Save the World on Your Own Time (Hardcover)

by Stanley Fish (Author)
Key Phrases: intellectual diversity, Save the World, First Amendment, Don't Try (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Fish's lively polemic skewers the popular perspective that universities have an obligation to foster ethical, social, and political virtues, arguing that academic institutions are best served by admitting to the distinct (and limited) nature of their task: [to] introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry... and equip [them] with the analytical skills that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research. To professors using their podium to politically influence or engage with their students, the author chides: Do your job, Don't try to do someone else's job and Don't let anyone else do your job—and offers refreshing takes on Ward Churchill, Bob Newhart and how writing ought to be taught. Despite the repetitive reiteration of initial premises and a few rhetorical inconsistencies, Fish's penultimate chapter shows off his unconventional style in its most personable guise; he lays out a simple strategy by which academics and administrators may fight (not work with) those who demand that academia justify itself; he writes, The only honest thing to do when someone from outside asks, 'what use is this venture anyway?' is to answer 'none whatsoever.' (Sept.)
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From Booklist
A college teacher has just two professional responsibilities, Fish says: (1) “introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry” and (2) “equip those students with the analytical skills” needed to absorb those traditions and perform independent research. Those should take up all a teacher’s professional time. Political advocacy, religious instruction, and pet causes should be prosecuted outside the classroom. To show that conscientiously pursued teaching can take all one’s work time, he sketches his own way of teaching English composition, intriguingly enough to make one wish to have been in his classroom. He is trenchant and cogent on the dangers of trying to do someone else’s work and of allowing someone else to do yours, and the particulars in his argument include his defense of academic work (it is not good for something but good in itself), his experienced administrator’s revelation that public (i.e., tax) support of higher education has plummeted throughout the U.S., and his evisceration of the activist maxim everything is political. All who care about higher education should read this book. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195369025
• ISBN-13: 978-0195369021
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #52,614 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Divesting the Academy of Left and Right, September 13, 2008

By	Kinohi Nishikawa (Durham, NC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

*Save the World on Your Own Time* is an incisive, engaging, and I daresay inspiring polemic on major issues in higher education today. Stanley Fish does not mince words; the argument he repeats throughout this book is that academics should stick to "doing their jobs": "introduce students to disciplinary materials and equip them with the necessary analytic skills" to engage in disciplinary methods of research (p. 153). Yet proceeding from this modest thesis, Fish outlines a series of logical consequences which expose the folly of the way partisans of the left and the right tackle issues ranging from academic freedom and faculty hiring to deconstruction and Intelligent Design.

How does the humble work of academic inquiry manage to take on these diverse hot-button issues? For starters, Fish pulls the rug out from under all those who see the university classroom as a site to do something other than teach disciplinary methods of research and analysis. Despite the lofty rhetoric of professors who aim to teach their students "civic responsibility" and "tolerance for others," it is Fish's contention that doing something other than engaging in academic study in the university is dangerous. Politics, Fish surmises, has no place in the classroom unless it's the object of academic inquiry in a political science seminar. That is, politics should be something professors analyze, not something they demand allegiance to.

Fish's position may strike many in the academy as deeply conservative, but what emerges from *Save the World* is a deeply committed defense of the academic enterprise itself. The contextual playing out of Fish's logic is persuasive: if the university classroom is the proper site for disinterested academic study, the teaching and learning of disciplinary methods, indeed the pursuit of "truth" through reason and judgment ("truth" for Fish being not some ungrounded universal truth but a historically worked-over, disciplinarily agreed-upon "truth" of human inquiry), then neither liberal nor conservative ideologues have a leg to stand on in claiming a space in academe. Thus, Fish shows, just as the desire to denounce the Bush administration in the classroom (i.e., the act of performing a political statement rather than analyzing it) must be deemed misguided and quashed, so must David Horowitz and others' desire that the university faculty body reflect a "more balanced" political outlook (i.e., a 50/50 liberal-conservative or Democrat-Republican split) be deemed misguided and quashed. Because academics shouldn't "do" politics (that's the prescription, at least, of *Save the World*), then politicians, policy wonks, and partisans shouldn't "do" academics either.

The bulk of Fish's book offers example after example of how the modest proposal of teaching discipline-specific knowledge requires all participants to subject themselves to sound judgment and reasoned argument. Leaving one's political commitments at the door gives everyone the opportunity to engage in academic study not as a project of stupefying (and dull) opinion-sharing but as one of carefully honed argument-making.

Most inspiring, though, is how Fish's call for academics to "do their jobs" and other folks, by implication, to do *their* jobs leads him to conclude that the divesting of public funds from higher education in recent years by private sector-rallying politicians is one of the most dastardly (and woefully misunderstood) cases of one group claiming to know how to do another group's job better. Reading the penultimate chapter is breathtaking not only because you realize that Fish's thesis has come to its logical conclusion but also, more specifically, because you realize that the university culture wars have in many ways distracted us from the actual gutting of public higher education by corporate neoliberal policies and their political spokesmen.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not just for specialists, December 21, 2008

By	Charles J. Marr (Cambridge Springs, Pa USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Mr. Fish is not light reading. He never was and in this short book he employs precise reasoning that may sound redundant to a reader. "Yeah, I heard you the first time." This book has only one point: It is not the job of an academic to save the world but to teach a subject. Not really new. More than forty years ago I heard a Benedictine Professor of Genetics say, "I do not confuse the lectern with the pulpit."

This text is a rational and useful counter to accumulated rhetoric which has proposed "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" and "diversity of ideas in the classroom," and universal questioning of all fixed norms. Fish sanely says English teachers should teach English, lawyers law and philosophers philosophy. It is not the job of an English teacher to judge the law or ethics of Macbeth's actions but the quality of the play, or more precisely it is the professor's job to evaluate quality and to teach students to perform this task. Law professors should not advocate laws to be enacted but how to understand and interpret those in effect. Philosophers should evaluate ethical systems not advocate one or another. And so forth.

Fish mentions the difficulties of distinguishing right and good, the difficulties of administration and even diminishing funding streams , but his major point is central: do your job, not someone else's job. I might add, there are plenty of folk willing to save our souls, our health and our society outside academe.


There is one difficulty, the underlying assumption that the University consists solely of the classroom and the lab. The elaborate social service side (Offfice of Student Success, etc) of modern American Universities has a trail of health officers and psychologists, nutritionists, housing, affirmative action, gender equity, financial aide specialists as well as admissions, out-counselers, registrars, and so on and so onwhich is an enterprise in itself and often part of the larger commercial life of the host city. But why criticize what he does not attempt.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Teach, Don't Preach, December 1, 2008

By	Sean P. Pidgeon (Morristown, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The last three presidential elections show almost 50/50 partisan voting splits. For many academics, this is a sign that schools are failing. That George Bush won twice and John McCain garnered 46 percent of the vote is an indictment of our school system. If only educators would teach social justice; if only teachers would take the progressive pedagogy they learn from their education professors and bring it into public school classrooms, we could usher in a new enlightened age.

Famed Milton scholar and public intellectual Stanley Fish has a more academic take on the role of education. In response to Fish's online New York Times column, "Buttons and Bows (Oct. 12, 2008)," commenter `Barbara, the retired English Prof' smugly states:

"I am proud...to become liberal in my outlook, voting record, and behavior, and to have taught my students the meaning of `liberal'...if not from me and my teaching, from whom will [my students] learn about the liberal point of view when all around them this view is being demonized , especially in this red state where I live?"

If only more teachers brought their politics into the classroom like Professor Barbara, we could propel an entire generation to think and vote exactly like her!

Unfortunately, not enough teachers are trying to change the world. They busy themselves with trite tasks like teaching reading, writing, math, science, and history. Stanley Fish encourages this petty academic outlook with his new book, "Save the World on Your Own Time." Fish begins by noting that colleges fill their mission statements with lofty goals, urging students to fight poverty, war, racism, sexism, capitalism, American imperialism, and, yes, "the hegemony of Wal-Mart," while simultaneously "respecting" diverse beliefs, lifestyles, and ideologies. Fish grants that many of these may be worthy goals. But they are not academic goals. A university professor should not, for example, promote democracy, but rather teach the philosophical and historical roots of democracy as a political system. "Respect" for diverse beliefs and opinions should only come after the academic task of evaluation has taken place.

Professors should be busy enough planning lessons, grading papers, providing students feedback, and publishing in academic journals. They have specific training, and should limit themselves to two tasks: "(1) introducing students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry...and (2) equipping those same students with the analytical skills...that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and engage in independent research after a course is over." When teachers try to offer "more" than this by bringing in their political agendas, students actually end up learning less. And to conservatives who complain about the lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses dominated by liberal professors, Fish says this is no more relevant than the lack of left-handed professors or the lack of, say, Yankee fan professors. As long as professors stick to their job requirement--teach, don't preach--political leanings are irrelevant.

If Professor Barbara and teachers like her want to buy locally grown organic food, protest capitalism, and boycott Wal-Mart, that is fantastic, provided it is done on nights and weekends. If her agenda is that important, she can switch careers and work for a PAC or think-tank. But when she steps in the classroom, she should do her job. She can save the world on her own time.