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Save the World on Your Own Time

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*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.

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.

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.

In "Save the World on Your Own Time," former professor and dean Stanley Fish is quite clear on what he wants: "I want a university infected by no one's politics, but by the nitty-gritty obligations of teaching and research." (p. 16) Fish draws on his own experience in academia, as well as the usual highly publicized examples a la Ward Churchill, to argue that the academy is focusing less on teaching and more on preaching. And unlike those like David Horowitz and Dinesh D'Souza, Fish does not simply want to make political discourse by university faculty more "balanced," but to remove it all together. As Fish writes repeatedly, teaching political ideas (how to think about them, the history of them, etc) is different from preaching political ideas.

That the latter is happening on a pretty large scale is not much in dispute. From Ward Churchill being removed from the U of Colorado for comments made after 9/11, to universities taking collective stands on policy issues, to the "speech codes" that several universities have experimented with over the past decade, Fish documents this trend quite well.

But what to do about it? Fish wants us to "return" to the "proper" job of universities: to teach students how to think, rather than what to think. Teach about ideas, rather than endorse ideas. Let's avoid the rhetoric, contra Derek Bok and Martha Nussbaum, about the universities' responsibility to promkote tolerance, democracy, pluralism, or any other value and accept the fact that universities are not in the "making good citizens" business, but in the "making educated citizens" business.

Does this mean that universities should not talk about values, politics, literary ideas, etc? No. "You can probe [a] policy's history,...explore its philosophical lineage... [and] examine its implicaitons... but you can't urge it on your students." (p. 24) Will this make the university stale or self-censorious? Fish offers persuasive reasons to suggest that self-censoring can lead to more excitement. Anyone can offer and talk about their opinioins; it is quite more exciting to show students how to analyze and talk about ideas then it is to opine about them.

Some of Fish's other ideas will doubtless rub some the wrong way. For instance, many people take it as a given that the goal of a university is to promote social justice, democracy, pluralism, multiculturalism, or some other such value (other than the pursuit of truth and knowledge). Fish says no! This is the job of the counselor, clergyman, television pundit, and politician; for an academic to preach values other than pursuit of truth and knowledge is to, in effect, "practice without a license."

Fish even gets into a juicy discussion on the "intelligent design" movement, and argues quite persuasively that the very subordination of pursuing truth to pursuing "democratic pluralistic debate" is what gave rise to this fiasco. Some may think it is a stretch, but Fish is quite convincing in his suggestion that our infatuation with keeping debates as pluralistic as possible has gotten in the way of our asking whether a certain position is true or the opposition worthy. (ID exploits this by focusing less on the "theory's" scientific merits and more on the value of "democratic dialogue.")

My only real complaint about this book is that I was hoping to hear Fish's take on the dilemma caused by professors at once having to take positions in publications (particularly humanities publications) while expecting not to let students find out their biases. (The Ward Churchill incident is a good example, where Churchill seemed very neutral and fair in his classes, but was fired becuase his writings rubbed people the wrong way.) Should we not expect professors to take iconoclastic positions in print for fear that their students might find out? Or is taking strong positions okay, so long as one keeps their research and teaching seperate? I think I know where Fish would come out here, but I was hoping to hear him discuss this very vexing and pertinent topic.

All in all, though, the book was well argued, economically written (176 pp.) and is bound to stir up an academy that needs stirring up.

I certainly agree with professor Fish that there is a world of difference between discussing a political issue politically, namely by taking a stand on it, and discussing it academically: by reviewing arguments pro and against it in an impartial manner, reviewing its social and historical context and so on. However, the idea that there is a neutral language of academic discussion, something to which Fish aspires, is at best an illusion, and at worst silly. First, all academics, even as they are equipped with the best of 'analytic skills' (what are these exactly?), are children of their time, the universities they went to, the professors they were influenced by, and probably their racial and other affiliations. This is not to say that academics should not be TRAINED to be as impartial as they possibly could (a value?), and that some cannot succeed in this better than others. Fish recruits Aristotle to his aid as someone who thought that virtue cannot be taught academically, namely, through scientific reasoning. But in fact, Aristotle didn't argue that virtue cannot or should not be taught. Quite the contrary: Aristotle thought that reading the right kind of literature could, and should, be used to inculcate in people the right sort of values. And indeed, when one reads Kafka, or Dostoyevsky, or Nietzsche, or Plato, in the classroom, one also teaches one's students something about values and the meaning of life. Even Plato's Socrates, who claimed that he possessed no knowledge, seems to us to know quite a lot about how one should live his life namely, through rational investigation. But then, isn't that exactly what Fish wants universities to be doing, that is, teaching us the basics of rational deliberation? After all, let us ask Fish, why should people go and study for a university degree if those institutions don't teach them something valuable about life? If the Physicist, or the Chemist, or the English major, should not come to value their discipline as contributing something good to themselves and to others, - and who is better to guide them there than their teachers - why should they seek that education in the first place? Both Plato and Aristotle thought that people, by their very nature, seek the morally good life. Universities, packed as they are with men and women of letters, should be good places, among others, to advance those aspirations. If some academics, from right and left, have abused their position to promote a misguided political agenda, this should not mean that academia needs less values but just the opposite: it shows that it needs better people to promote better values.

This is a perfectly reasonable book which has attracted some brickbats as well as more reasoned criticism. The argument is summarized at several points in the book. Basically, our tasks are defined by that which makes them distinctive. What is the distinct role of the university teacher? To "introduce students to bodies of material new to them and equip those same students with the appropriate (to the discipline) analytical and research skills."

This task involves both responsibilities (to show up for class, be prepared, create exams, give feedback on assignments, etc.) and prohibitions (taking on tasks "that belong properly to other agents," including political indoctrination. When we do the latter we open ourselves to legitimate criticism which then threatens the accomplishment of our actual task.

I believe that he argues these points convincingly and also answers the `everything is political, so I'll give my political slant to counterbalance the slant of others' argument.

One of the distinctions that has often been overlooked in the so-called `culture wars' is the distinction between the politically conservative and the academically conservative. The broad brush attacks on leftist professors have often overlooked the fact that many of those individuals are conservative with regard to curriculum, methodology, standards, and so on. Fish, e.g., notoriously tells students that they shouldn't be `expressing themselves' in class because they have nothing to express until they acquire a great deal more knowledge than they presently possess, a point repeated in Save the World on Your Own Time.

The only place where he seems to backslide on his defense of disciplinary distinctiveness and the specificity of tasks is in his implicit defense of Women's Studies, Black Studies, etc. programs. In this book he says that the study of race, class and gender has energized the humanities. At the same time, he says that if the identity-based programs stray from their task of analysis and `academicizing' and become agents of advocacy they should be prohibited from doing so by administrative authorities.

I would have thought that he would argue on behalf of `the study of women' within the disciplines but not for `women's studies' as an administrative and curricular unit, since the expectation of advocacy is nearly always part of such a unit's portfolio. There are several points worth considering here. First, the identity-based programs are overwhelmingly populated by faculty in the humanities, whereas the issues that those programs raise may, in some cases, be more effectively addressed by economists, historians, statisticians and faculty in the life sciences. It is arguable that some of the issues which these programs address were not being addressed in the past, at least not to the degree that their importance would justify. Hence the need for such programs (then). It is now late in the day, however, and issues of race, class and gender pervade the curricula and research agendas of the separate disciplines. John Guillory (who is clearly not politically conservative) has argued that women's studies, black studies, etc. should be research foci, not curricular units. He argues that on several grounds, but one important point that he makes is that anything that is constructed as an alternative to a core, anything that offers a different path than that taken by the vast majority of students (majoring in history, sociology, the biological sciences, etc.) ends up being something `secondary', something with less clout and less authority, something that, ultimately, helps widen the gap between the students who study a traditional curriculum (as defined by the disciplines; Guillory's `traditional' will be very different from Dinesh D'Souza's or Roger Kimball's) and serves to diminish the authenticity of their degrees. Given Fish's respect for the disciplines and their distinctiveness I would have expected a warm embrace of Guillory's argument.

Nevertheless, it is important to identify the proper role of university teachers and Fish does that. This is a subset, of course, of the proper role of a university, which would include the development of new knowledge as well as the dissemination of established knowledge. The development of new knowledge (faculty research) is related to instruction in various ways and forms. The choice of a subject of such research can, of course, be a political act. If a prospective faculty member in the humanities identifies his research foci as the kinds of things which Fish highlights here (genre, literary history, metrics, verse forms, stylistic effects, and so on), that candidate will be immediately and overtly identifying him- or herself as `traditional' and `conservative' (academically and possibly . . . politically?), given the fact that the easily politicized foci of race, class and gender have pervaded the academy, at least until very recently.

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.

Stanley Fish's position can be understood with a quote on page 131 of this book where he writes:

"The mistake, and it is one made by some postmodern thinkers and seized upon by their neoconservative opponents, is to go from this perfectly ordinary description of how knowledge is established, tested, and sometimes dislodged -this, after all, is the scientific method -to the extraordinary and unearned conclusion that nothing that has been established as knowledge is to be trusted." - Stanley Fish (p131)

The key words here are "some postmodern thinkers." Some? In fact, this type of postmodern thinking characterized the entire movement. Stanley Fish admits that some postmodern thinkers went too far with relativism. But are we to believe, that Stanley Fish believes, that there is a certain segment of postmodern thinkers that make this mistake, and the rest do not - or should we come to the more obvious conclusion that nearly all postmodern thinkers went overboard, intentionally, for political purposes, SOME of the time.

To understand this is to understand the postmodern technique, and why it is such a problem. The postmodern method, used first by the Left and then by the Right, is to stand by rationality and absolute values when it serves a personal or political end, but then to become absolute relativists when it is personally or politically advantageous. But it's no mistake. It's a weapon.

It's easy for Professor Fish to dismiss postmodern philosophy as benign, and apolitical, if it is understood correctly. But his higher education was in the late fifties and early sixties. We all know the Ivory Tower of the university was bombed into rubble in the late sixties. By the late seventies it was in the process of being rebuilt as a bastion of liberalism. Stanley Fish's solution is sound: return to the Ivory Tower, allow the quest for truth, for justice, and for wisdom, to have priority over politics in academia. But I wonder where his solution was forty years ago when the nightmare began.

Stanley Fish's personal anecdotes in the introduction, describing his misplaced anger, were entertaining. With the tone of the book, it suggested his frustration with the politicization of academia. His point is well illustrated by John Carey's critique of his interpretation of Milton's "Samson Agonistes" (p 51). But for some reason I doubt Fish's sincerity. I don't think he is terribly concerned over the sacrifice of true education in the social sciences and humanities that was made by my generation for the sake of political fantasies of the overwelming majority of instructors. If he were, why would he wait until 2008 to offer this little book as a solution?

Still, I agree with him. Higher education shouldn't teach morality, but rather the way to morality. But his preaching against preaching in the classroom, his call to end indoctrination in higher education, his solution to our soul-less universities, just seems to me to be, too little - and a little too late.

There are some fairly decent points in this slender review, but once again, the pedant within shines through Mr. Fish's measured objections to the polemical academy.
For one, his descriptions of the course he used to teach, offered as the corrective example to those tendentious political courses he decries, seems laughably and utterly banal. If I get this straight, his students are subjected to some nonsensical course-long playtime of devising their own language, in groups no less, and oh how brilliant and earth-shaking these exercises were for these lucky students, by the good professor's own admission.
This is the great education he intones so righteously about? That's a life-long skill, learning to babble in tongues, to learn the "structure" of language?
These pedants always seem to lose all critical grip when describing their own bore-fests. As for the other stuff, he's on with some, off when he thinks that investments should purely be for profit because that's the "legal" duty of investors - since when does poorly designed and egregiously enforced law determine ultimate ethics?

Fish is rightly against the over-generalized and ultimately meaningless political correctness in the way Universities' define their educational goals - but his answer is to explicitly ignore the political implications of all inquiry. Education becomes merely training students to use the scientific method. Universities already make politics ultimately meaningless by encouraging diatribe but making actual action anathema. Fish just wants to make that explicit. Maybe he thinks that will save professors' jobs - by turning them into faceless drones.