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Post by Big D on Oct 12, 2013 8:27:53 GMT -6
Below is one of the best articles I have ever read about UIC to date. I was a student when Fish was hired and there was a buzz on campus about it. This was a big time hire for us...
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February 4, 2000
Stanley Fish, as a College Dean, Makes a Big Splash and Spares No Expense
By ALISON SCHNEIDER
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 -- especially 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.I.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.
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 media-savvy 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 some heat recently as Duke's English department self-destructed, with one star defecting after another. Lately, Illinois taxpayers have taken some whacks at him, too. One disgruntled citizen dubbed Mr. Fish, in the Chicago Tribune, the "academic equivalent of a three-card monte hustler." The subtext: Mr. Fish should get of town and take the green Jaguar he drove in on.
What, the naysayers ask, is a fancy-pants lit-crit like Mr. Fish doing at a working-class place like U.I.C.? Is Mr. Fish in this for the long haul, they ask, or in it just for himself, hoping to parlay a post at the university into a provostship in the Ivy League? What's more, if he wants to rebuild U.I.C. from the bottom up, perhaps he shouldn't be starting from the top down, with one flashy hire after another.
All this talk of how the man with the Midas touch will turn U.I.C.'s mass of concrete into a pile of gold sounds good, the critics say -- but it smells, well, fishy.
Few people on the campus, however, are turning up their noses at his arrival. When she announced the appointment, Elizabeth Hoffman, U.I.C.'s provost, told The Chronicle, "This is the biggest hire I will probably ever make."
Biggest, indeed. Mr. Fish's $230,000 salary dwarfs even her paycheck, a mere $185,950.
But Ms. Hoffman insists that it was the smartest money she ever spent. What kind of institution does she hope U.I.C. will become? Something akin to the University of Michigan, she answers. In fact, she won't stop until she lands an invitation to the toniest club of them all: the 61-member Association of American Universities.
If anyone can help oil the lock to that door, it's Mr. Fish, she says. In a year, the liberal-arts dean has lured scholars -- the economist Deirdre N. McCloskey, the gay-studies scholar John D'Emilio, the English professor Gerald Graff -- that the university would never have dreamed it could land.
When he arrived, Mr. Fish found a demoralized faculty. Academic initiatives had been squashed so often that people had stopped proposing them. Money was always in short supply. And the life of the mind was too often lived alone.
"This was a place where people came, did their work, and went home," says Virginia Wright Wexman, an English professor. "The halls were very quiet."
They're buzzing now. Mr. Fish is perpetually out and about -- teaching classes, attending talks, sitting in the cafeteria with his morning coffee and his copy of USA Today. He has started lecture series, pushed for a faculty club, given the nod to new programs: film studies, cultural studies, and queer studies, to name a few.
"You can see people standing up taller," Ms. Hoffman says.
Standing was all they could do at a reception for Mr. Fish in December, at the convention of the Modern Language Association in Chicago. There was no room to sit down, Ms. Hoffman says with excitement. By 10 p.m., more than 300 guests -- some of them people who wouldn't have been caught dead at a U.I.C. function a few years ago -- were jostling for elbow room in the crowded hotel suite. Everyone wanted a glimpse of the man of the hour, not to mention the candidates he was courting for the English department's chairmanship. "It was clear that it was the party at the M.L.A.," Ms. Hoffman says. "I kept hearing, 'Where's Stanley Fish? This is the hire.'"
Certainly, people at U.I.C. are still reeling from the coup. "Our impression during the search was, let me say, incredulity," recalls John A. Gardiner, director of the university's Office of Social Science Research and a member of the search committee. "We couldn't, for the life of us, figure out why he was applying for the job."
That remains the $230,000 question, and, as always, Mr. Fish is ready with an answer. After almost 40 years in academe, he had options: move to U.I.C., toss in his hat for the newly opened provost's job at Duke, or retire.
The idea of retiring was "powerful," says Mr. Fish, who is almost 62. But he had been trying to climb the administrative ladder for years. He lost out on provostships at Indiana University at Bloomington and the University of California at Santa Barbara. He missed getting the presidency at Purchase College of the State University of New York -- the trustees shot him down, he says -- and was nixed at Macalester College, too. "They always say about people who've been around for a while and have a reputation that they can go anywhere," Mr. Fish says. "It's not true."
He did have a chance to be the humanities dean at the University of California at Irvine, but he passed on it. "The job was too good," he says. "They already had a new building. The departments were in great shape. What was I going to do? Part of the appeal of this job was the chance to make a larger difference."
"This university has labored under a sense of itself as secondary, even tertiary," and that has to go, says Mr. Fish. "That's my job -- to change the tone, to eliminate the hangdog attitude, to deprive people of the low expectations that have protected them from disappointment. It's a cheerleading job. 'You can do it!'" he says, brandishing an invisible pompon.
Mr. Fish waves off the idea that an academic with his tweedy credentials can't identify with the undergraduates on the state university's Chicago campus. Yes, almost 50 percent of them are first-generation college students, and 63 percent of them come from homes where English is not the first language. So what? "Forty years ago, I was the kind of student who attends this university -- the son of an immigrant father in a family that had never sent anyone to college before," he says. Stanley Fish may be a scholar, but his father was a plumber -- ultimately a rich plumber, mind you.
Frankly, administrative work suits him, he adds. "Making decisions, organizing structures, spotting where the mechanism isn't working -- it comes naturally to me. It's a fix-it mentality."
And Mr. Fish, a self-proclaimed "neat freak," is a fix-it man if ever there was one. There is nothing he likes doing better, he says, than cleaning up a mess -- administrative or otherwise. "My favorite piece of machinery in the world is a vacuum cleaner," he proclaims.
Fortunately for him, he arrived in Chicago at an opportune time to do some house cleaning. Despite the sudden resignation last September of the chancellor, David Broski, who quit after the federal government censured the university for violating human-research protocols, these are heady days for the institution. It is considering buying the private John Marshall Law School. Building and beautification efforts have begun, particularly on the desolate South Campus, where dorms, shops, even a performing-arts center may eventually stand. And the university's liberal-arts college is receiving more support -- financial and otherwise -- than it's seen in a long time.
Given that, it's little wonder that Mr. Fish is feeling confident, even cocky. Right now, he has 44 job searches under way, and expects to make "15 to 20 very high-profile hires this year," he says.
Sitting in his office on a recent winter day, Mr. Fish clearly relishes the role of wheeler-dealer. Rasma Karklins, the acting head of political science, is across the table, talking about the hires she hopes to make. Three of those are substantial.
Hold that thought, Mr. Fish says. His Jaguar mechanic is on the line. (Good news -- just a $90 repair.) In a flash, Mr. Fish is back at the table.
A star scholar is coming in next week for a final look at the university, Ms. Karklins says. Mr. Fish is scheduled to spend 30 minutes with the candidate. "Let's make it an hour. I want to find out exactly what this will take," the dean says. Another candidate wants summer salary, a teaching reduction in the first year, and a computer lab that could cost $10,000, the department head notes. "I don't think that will be a problem," Mr. Fish replies nonchalantly.
Ms. Karklins makes noises about adding another hire at the junior level. Mr. Fish isn't sure. It depends on the quality of the candidates. "You know my policy," he says. "I don't want to add faculty except at the highest level."
So far, he has. Within weeks of his arrival, Mr. Fish was wooing Gerald Graff, a professor of English and education at the University of Chicago. Last month, Mr. Graff assumed his post as associate dean of curriculum and pedagogy at U.I.C. It was a classic Fish recruit. "He pretty much invited me to come under whatever terms were comfortable to me," Mr. Graff says. In fact, the dean invented a job for him: "It was a pretty seductive invitation."
Seduction is a word you would expect to hear when people discuss a man as experienced in the art of professional courtship as Mr. Fish. But Deirdre McCloskey, the economist who recently left her position at the University of Iowa in favor of one at U.I.C., uses a different word entirely. "He inspires," she pauses for a moment, "love."
These days, love doesn't come cheap. "In a commercial civilization, honor follows pay," says Ms. McCloskey, whose well-publicized sex change continues to cause a stir in academe. How much "honor" will she have? About $150,000 worth, if the trustees approve her appointment. Her salary at Iowa was $110,000. And Mr. Graff? He leaped from $125,000 at Chicago to $145,000 at U.I.C. The Fish tactic: Give raises in the neighborhood of 20 percent.
But money is just the half of it. Mr. Fish knows how to devise the kind of imaginative jobs that will appeal to a senior scholar. Ms. McCloskey wants to be "among the disciplines," with appointments in several departments, and Mr. Fish has promised to deliver.
Of course, the biggest selling point is Mr. Fish himself. Before his arrival, the university was suspect; now it's sexy. If Stanley Fish thought that U.I.C. was worth the gamble, why shouldn't Deirdre McCloskey?
Or Christopher Maurer, for that matter? He just left Vanderbilt University to become the head of the department of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese at Illinois-Chicago. "When you move from a very good private university to a public one, you feel like you're rowing upstream and people are passing you on the way down," he says. "By doing that himself, Stanley Fish gave other people an example to follow."
Others are. Two years ago, U.I.C. tried to recruit Debra Minkoff, an associate professor of sociology at Yale University. Back then, she didn't even bother applying. Now she's seriously considering an offer. Would she have done so before Mr. Fish's arrival? "Frankly, no," she says.
And never underestimate the impact of the little niceties: the artful phone call, the spousal hire, the lively inquiry into someone's work. Mr. Fish is a master at them all. He shows up at every candidate's job talk, something almost unheard of for a dean. He even appeared at a courtship dinner for Dennis R. Judd, from the University of Missouri at St. Louis, who is one of the country's top scholars in urban studies. "Department chairs don't always do that," Mr. Judd says. "That really impressed me."
It worked, too. Mr. Judd accepted a position at U.I.C. last month, despite being courted for a job at Rutgers University at Newark that came with a $2.4-million endowment. The Rutgers deal was very compelling, he says. So why did he opt to help Illinois-Chicago build a "first-rank" Ph.D. program in political science? Because of the critical mass of urban-studies scholars there, he replies, and "frankly, Stanley Fish."
Even some of Mr. Fish's failures have had the flavor of success. William Luis, a prominent Spanish professor at Vanderbilt, turned down an offer, but it was the nearest of misses. Mr. Fish had pulled out all the stops -- Sunday phone calls, numerous visits, a spousal position in the dean's office for Mr. Luis's wife, who is a fund raiser. The dean even offered his apartment to Mr. Luis for one of his visits to Chicago.
For personal reasons, Mr. Luis decided to stay put, but he says he would reconsider: "It was an honor for us to have direct contact with Stanley Fish. We honestly miss that interaction." He laughs, then adds, "It's been a real void in our lives."
What's Mr. Fish's recruitment secret? Rule No. 1 (and it's the only rule): "Treat candidates as you would like to be treated if you were in their place." Would you like to be met at the airport by the head of the search committee, Mr. Fish asks rhetorically, or by a graduate student pressed into duty? Do you want to stay at a deluxe hotel, or at the drab franchise down the road? Would you rather eat at a world-class restaurant, or at the local deli? Maybe you'd like to break bread at a faculty member's house. (That can be a nice touch, Mr. Fish notes.)
How did U.I.C. rate when it was wooing Mr. Fish? On his first visit, he took a cab to and from the airport. Three weeks later, he was back for wall-to-wall interviews, and he was housed at the generic Hyatt, on the campus. "No one was at the switch," says Mr. Fish -- something that he told the search committee. A month later, he returned with Ms. Tompkins in tow. A limo met them at the airport. They had dinner at an English professor's house, and another faculty member threw them a cocktail party. Their hotel this time: a suite at the Ritz Carlton. "They did it right," Mr. Fish says.
But will Mr. Fish do right by the university? Yes, he's added substance to the intellectual life on campus and style to the recruitment process. For the first time in years, search committees can go after senior candidate as well as junior ones, and hire two good people if they find them, even if they were looking for one.
"We used to quibble over whether we would spend $3,000 to buy someone a computer," says William Bridges, the head of sociology. Now they can offer candidates six-figure salaries. "It's liberating that there's someone here who will allow us to go out and recruit without two hands tied behind our backs."
Where is the money coming from? Mr. Fish isn't quite sure. "No pot of money was given to me," he says. When he needs a big chunk of change for a hire, he asks the provost, and "so far, she's never said No."
She hasn't needed to. "I'm drawing on the same resources that have always been available to U.I.C.," the provost says, "but I'm being very strategic about how I use it." Ms. Hoffman is reallocating funds, as well as using more than $3-million in new program money and dipping into the $3-million a year that the state gave to U.I.C. for recruitment and retention, money which will be awarded for the next five years. She also requires each college to match the funds that the university puts into a hire.
Some people find the big bucks a big turnoff. "Many of us feel it's not seemly for a public institution to put so many resources into high salaries," says Nancy R. Cirillo, director of undergraduate studies in English. After all, she argues, U.I.C. is a "public trust." She thinks the notion that a rising tide lifts all boats is hooey. "The rising tide can leave a whole lot of people on the beach, including people who support this institution and need it -- our students," she says.
It's not great for the university's long-time professors, either, many of whom are stuck with raises of just 1 to 4 percent. The average salary for full professors in the college of arts and sciences is $77,206, but many scholars in the humanities work for much less.
"Fish is creating two classes of professors: the people he hires and everyone else," says a faculty member who asked not to be identified. "This is becoming a dual system, and it's destroying morale."
It's also breeding concerns about what U.I.C. really values: good teaching or glitzy research.
"We have 520 English majors who need someone to teach them," says another professor who asked for anonymity. Are these star scholars really going to roll up their sleeves and help out? "A lot of people here have felt quite happy not being on the map," the professor points out. "The advantage is you don't have to worry about what the rest of the world thinks of you, and instead, you can focus on the requirements of your department and your students." Money that could go to graduate students, to scholarships, or to new classrooms now won't, the professor says, "because there's so much attention on, 'Okay, now who can we hire?'"
Maybe, the critics argue, the people who know best what a department needs are the ones in the department. When Mr. Fish doesn't like an applicant pool, he'll suggest other candidates, or jettison the search altogether, even if the department disagrees. He's done just that in English, political science, and criminal justice, professors say.
"Last year, we wanted to recruit someone," says Richard M. Johnson, a political-science professor. "The dean wouldn't go along with the proposal. That irked me. I thought he was wrong, although he has been very good on some other things."
The dean makes no apologies for intervening. "It's fully within my job description to say, 'If you continue to go in this direction, you won't produce anything exciting, attract top graduate students, or add to the university's research profile,'" he argues. It's easier for him to do that in the humanities and social sciences, where he's on his home turf. But his goals for the sciences are the same as everywhere else: top scholars who can land big grants. His tactic in the sciences: "I call up people I know and say, 'My college is thinking of approaching so-and-so. How would that play? Would people take notice?'"
"In general, I like to let people run their own shop," Mr. Fish adds, "but if I feel that they're not, I don't hesitate to step in. I'll come in and benevolently dictate."
There's nothing benevolent about it, retorts Ms. Cirillo. It's "destabilizing, infuriating, and confusing" when department members have finally found a candidate that fits their needs, to have Mr. Fish ram someone else down their throats who fits his needs -- namely, "Joe Smith, who is very prominent in an allied field."
"I think it's fairly clear that Fish is not running this as a committee," says Darrel L. Murray, a professor of biological sciences here. "He seeks opinions, and he doesn't hesitate to react to those opinions. He's flashy, he's flamboyant, he's confrontational. That's an interesting management style."
It's particularly interesting to legislators, taxpayers, and U.I.C.'s brethren at Urbana-Champaign -- all of whom are closely watching Mr. Fish's every step, or misstep, as the case may be. His biggest misstep so far? It's a tossup -- either supporting a gay-studies program or hiring Deirdre McCloskey. Both moves raised red flags with the press, which had a field day over Ms. McCloskey's sex change. The push for gay studies may not win Mr. Fish friends, either. Two trustees abstained from the vote to hire John D'Emilio, who was brought to U.I.C. to get the program off the ground, and a state legislator took a swing at the institution for putting its resources into such an endeavor.
Then there's the Urbana factor. Already, professors there raised a ruckus when they heard about the Chicago campus's hopes of buying John Marshall Law School. Their own proposal: to open a branch of the Urbana-Champaign law school in Chicago. There has been lots of "macro-grumbling," as one professor on the flagship campus put it, "that building U.I.C. into a premier national university will dilute Urbana-Champaign."
Mr. Fish remains unflappable. "You don't see me trembling," he says.
Gay studies? "What university doesn't have it in some form these days?" he says.
Hiring Ms. McCloskey? Come on, he replies. "The most recent edition of Who's Who in Economics has a picture of the 15 top economists of the century on its cover, and she's one of them."
Star hires? Every one of them is committed to the classroom, Mr. Fish insists.
His fat salary? Get over it. He took a $5,000 pay cut to come here, he says, and he was supposed to get a raise of 4 percent for the next few years. Ultimately, this job will cost him about $70,000, he notes.
Is U.I.C. a steppingstone to something else? "I'm 61. This looks like it to me."
As always, Mr. Fish has an answer for everything.
Stanley Fish's Recruits
JOHN D'EMILIO
POSITION: professor of women's studies and history; hired to found a gay-and-lesbian-studies program.
SALARY: $102,000.
WHERE HE CAME FROM: National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; previously at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
KNOWN FOR: social history of gay life and culture.
WHY HE SIGNED ON: "There aren't many jobs like this in the country. I turned down a position in history at U.C.-San Diego to come here. I was being hired by U.I.C. to teach gay-and-lesbian studies and to build something. At U.C., gay-and-lesbian studies would have been an extracurricular thing."
GERALD GRAFF
POSITION: associate dean of curriculum and pedagogy.
SALARY: $145,000.
WHERE HE CAME FROM: University of Chicago.
KNOWN FOR: books on pedagogy, teacher education, and the academic profession.
WHY HE SIGNED ON: "Stanley Fish's approach to me was, 'You've been writing all these things suggesting the direction American education should move in. Why don't you come to U.I.C. and see what you can do?' How could I say No?"
DENNIS R. JUDD
POSITION: professor of political science; hired to help get the department's Ph.D. program off the ground; arrives in the fall.
SALARY: a six-figure salary, still in negotiation.
WHERE HE IS NOW: University of Missouri at St. Louis.
KNOWN FOR: specialist in urban studies, editor of the Urban Affairs Review.
WHY HE SIGNED ON: "Let's face it. A lot of institutions wouldn't hire a famous and controversial person to be a dean. That's impressive. You don't hire someone like Stanley Fish if you want to stand still."
CHRISTOPHER MAURER
POSITION: head of the department of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese.
SALARY: $110,000.
WHERE HE CAME FROM: Vanderbilt University.
KNOWN FOR: specialist in Spanish poetry.
WHY HE SIGNED ON: "Fish pays all this painstaking attention to recruiting. The fact that he does this implies that you're going to have to do this, too. It's recruiting as a chain reaction. One of his first questions to me was, 'Who else do you know?'"
DEIRDRE N. McCLOSKEY
POSITION: appointment in economics and the humanities.
SALARY: $150,000.
WHERE SHE CAME FROM: University of Iowa.
KNOWN FOR: world-renowned in economics history, methodology, and rhetoric; attracted national attention for her sex-change operation.
WHY SHE SIGNED ON: "I would not have applied to U.I.C. if someone like Stan wasn't in charge of the college of arts and sciences. If Betsy Hoffman couldn't have hired him, I would not have been able to believe her earnest claims that she was trying to upgrade the university. And I'll move the instant it becomes clear that U.I.C. isn't going to carry through on this. That's the trouble when you hire people like me or Stan. We're mobile."
DEBRA MINKOFF
POSITION: has an offer to join the department of sociology as a full professor.
WHERE SHE IS: Yale University.
KNOWN FOR: studies contemporary American social movements.
WHY SHE MAY SIGN ON: "Moving from a private to a public university would be dramatic. But it seems to be common knowledge that Fish is at U.I.C. It makes a difference when I try to articulate why I'm seriously considering this opportunity. In the humanities, I say 'U.I.C.,' and people say 'Stanley Fish.'"
Other hires since Fish arrived
(Name - from - Discipline)
Simon T. Alford - Northwestern University - Biology
Ralph E. Cintron - University of Iowa - Rhetoric
R. Chris Fraley - University of California at Davis - Psychology
Guershon Harel - Purdue University - Mathematics
Patricia Harkin - Purdue University - English
David J. Hofman - Argonne National Laboratory - Physics
Dwight McBride - University of Pittsburgh - English
Nava Sagev - University of Chicago - Biology
Neil C. Sturchio - Argonne National Laboratory - Earth sciences
Recent offers the university has made
(Name - Current institution - Discipline)
Nathaniel L. Beck - University of California at San Diego - Political science
Rebecca B. Morton - University of Iowa - Political science
Lisa Sanchez - State University of New York at Buffalo - Criminal justice
Kari Vilonen - Brandeis University - Mathematics
Alexander Volberg - Michigan State University - Mathematics
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Now, I certainly don't know for sure why Fish left, but, from the article, it sounds as if he had planned to stay at UIC to accomplish his mission. I had heard rumors that he burned a lot of bridges with higher ups, and that his tactics (laying out the red carpet and hiring big name people at big salaries) eventually wore out their welcome, especially in the wake of the dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001, when budgets tightened in a poor economy. But I'm sure his "UIC first; who cares what UIUC thinks" attitude didn't go over well with those that run the University of Illinois, which happen to mostly be UIUC grads.
And what about Elizabeth Hoffman? She had big plans for UIC as well...she hired Fish and was determined to get into the AAU. She moved on to be president at the University of Colorado. Did she wear out her welcome as well?
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