify its costs, politics, and cultural power, Fish argues that institutional silence isn’t civility. It’s surrender dressed up as professionalism. His intent is to force a hard choice: either articulate a concrete purpose (education as formation, inquiry as public good) or accept being narrated by everyone else.