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49 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Divesting the Academy of Left and Right, September 13, 2008
This review is from: Save the World on Your Own Time (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.
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21 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Teach, Don't Preach, December 1, 2008
This review is from: Save the World on Your Own Time (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.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"I'm a teacher, not a...", December 11, 2010
This review is from: Save the World on Your Own Time (Hardcover)
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.
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