I should say that I overstated the case when I said that Fish tried to keep NAS members from serving on Duke personnel and promotion committees.
In truth, as the NAS chapter was forming at Duke, Fish sent a note to the provost urging that they not be approved for those committees because they would enter the room prejudiced against certain candidates on the grounds of the content and focus of their work. In other words, and arguing the point further in other contexts (including a remarkable debate between Fish, Catherine Stimpson, and two others on the left, and William F. Buckley, Dinesh D’Souza, John Silber, and Glenn Loury on the right, with host Michael Kingsley), Fish believed that NAS-ers wouldn’t judge people on the quality of their work, only on their subject matter. If a feminist portfolio came onto the table, they would reject it a priori, no matter how sdeep the research and rigorous the argumentation.
The provost wrote back stating that he couldn’t enact a “litmus test,” and maintained that each individual suggested for committees would be judged individually, not on group membership.
It was an important episode for Fish, as was the Sokal Hoax. When Fish wrote an op-ed in the New York Times attacking Sokal for his “bad joke,” the letters poured in from all corners, many from distinguished figures (such as Howard Gardner and E. D. Hirsch), and if the letters in the Fish Papers are representative, they were more than 90 percent negative.
That may be one reason that Fish has been, in fact, a harsh critic of the academic Left in later years (see the book Professional Correctness as well as the recent Save the World on Your Own Time). He stated once at a private dinner I attended how much he admired Buckley, and he showed up among the guests at Dinesh D’Souza’s wedding. My guess is that, while still a man of the Left, he prefers the company of conservative intellectuals.