I first encountered Stanley Fish's writing when I was a sophomore in college. I was on this silly kick of reading the "right" books, both in-class and outside of class, that would lead to my erudition, and as a result I found a list propagated by some Harvard professor who thought every well-read liberal arts-minded person should be conversant the items listed. There must have been 200-300 books on the list, and as I could only discuss maybe 10% of the books on the list at the time, I tried to remember the other titles and be on the look-out for them. (Note: like most 20-year olds, I was too stupid to see that this is not a good way to erudition).
Anyway, one of the books was Stanley Fish's Self-Consuming Artifacts. I never made it to that one, but I did happen to see a book of Fish writings in the library a while later. I picked it up and read five or six essays. One was this simplistic piece about how "free speech" was a myth. Another was this overly-convoluted exploration of interdisciplinary studies. One that sticks especially in my memory was this horribly-reasoned postmodern piece of garbage about how a scribbled shopping list, or a group of computer-generated words, could be a poem, all because they're capable of being interpreted as-if they were poems.
At the end of skimming through the book, I set it down and thought to myself "wow, this guy is intelligent, and he argues and writes like a fucking crackpot." Fast forward two years later and I was in a senior seminar that studied major authors. Like any good poser, one of my classmates name-dropped Stanley Fish in citing some bogus proposition and my instructor, without thinking about it, shook his head and said, "that guy is polemical for the sake of being polemical."
I say all this because Stanley Fish - the jack-of-all-stupid-arguments - has now written a defense of rising law school tuition fees based on - wait for it - technology. That's right, even though law schools are a veritable cash cow, the students generally supply their own computer equipment, and the only new technological expense is Westlaw and LexisNexis (both of which are more than happy to work with schools to get students hooked on using their systems), technology has driven cost increases outpacing the CPI by a ridiculous amount.
Not to short-change Fish, he also states that the inquiry should be a relative one; instead of saying "is tuition increasing?" we should ask "is the share of my income going to tuition increasing?" Although the tuition bubble is out-pacing the CPI by leaps and bounds, he somehow arrives at the opposite conclusion. For most people, justifying that statistical sleight-of-hand would be hard, but when you've spent your whole life bullshitting your way to fame, it's just another day in the office.
I refuse to post a direct link to this article and the rag that published it. Instead, I'll link to First Tier Toilet's excellent write-up and put-down.