Stanley Fish Has no Chili Peppers on Ratemyprofessors.com
by Advocate Staff
With the Humanities facing existential budget cuts and the industrialized world melting down in the greatest credit crisis since the last scene of Fight Club, Stanley Fish may be “the last professor,” but the Florida International University Law Professor is certainly not the hottest. Or at least that’s the verdict of his students on ratemyprofessors.com, regarding the sexiness of the somewhat famous, 170 year-old Milton scholar whose New York Times blog probably annoys you.
Ratemyprofessors.com is a website on the “internet” that allows students to rant or, conversely, rave about their college and university teachers in brief commentaries. They can also rate them, on a point scale, on their easiness, clarity, helpfulness, rater interest in the subject, and, of course, most importantly, their hotness.
Hotness, or as it is more traditionally known, fuck-ability is a nearly universally desirable attribute in human cultures and societies. And although it is to a great extent determined by the norms of a given period and culture, “it is difficult to imagine any possible context in which Stanley Fish would be considered hot,” writes one student on the site.
Or as another student extremely factual and objective student put it, “Old, white, and beady-eyed, with a whiny voice that sounds like he’s mockingly imitating himself, the last time Professor Fish got laid was the day before the concept of sexual harassment was invented, which was too late for the donkey.”
Critics might argue that he has that one author photo on the cover of The Trouble with Principle where he looks kind of okay, not “like you wanna throw up in your mouth, IMAO,” as another modest student contribution to ratemyprofessor.com has it. The photographer did a reasonable job of hiding his less-than-flattering Cindy Crawford mole, and his jowls appear to have been taped to the back of his neck. Meanwhile, his hair looks surprisingly tousled and full. As one comment on Ratemyprofessors.com reads, “Where did he get that wig?”
But if my sources, Mark and Kram Schiebe, are correct, then Professor Fish, who is an English Civil War veteran, stole it from his mother’s trunk on the slave ship his family gainfully operated to arrive in the New World. Or, as one of the reviews online reads: “When Prof. Fish went to school, they didn’t have History!”
But most of his law students, as polled by the statistical firm of Dewey, Cheetem, and Howe, think either his wife painted that photo or that it is someone else entirely. Indeed, my confidential sources for such matters, gigolos Mark and Kram Schiebe, told me she confessed to it to them. “We told her we wouldn’t make her life worth living anymore if she didn’t come clean about how she’d enhanced that photo,” said the Schiebes, who looked like they’d been violated, when they stepped off the plan from Miami.
When asked why they’d hired a blogger who’s almost as ugly as Maureen Dowd, the senior public spokesperson for The Times, Ramk Beschie, said he couldn’t talk right now because Dowd had been sitting on his face for the last several hours.
Beschie finally emailed a response later in the day. “Look, compared to Dowd, he’s completely beautiful. I mean, she makes Medusa look like Helen of Troy. Besides at least Fish is a bottom. My jaw hurts.”
