World-Saving Education Deconstructed

When beginning a piece by Dr. Stanley Fish one is never quite sure what to expect. His new book Save the World on Your Own Time is no exception.

The Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a Professor of Law at Florida International University, Dr. Fish’s new work takes a controversial stance towards the purpose of higher education:

“The core of a college or university experience should be the academic study of the question posed by the various disciplines.” “College and university teachers can (legitimately) do two things,” writes Dr. Fish.

“(1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skill—of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure—that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over.”

Professor Fish believes that too many teachers have adopted Derek Bok’s philosophy towards education:

“The former president of Harvard and the author of Our Underachieving Colleges. . . Bok believes colleges and universities should be trying to . . . ‘develop such virtues as racial tolerance, honesty and social responsibility’; ‘prepare . . . students to be active, knowledgeable citizens in a democracy ’;‘ nurture . . . good moral character.’”

Teachers are no longer teaching, Dr. Fish believes. They are attempting to shape and mold students to these ideals; however, these ideals are abstract. Every person would define “good moral character” or “social responsibility” differently, argues Professor Fish. And, it is this attempt by teachers to mold their students to what they believe is “good moral character” that is politicizing the classroom.

“A university administration may believe with Kiss and Euben that ‘principles of equality and respect’ form the core of democratic life, but if it pressures students to accept those principles as theirs, it is using the power it has to impose a moral vision on those who do not share it, and that is indoctrination if anything is . . . As long as respect for the culture, religion, and ideology of the other is a contested ethic rather than a universal one, a university that requires it or attempts to inculcate it is engaged not in educational but in partisan behavior.”

Students are in college to learn how to think, not what to think. Yet, many professors turn the classroom into a soapbox, argues Dr. Fish.

“The ‘genuine inquiry’ in which students are (or should be) engaged is not an inquiry about what kind of person Plato or Hobbes or Rawls or Milton thought they should be, and for what reasons, and with what poetic or philosophical force. The exam question is not, ‘If you were to find yourself in such and such a situation, what would you do?’ The exam question is, ‘If you were to find yourself in such and such a situation, what would Plato, Hobbes, Rawls, and Kant tell you to do and what are the different assumptions and investments that would generate their different recommendation.’”

The first question, the question that should not be asked, is not an academic or analytical one. However, it seems to be a common theme running through colleges and universities because professors have turned the classroom into a place of indoctrination, argues Dr. Fish. The real question being asked is not “what would you do?” but, rather, “what have I, the almighty professor, taught you to do?”

Professor Fish understands that “many courses . . . are fraught with political, social, ethical, moral, and religious implications.” It is not his desire to have these topics removed from the classroom because “any ideology, agenda, even crusade is an appropriate object to study.”

“Rather I [Dr. Fish] urge a restriction on what is done with the content when it is brought to the classroom” (emphasis original).

One can correctly and properly study a topic, even a topic palpitating with partisan ideology, Dr. Fish believes. One simply must “academicize” it. “To academicize a topic is to detach it from the context of its real world urgency, where there is a vote to be taken or an agenda to be embraced, and insert it into a context of academic urgency, where, where there is an account to be offered or an analysis to be performed” (emphasis original).

To further illustrate his point, Professor Fish gives an example of how to “academicize” a topic. “In the fall of 2004, my freshman students and I analyzed a speech of John Kerry’s . . . [We subjected] Kerry’s argument to an academic interrogation. Do they hang together? Are they coherent? Do they respond to issues? Are they likely to be persuasive?” At the end of the class, the student determined Kerry’s speech was “confused, contradictory, inchoate, and weak.” The purpose of Dr. Fish’s assignment was not to convince the students that Kerry was “confused, contradictory, inchoate, and weak,” but to analyze the work itself.

(One might argue that the assignment above was political, that Dr. Fish was trying to undermine Kerry supporters in his classroom. Yet, if this had been an issue chosen by Dr. Fish to undermine Kerry’s campaign in an attempt to strengthen George Bush’s, why then did Professor Fish vote for Kerry? It is the overwhelming indoctrination in modern classrooms that Professor Fish argues against that turns an analytical assignment, like the one above, into something political, even when it is not).

Save the World on Your Own Time is a book that attempts to define the true purpose of higher education—to teach, not shape. With most colleges and universities focusing on developing students, “moral, civil, and creative capacities,” Dr. Fish’s idea is highly controversial. Yet in the modern classroom this idea is sensible. By attempting to determine what is moral, what is right or wrong, what is the correct ideology, “the classroom [turns] into a theater of competing indoctrinations.” Students are no longer rational or analytical, they “plump for the values they prefer as a counterweight to the values preferred by their professor [and other students].”

Maybe Dr. Fish is right. Maybe colleges and universities should stop trying to indoctrinate their students and stick to teaching.

Lance Nation is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.

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