by Steve Balkin <mar@interaccess.com>
The Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition had high expectations of good things coming from the recent hire of Stanley Fish to become the new dean of UIC's College of Liberal Arts. The Coalition has made attempts to contact him but received no replies or acknowledgment. And now we see why. The Chicago Sun Times interview with Stanley Fish in the February 14, 1999 issue provided a candid view of who he is. Here is an excerpt:
Fish expressed an admiration for the architecture on the UIC campus and predicted that neighborhood forces opposing the South Campus expansion will not succeed in stopping university-driven gentrification. "Efforts at preservation are always understandable and attractive and have to be understood as efforts to retard time,'' Fish said. ``As someone who is 60, I understand the impulse to retard time. ..."Whatever is being done, the protests will not succeed in their goal to stop something that can't be stopped, but will succeed in a goal they may not have even considered: that what does happen at least happens under the pressure of their protests."
Stanley Fish calls himself a radical conservative and I agree with his self-labeling. Everything that helps him he likes; everything inconvenient or difficult to understand he dismisses. He fits in well with Chicago's "it's a done deal" attitude. Intellectuals are often needed by the ruling elite to provide grand schemes and narratives to legitimize power. Perhaps Stanley Fish is an attempt by UIC to buy some respectability that it can not earn for itself.
Fish does not understand what preservation is about. Preservation is about the future. It is about honoring and respecting history -- but whose history? We know who we are by the objects we possess. What is preserved says that we think it is important. It influences the minds of the future and provides a lens through how we interpret the world. Maxwell Street is about a celebration of diversity and multiculturalism; not in abstract theory that only elites can understand, but embedded in bricks and mortar, hot dogs and blues, that are accessible to ordinary people.
Has Fish ever walked on Maxwell Street? Does he know anything about it that he acquired through independent investigation? How can he be making judgments when he has not even visited the place? How can he imply motives to UIC critics when he has never met them or talked to them? Making snap judgments without doing the research is a bad lesson to give university students.
He seems to fall in line with UIC administrator claims that Maxwell Street preservation is a win-lose deal rather than a win-win deal. It is cooperation, not confrontation, that preservationists seek. The UIC administration are being obstructionist, not the preservationists.
He writes about literary criticism so it is strange that he can not interpret an important underlying text of UIC administration rhetoric -- that the Great Cities mission is a public relations smokescreen to hide a class-apartheid ethnic cleansing agenda to push poor people out of the inner city, push poor kids out of UIC and replace them with middle class suburban kids and out of towners, negate achievements of working class people, act as a front for private real estate developers, and expand a patronage machine.
What Dean Fish should be asking is this: where are those research labs that UIC said they needed as the basis for pushing out the old Maxwell Street Market in 1994 and destroying more than 90 percent of the area, taking public streets to give to private developers?
As a Postmodernist, he should be trying to understand the variety of perspectives about Maxwell Street in their social and political context, and not just accept the explanations his bosses provide him. He mistakes "the common good" with what's good for the powerful people who hired him.
If Dean Fish should ever visit Maxwell Street, and he sees its contrast, visually and spiritually, to UIC he will better understand what UIC is -- hierarchical, boring, monolithic, pretentious, and elitist. If Maxwell Street gets destroyed, not only will Dean Fish miss out on an educational experience, but so will his students.
Steve Balkin <mar@interaccess.com> is secretary of the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition and a Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University.
web page provided by OPENAIR-MARKET NET
return to Preserve Maxwell Street