Save the World on Your Own Time [Hardcover]

Stanley Fish (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0195369025 | ISBN-13: 978-0195369021 | Edition: Second Edition

What should be the role of our institutions of higher education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce responsible citizens?

In Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues that, however laudable these goals might be, there is but one proper role for the academe in society: to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. And yet professors now routinely bring their political views into the classroom and seek to influence the political views of their students. Those who do this will often invoke academic freedom, but Fish argues that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that comes into the professor's mind. He insists that a professor's only obligation is "to present the material in the syllabus and introduce students to state-of-the-art methods of analysis. Not to practice politics, but to study it; not to proselytize for or against religious doctrines, but to describe them; not to affirm or condemn Intelligent Design, but to explain what it is and analyze its appeal."

Given that hot-button issues such as Holocaust denial, free speech, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are regularly debated in classrooms across the nation, Save the World On Your Own Time is certain to spark fresh debate-and to incense both liberals and conservatives-about the true purpose of higher education in America.

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; Second Edition edition (August 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195369025
• ISBN-13: 978-0195369021
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #797,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University. He has previously taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has received many honors and awards, including being named the Chicagoan of the Year for Culture. He is the author of twelve books and is now a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He resides in Andes, New York; New York City; and Delray Beach, Florida; with his wife, Jane Tompkins.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 55 people found the following review helpful

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

By K. Nishikawa VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

*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.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars "I'm a teacher, not a..." December 11, 2010

By Omer Belsky VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

In The Trouble with Principle, Stanley Fish argues against Principles. The values he attacks vary, but the methodology is always the same, and can be summed thus: every value no matter how important, must be balanced against other considerations, which means that for every principle, there would be circumstances when that principle would be violated. Therefore, Fish argues, there are no principles.

My view was that Fish took a far too stringent view of principles. If principles are taken as good generalizations or rules of thumb (i.e. "In principle, I agree that..."), they can be very useful. Only when conceived as eternal, unchanging, and always correct, is there a "trouble with principles"; Otherwise, they would do just fine.

So it is a little of a shock to find Fish does the very thing he argued against in his previous book in this one - that is, declaring a principle. Taken in my sense, that of a rule of thumb, Fish's principle is solid: the prime objective of an academic is to engage in academic pursuits, that is mostly in the teaching of the "current state of disciplinary knowledge" (p. 13), and doing research.

This is surely a good idea; We don't need professors to be preachers or pundits; That's not where their comparative advantage lies. But it is over simplistic; Reality is more complicated that Fish is willing to acknowledge, and the generally good rule must be tweaked to acknowledge that.

For example, Fish criticizes the professors who opposed the housing of the George W. Bush presidential library at Southern Methodist University. He argues that "SMU would not be enshrining any attitudes or actions by housing the library; rather, it would be helping to assure that a set of historical attitudes and actions will be subject to scholarly analysis" (p. 36).

But realistically, this is not a neither/or proposition. I've only been to one US Presidential Library, that of LBJ in the university of Austin, Texas. But if that is a model, it doesn't only help subject the President's attitudes and actions to scholarly analysis; It also helps portray him in a very positive light.

If a presidential Library would both promote research, and serve as a (hopefully subtle) propaganda piece for the President, how can professors maintain the strict separation between their "work" and their "ideas"?

And Fish recognizes that such sectarian schools as (I suppose, he never names them) Brigham Young University and Liberty college have a different agenda, one that is explicitly moral; Does that mean that these univesities are necessarily bad at their academic job, or merely that they manage to combine two jobs? And recall that moral instruction is often an explicit target in the education of the students only a few years before they enter higher education. So why shouldn't there be an agenda also to mainstream universities and colleges, at least a moderate, consensual agenda such as promoting democracy and opposing racism?

Wouldn't it be better, in fact, for ideology to be explicit rather than implicit? Some issues are impossible to discuss without any bias, no matter how subtle. A Conservative professor would describe FDR's administration differently than a Liberal one, and an American's depiction of World War 2 would be very different than a Russian Professor's depiction. This would be true even if all tried to adhere as closely as possible to "disciplinary knowledge" (as they certainly should).

So, yes, Fish is right that professors should be teachers and researchers before they're anything else, and should strive for objectivity; But that's a standard they can never actually reach, and so,inevitably, they would spend at least some of their work time trying to save the world; And that, too, is part of their job.

24 of 33 people found the following review helpful

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

By Sean P. Pidgeon

Format:Hardcover

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.