Politics in the Academy: The Same Old Song
By STANLEY FISH
Stanley Fish on education, law and society.
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I try not to write the same column twice, at least not knowingly. But I have just come back from still another conference on originalism held, as it was last year, at the University of San Diego law school, and I was struck once again by the academic purity of the occasion.
Originalism is the view that interpretation is a historical activity in which one attempts to identify the meaning a text had at the moment of its production, either by looking into the intention of an author (what did he have in mind?) or by determining what the words an author used would have meant to the literate and rational reader at the time. (The latter is called public meaning originalism.)
via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
Excellent essay on the relationship between politics and academia.
