Wednesday, February 23, 2005

February 23, 2005

Wilmington, N.C.- The University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Leadership Lecture series presents Stanley Fish for his lecture, “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, And It’s A Good Thing, Too” at 7 p.m. Monday, March 14 in Kenan Auditorium. He will discuss what he believes a university properly stands for and what is tangential to its core activities. The talk will be followed by a question and answer period and book signing.

Fish has written extensively on the politics of the university, having taken positions justifying campus speech codes and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise. He has argued repeatedly that a university is primarily a place for teaching and research and that the “unfettered expression of ideas” is a prime political value, not an academic one.

Fish is one of the best-known contemporary literary theorists on the American scene, widely imitated yet widely criticized. Currently dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he earned his Ph.D. from Yale and taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before becoming Arts and Sciences Professor of English and professor of law at Duke University from 1986 to 1998.

His works include Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies, There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too, and The Trouble with Principle. As his provocative titles indicate, Fish has vigorously debunked pieties of both the left and the right.

Tickets are free for UNCW students, faculty and staff, and $6 for the general public. To reserve tickets, call the Kenan Auditorium box office at 910/962-3500, or 800/732-3643 outside of the Wilmington area. Ticket office hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday. For additional information about the Leadership Lecture Series, visit www.uncw.edu/arts.

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Media Contact: Shannon Hooker 910/962-7600 or hookers@uncw.edu.