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Stanley Fish’s latest book asks professors to keep their opinions out of the classroom. He’s onto something.By Andy Kroll
February 10, 2009
Stanley Fish argues that professors should keep their idealism and their opinions out of the classroom.The modern American university has lost its way. So argues prominent intellectual and New York Times columnist Stanley Fish in his latest book, Save the World on Your Own Time, a short, well-reasoned polemic on what he considers to be the failings of American higher education and what must be done to correct them. Rather than focusing on teaching and conducting research, he writes, today’s colleges and universities aim to solve the ills of the world, tackle social injustices like racism and American imperialism, and mold students into worldly citizens. Any number of college mission statements—which read more like panaceas than declarations of academic core principles—confirms this ambition. Faculty members, the intellectual lifeblood of any college or university and the focus of Fish’s book, are equally at fault, bringing personal beliefs and politics into the classroom where they don’t belong.
Fish, a former dean at the University of Illinois–Chicago and currently a professor at Florida International University, lays out a three-fold solution for remedying the roles of teachers in higher education. He wants teachers to stick to instructing students on how best to engage in academic inquiry and how to study the competing perspectives within a text or issue. This is advice he calls, “Do your job.” Fish argues that teachers should stick to teaching and not try to do the work of a preacher, social worker, or inspirational speaker. He also says not to let outside influences meddle with a teacher’s job of educating his or her students. “[T]rustees, donors, politicians, parents, and concerned members of the general public,” he writes, “have lots of ideas that should be politely listened to and then filed away under ‘not to the academic point.’”
Fish inevitably wades into the debate over what defines academic freedom on today’s campuses. In recent years, “academic watchdog” groups like Campus Watch, which purports to monitor curricula and professors in Middle East Studies departments across the country, and the Argus Project, an initiative from the National Association of Scholars employing volunteers to report incidences of politicization in teaching and scholarship, have sprung up, stirring an already contentious discussion on whether teachers are too political in the classroom. Mind you, Fish devotes few words to these organizations, and in no way advocates for something similar. Since he believes introducing students to new material and teaching them to analyze that material is truly a teacher’s job, outside groups like Campus Watch are irrelevant.
Much of Save the World clashes with the various progressive ideals of higher education. The progressive community sees the classroom as a place to encourage students to tackle issues of social justice and inequality; Fish flatly does not. And his strict belief in academic inquiry is sure to irk fervent progressives who see education as a means for fostering a sense of morality and democracy in students.
So is Fish’s advice in Save the World what today’s college and universities and the teachers filling their classroom need? Indeed it is, and here’s why. More than ever before, the value in understanding all arguments on an issue (even those one disagrees with), in evaluating the merits of those competing viewpoints, and in selecting which viewpoint(s) are most valuable—the value of this intellectual process—has all but dwindled.
As legal scholar Cass Sunstein has argued, in today’s Internet-driven age, individuals can select and filter the kinds of information they receive more than ever before. If liberal, they can tailor their daily reading and watching and listening to feature only liberal newspapers, websites, magazine, blogs, message boards, etc.; the same applies for conservatives, and for that matter, adherents to any other ideology. Put simply, given complete control over what they read on the Internet, people will almost always seek out information confirming what they already believe, in effect polarizing our discourse. “There is a general risk that those who flock together, on the Internet or elsewhere, will end up both confident and wrong, simply because they have not been sufficiently exposed to counterarguments,” Sunstein writes. “They may even think of their fellow citizens as opponents or adversaries in some kind of war.’”
Not that it’s completely the Internet’s fault. Closed-mindedness, selective ignorance, an “unwillingness to give a hearing to contradictory viewpoints, or to imagine that one might learn anything from an ideological or cultural opponent,” as Susan Jacoby writes in The Age of American Unreason—these are all growing aspects of American culture.
And this is where higher education becomes so important. As citizens become more ideologically isolated and more intellectually polarized, higher education—that is, Fish’s vision of higher education—can help to counteract that anti-intellectualism by instilling in students the importance of approaching issues from an academic standpoint and of thoroughly dissecting an argument, text, idea.
One of the best ways to create an intellectually curious citizenry, rather than an ignorant one, is to emphasize the value of understanding all sides to an issue. For those who fear that this approach will turn students into passive citizens, it simply isn’t true. There will never be a shortage of opportunities for students to use and apply their newfound passions, and to channel them into action—it just needs to be outside of the classroom. But if the university continues down a path in which its educators fail to teach academic inquiry, and instead shortchange their students by simply offering their own opinions, it will only amplify the deafening echo chamber that characterizes so much of this country’s public discourse.
Andy Kroll, a senior at the University of Michigan, has written for The Nation, AlterNet, CNN, TomDispatch.com, and CBSNews.com. He welcomes comments and further discussion, and can be reached at his website.
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Comments
If Fish believes preaching professors are of such dire consequence to the quality of higher education in America that it warrants an entire book about it, I worry for him and those who take him seriously.
Fish pines for long-gone days where professors were kings and students were serfs – a kind of authoritarian wistfulness that’s all too-common among those in legal academia (enamored with the most rotten core of the Socratic method). The implication is that such courses “back then” were apolitical, when in fact the fin-de-siecle University was dripping with politics. Of course back then the politics were mostly structural – hiding in things like pedagogy, departmental structure, admissions procedures, and hiring/firing.
The notion of a value- or politics-free education is a naive one, not worthy of someone to whom The New York Times grants column inches. If Fish is truly concerned about the quality of education that the modern University offers, he should follow the money.
— For Student Power - Feb 12, 05:48 PM - #I remember my struggles with the professing professors of the 60s and beyond. They were not using “academic freedom” to propagandize but rather so they could prepare an hour lecture in five minutes and no one would be allowed to complain about the quality of their teaching. I was told that the motto of higher education in America is: IF YOU CAN’T GET IT ON YOUR OWN, YOU CAN’T GET IT!
Then came the FSM, calling for MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE, on the campus, NOT in class… The profs were Johnnies-come-latelies to the student demands. It was when the FSM generation became faculty that they imposed an anti-US Imperialism diatribe in classes such as Biology. But that had nothing to do with “free speech,” only became the new bugaboo of “academic freedom.” Arguing the case for NO pedagogic accountability, the Faculty Senate was of one voice for this ACADEMIC FREEDOM. It is only when the issue on campus and in Middle Eastern Studies classes became “too pro-Arab” for the taste of Zionist radicals that suddenly the likes of Fish scream and holler, following the ex-lefty Horowitz, about the nightmare of academia. Recall that the Israel Lobby called for Congressional censorship of such studies so that anything Zionists found unfriendly would be denied federal funds (that’s like Red East Europe!!!), that’s not what the Commies in the FSM fought for. On the contrary, they wanted MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE where no dogma rules. Is what Fish fights against, not classroom propaganda, but out of class campus free speech on Zionism, like Horowitz,the new professional censor of the campus?
— DE Teodoru - Feb 12, 10:35 PM - #Aptheker and the FSM at UC Berkeley were all about MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE instead of Red Revolution. So was Horowitz, until the magazine RAMPARTS went broke. Eventually neocon money was coming in fast for this disguised censorship on campus pretending to demand proper class discourse.
FREE SPEECH is what the Zionists are demanding be denied to American students who question how a broke America will contend with Israel’s demand for a lavish $14 billion in aide; how we will react when the Arabs again retaliate with an oil embargo; why young American volunteers must die in in Iraq when the enemy is in Afghanistan….and the issues go on— OUTSIDE THE CLASS, NOT IN IT…. and the campaign is for censorship ON CAMPUS. The fate of Norman Finkelstein, an able academic and a dedicated pedagogue, is a case in point— one of many.I can’t forget that Communist leaders of the FSM like Aptheker kept their word on MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE, creating campus teach-ins, not by disrupting classes. On campus, we, the anti-Communist Right, were given a platform to debate the Left, BY THE LEFT because we were too weak to get it ourselves. It is only in history and social science classes that the once hairy, now bald New Lefters as tenured faculty, raved about US Imperialism as professing professors…or more as Baptist preachers in style. I wonder if Fish was one of them and, if not, where was his book then?
Bill Buckley used to suggest to YAFERS that, in debating Communism and the Vietnam War, they bring up Israel’s killing of Palestinians because there the New Left would go crazy and scream “anti-Semite,” losing the debate on inconsistency. A perfect case was Alard Lowenstein; remember him?
So maybe Mr. Fish allies with those who oppose teaching “only” evolution in biology classes as well as keeping the Palestinians off campus; but these are distinct issues and it is up to Mr. Fish to show his bonafides by acknowledging the distinction.
The Holocaust Industry has lost sight of the anti-Semitism it provokes, blinded by how much money it extracts from guilt ridden American Jews because of the silence of their parents while Hitler was murdering Jews and FDR was sending refugees back to him in the 1930s. But that does not help Israel and imperils American Jews, who are as American as apple pie, not a Fifth Column, despite the efforts of certain lobbies to claim that they are. The proof is in that the same proportion of Jews voted for Obama as blacks— despite the lying neocon propaganda that he’s an anti-American terrorist-loving anti-Zionist. The campus SHOULD be where ideas are debated rather than where beer is imbibed and pranks become traditions. The classroom is the desperate place where pedagogy attempts to make up for 12 wasted years of lower education in four of higher (Europeans after high school go directly to grad school on the assumption that 12 years is enough to educate you. But there you begin solid geometry in 3rd grade, not in the 14th as a college sophomore). So let’s be clear. The campus is where meaningful dialogue should prepare students for responsible citizenship through free speech instead of beer and video games. That was the whole issue of the Student Movement of the 1960s; class content was only supposed to be “relevant” to what you want to do with your life: like learning good chemistry geared to biology if you want to be a biochemist— in other words, getting your money’s worth.
The Zionist censorship will only cause a backlash against people who don’t deserve it while the neocons, who run these campus crusades for cash, live it up on their ill-gotten gains in what they call “Eurabia” (“anti-Semitic” places like French Riviera). Fish’s book, seems from this review (as I didn’t get to read it yet) to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, pretending that he supports serious education. But does he ever discuss why it costs up to $25,000 a year for a lousy general Bachelor’s Degree, needed to enter any serious professional school?
We’ve heard what Fish and Kroll want. Now let’s hear what students want (and need) to occur in the classroom.
Maybe debate between professor and students (and the students themselves) about issues (relevant to the course taught) is what STUDENTS want and need.
Students having a say in what they are taught. What a NOVEL concept!
— hterrya - Feb 13, 03:03 AM - #Hate to say it, but students don’t necessarily know whether what they want is in their own best interest. Student input is certainly important, but it should not trump all other legitimate concerns about the aims and methods of higher education.
— tryjeio - Feb 13, 04:12 PM - #At UC Berkeley I argued that students are America’s only aristocracy because only they are free from day-to-day reality to study and socialize on campus. It apparently got to someone for the term appeared in books on student responsiblity.So maybe Americans are not hopeless, even now, if properly motivated to OPEN MIND by professing professors teaching through example. I deemed it their social obligation to engage in responsible debate on campus and if, subject appropriate, in class. MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE MUST BE A POSITION NEUTRAL OBLIGATION DEMAND BY COLLEGES OF STUDENTS— LIKE SOCIAL SERVICE— FOR ALL STUDENTS. Most importantly, it provokes MATRURATION of the young as ignroance eventually becomes humiliating to the students in their own social circles. My Prof friends agreed to give priority to making students argue in class. They ALL report that it leads to more reading of assigned and other vmaterials ON SUBJECT AT ISSUE and better understanding. The “jock-mind” gets humiliated and it goes home, reads and comes back arguing, inproving just as it improves in sports after defeat. The only down side I know of is that class debate preparation time cuts into income of local beer joints and condom sales.
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