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November 09, 2006
Having some fun with Stanley Fish on the NYTimes Blog
I must confess: an evil streak came over me just the other day. Maybe it was all those planets in Scorpio, Mars in Scorpio, and then Mercury rolling retrograde.
The real reason is that the New York Times left the barn door open and the cows got out.
I am vehemently boycotting all the content on TimesSelect, you see. I hate that firewall and the price, and what it does to the quality of the debate in the public commons of the Internet. I ranted on this topic a bit in a recent post on my other blog. I mean, truly, I can't live without Frank Rich, and if I could have Frank, I'd want Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert too. My life is messed up without them in it, and it is all the Times's fault.
So, the Times offered me a free week to play in the TimesSelect playground, that walled garden that I find to be a purely evil place where Rich and Herbert and Krugman are being held prisoner, and there's no one to rescue them. (Thank goodness they didn't trap David Pogue, or I might have to storm the castle!)
I knew I should never have entered the rich kids' private playground, but I couldn't resist. And wouldn't you know it, they're keeping Stanley Fish in there too! You know, the noted academic and dean and distinguished professor? His provocative writings have shaped a great deal of recent theory in academia. He's associated with reader-response theories, interpretive communities, and anti-foundationalism.
Which is why, in private company, over a few beers, I like to pick on him. That's a safe thing to do, usually. Anti-foundationalism is such an easy target, sort of like the Star Trek time-travel paradoxes. Just a few quick moves, and everyone is all tied in knots.
Turns out there are some other academics, or former academics, or academic defenders, playing in TimesSelect too, either because they got a free week like I did, or maybe they like that elitist feeling of being a paid subscriber to TimesSelect. Pooh on that. E-vile, I'm telling you. TimesSelect is a sign of the apocalypse!
So it doesn't do me much good to quote too much of Stanley Fish's blog post, "Always Academicize," spinning off Frederick Jameson's "Always Historicize" maxim of a number of years ago. There's really no comparison between the two, because Jameson was making an academic argument, and Fish is just throwing out a quick hit blog post to the pseudo-masses behind the TimesSelect firewall.
He's also jumping off another post he did on a related topic in October, which I guess generated a bunch of sound and fury from pointy-headed people in the comments area as well. I wouldn't know about that, because technically, TimesSelect wasn't free to me at the time he wrote that piece, so I shouldn't be responsible for taking those argument threads into full consideration anyway, right?
Right now there are 104 comments on this Stanley Fish post. My anonymous comment is #39. I posted semi-anonymously because grad school conditioned me well. I figured I'd come off as a Fish dilettante, and some real Fish scholar would show up and wipe the floor with me.
Looks like some of them showed up and half-way liked what I had to say, tho. I had too much fun writing it to let the little piece rot in some secret TimeSelect walled garden blog comments field, so I've got a wild hair to share it, along with a few of the other commenters I admire. I also save it here for no other reason than because I don't know when my free week runs out, and I won't be able to access my own writing. Oh dear.
It raises some fun issues to think about, even if there is no way I can take Fish's thesis in the main blog text seriously, ever. It's just absurd, on the face of it. But that's OK, because there isn't a text in this class.
I'll just quote a bit of it here, to give you the gist, and then put my rant down below. I mean, how often do you get to do an academic-style flame on Stanley Fish, you know? It was just too much fun, and maybe I didn't embarrass myself after all.
Ah hell, I probably did.
November 5, 2006, 10:00 pm
Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses
By Stanley Fish
In my post of October 22, I argued that college and university teachers should not take it upon themselves to cure the ills of the world, but should instead do the job they are trained and paid to do — the job, first, of introducing students to areas of knowledge they were not acquainted with before, and second, of equipping those same students with the analytic skills that will enable them to assess and evaluate the materials they are asked to read. I made the further point that the moment an instructor tries to do something more, he or she has crossed a line and ventured into territory that belongs properly to some other enterprise. It doesn’t matter whether the line is crossed by someone on the left who wants to enroll students in a progressive agenda dedicated to the redress of injustice, or by someone on the right who is concerned that students be taught to be patriotic, God-fearing, family oriented, and respectful of tradition. To be sure, the redress of injustice and the inculcation of patriotic and family values are worthy activities, but they are not academic activities, and they are not activities academics have the credentials to perform. Academics are not legislators, or political leaders or therapists or ministers; they are academics, and as academics they have contracted to do only one thing – to discuss whatever subject is introduced into the classroom in academic terms.
And what are academic terms? The list is long and includes looking into a history of a topic, studying and mastering the technical language that comes along with it, examining the controversies that have grown up around it and surveying the most significant contributions to its development. The list of academic terms would, however, not include coming to a resolution about a political or moral issue raised by the materials under discussion. This does not mean that political and moral questions are banned from the classroom, but that they should be regarded as objects of study – Where did they come from? How have they been answered at different times in different cultures? – rather than as invitations to take a vote (that’s what you do at the ballot box) or make a life decision (that’s what you do in the private recesses of your heart). No subject is out of bounds; what is out of bounds is using it as an occasion to move students in some political or ideological direction. The imperative, as I said in the earlier post, is to “academicize” the subject; that is, to remove it from whatever context of urgency it inhabits in the world and insert it into a context of academic urgency where the question being asked is not “What is the right thing to do?” but “Is this account of the matter attentive to the complexity of the issue?” [emphasis mine...cb]
Those who commented on the post raised many sharp and helpful objections to it. Some of those objections give me the opportunity to make my point again. I happily plead guilty to not asking the question Dr. James Cook would have me (and all teachers) ask when a “social/political” issue comes up in the classroom: “Does silence contribute to the victory of people who espouse values akin to those of Hitler?” The question confuses and conflates political silence – you decide not to speak up as a citizen against what you consider an outrage – with an academic silence that is neither culpable nor praiseworthy because it goes without saying if you understand the nature of academic work. When, as a teacher, you are silent about your ethical and political commitments, you are not making a positive choice – Should I or shouldn’t I? is not an academic question — but simply performing your pedagogical role.
[...]
In fact, my stance is aggressively ethical: it demands that we take the ethics of the classroom – everything that belongs to pedagogy including preparation, giving assignments, grading papers, keeping discussions on point, etc.– seriously and not allow the scene of instruction to become a scene of indoctrination. Were the ethics appropriate to the classroom no different from the ethics appropriate to the arena of political action or the ethics of democratic citizenry, there would be nothing distinctive about the academic experience – it would be politics by another name – and no reason for anyone to support the enterprise. For if its politics you want, you might as well get right to it and skip the entire academic apparatus entirely.
My argument, then, rests on the conviction that academic work is unlike other forms of work — if it isn’t, it has no shape of its own and no claim on our attention — and that fidelity to it demands respect for its difference, a difference defined by its removal from the decision-making pressures of the larger world. And that finally may be the point underlying the objections to my position: in a world so beset with problems, some of my critics seem to be asking, is it either possible or desirable to remain aloof from the fray? Thus Fred Moramarco declares, “It’s clearly not easy to ‘just do your job’ where genocide, aggression, moral superiority, and hatred of opposing views are ordinary, everyday occurrences.”
[...]
Of course, there will also be excitement in your class if you give it over to a discussion of what your students think about this or that hot-button issue. Lots of people will talk, and the talk will be heated, and everyone will go away feeling satisfied. But the satisfaction will be temporary as will its effects, for the long-lasting pleasure of learning something will have been sacrificed to the ephemeral pleasure of exchanging uninformed opinions. You can glorify that exercise in self-indulgence by calling it interactive learning or engaged learning or ethical learning, but in the end it will be nothing more than a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
And here is my response to Dr Fish:
(I call him Mr. Fish in my post because that was NYTimes style, or appeared so. Later I realized I was speaking in affected Times Stylebook style, and he should have been Dr. My apologies, Dr. Fish.)
And here are a few pithy and valuable bits that were also posted by other commenters, which will soon be lost to posterity forever so long as TimesSelect is restricted access.
You know, as I go through and re-read these (and you will see a theme emerging, as I picked along my favorite angle), I was just struck by how many smart people are out there running around, thinking wonderful thoughts, and expressing them with eloquence and creativity, with no apparent reward or reason, just for the joy of doing it (I am struck too by De Certeau's "la perrique," "the wig," which I've written of before).
But most importantly, what I see in the comments below, what stirs me about the comments below to the point that I want to SAVE these words, these thoughts, this dialogue, is that they are thrashing around with an idea that is about as close to first principles (or foundations) as things get for committed teachers and scholars, people who are driven to do this work for reasons other than professional and career advancement. People who are passionately "other-directed" and can't live in a world where these humanistic (and to some extent Enlightenment) values cut through artificial surfaces and spin, through disciplinary boundaries and institutionalized social constructs, not because there's a capital "T" Truth we're seeking, but precisely because there isn't, and it's still a Grail Quest anyway.
Most of the commenters below are so riled up (like myself as well) because they're really close to where Dr. Fish is coming from, but his conclusions seem so utterly wrong for our common starting point that it appears he is deliberately ignoring the fact that he's doing the very thing he's condemning, out of a lack of self-reflexivity. It feels almost maddening.
But the comments below say it far better than I could. I'll put my favorite bits in bold. More than anything, I love the passion with which they speak. We're drinking this Kool-Aid together, we all are. Kumbayah.
- 7. November 6th, 2006 7:22 am
I thought the discussion about your first ‘academicizing’ column was truly interesting and I read a good part of it. Unfortunately your reply is not. There is general agreement among most of your critics that striving for as objective a view as possible of any matter is a central part of the academic mission. Harvard states just that by simply putting ‘veritas’ into its seal. So most of the critics don’t argue that we should instead give the classroom over to polemic debate or exchanges of uninformed opinions as you seem to imply with your line of defense. Rather, one essential issue raised was that there are certain truths that are by nature political. Banning those from the classroom would be as much a sin against the academic mission as demagoguery or cheap polemicizing. This criticism is plain and simple, but you fail to address it.
The other is more philosophical: that it’s impossible to position yourself outside of political or moral or ethical questions because no matter how impartial a position you try to assume, it constitutes a political/moral/ethical position in its own right. This second criticism you even brush off saying it’s a piece of cake.
My assessment would be: your reply is not at the level of the (academic) debate you started. From someone so fond of academicizing that’s a bit disappointing.
— Posted by Leonardo Montecervo - 9. November 6th, 2006 7:54 am
The problem with people who have dealt with fiction all of their lives is that they tend to become the most perfectly self-deceived. The classroom is the most highly politized place in the world, nor can it be otherwise. Be aware of your assumptions, your values, and admit them. State them baldly. Ask your students to do the same. Then let the games begin. What is the game? Well, you have total policy-making power. You are the ultimate despotic politico. Start play and watch what happens, but do not ever delude yourself so totally that you truly begin to believe that you are above politics. You as professor are the purest intellectual incarnation of it. If you set the agenda, define the terms, conceptualize the problem, then you are a politico. It cannot be otherwise. Do not take that charge lightly.
— Posted by J. Landrum Kelly, Jr., Ph.D.
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Stanley Fish is a critic whose work I respect, but here seems to have forgotten that “arguing about whether Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_ or whether John Rawls is correctly classified as a Neo-Kantian” means that the instructor has selected those texts and framed those arguments. Are those choices apolitical? I would answer that they are not. Another fine critic, Kenneth Burke, said it best: “Whenever you find a doctrine of ‘nonpolitical’ esthetics affirmed with fervor, look for its politics.”
— Posted by Peter Gardner
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Stanley Fish’s classrooms must exist in some utopia of neutral knowledge, with teachers instruments or dispensers of pure or unbiased knowledge to thirsty, uncommitted minds. But even the name for what we do, professors, intimates a commitment. For what do we profess?
The illusion of an enlightening neutrality that Fish maintains falls apart as soon as we begin to write a syllabus. We select some texts for our students to read, but not others; we choose some topics to discuss and present some opposing views -but not just any topic and not just any view. The decision to teach Milton’s epic poem and encourage a discussion of whether or not Satan is the hero of the poem, to use Fish’s own example and area of scholarly expertise, already puts an ideological load on the boat we are floating. Milton himself was fiercely independent, an old-world republican (just explaining the difference of old-world from new involves an interpretive stance), and to read his poem is to be surprised by this independence of mind. Would we not have to make some decisions in how we teach this poem were we, say, confronted by a student who wanted to argue that Milton was secretly a royalist rather than secretly of the devil’s party as the romantics claimed?
To my mind, the best teachers identify their own situatedness, their own ideology, and how it may influence - and limit - their own views of things. They ‘fess up to what they profess, without proselytizing for it or denying that they have a position. No - the less acknowledged an ideology, the more blinding it is. We need to show students how to be their own gadfly, as Socrates encouraged his interlocutors, by showing them how we are our own.
— Posted by anthony dimatteo
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Even though Fish is trying to obfuscate and confuse the issue, let’s make one thing clear: he knows very well that complaints about a “politicized” class room will be made even if, for example, a teacher in a class on the history of the Middle East, just “sticks to the facts” (witness his mention of Campus Watch in the original post). Fish agrees that teaching “facts” is politicizing - in his view, such a thing as objective facts do not exist; claiming they do is showing preference for one interpretation over another based on a supposed external standard of objectivity, hence un-academic.
This is a fundamental philosophical distinction, not a question of (un)professional behavior.
Fish’s understanding of what constitutes academic work demonstrates how reactionary extreme forms of postmodern relativism - like those espoused by Fish - really are, in effect if not in intent. Make no mistake: in a world where truth is simply a matter of competing interpretation, the powerful have the upper hand.
— Posted by Christian Haesemeyer
- 29.
I suppose I was too subtle in my first set of comments. But Dr. Fish’s “response to the responses” allows me an opportunity to be less timid.Dr. Fish oversimplifies his subject. He ignores countless years of scholarly analysis of the complex web of politics that surround and undergird nearly everything in the scholarly enterprise. There are politics, both explicit and implicit, in the choice of books for classroom study, an academic issue according to Dr. Fish, and there are politics that shape how many and what kinds of resources that same classroom has at its disposal, which are “real world” issues, like salary, desks, audio-visual equipment, etc.
There are politics that ground Dr. Fish’s view that the academy is separate from the “real world.” He avoids or erases his own politics by arguing that any engagement with our collective or individual citizenship in the real world will end badly, our best bet is that we will “know you’re doing your job if you have no comeback at all to the charge that, aside from the pleasures it offers you and your students, the academic study of materials and problems is absolutely useless.”
All objects and activities have latent usefulness, and many have explicit usefulness. Maintaining an “head-in-the-sand” approach to these questions is, ironically, a less useful act than acknowledging and negotiating the politics that surround our work. The Ivory Tower has never been secure from the ravages of politics. However, it has been, from time to time, a bastion of intellectual honesty and accountability. We are intellectually useful because we demand of ourselves and our students a high level of intellectual accountability, though not all political persuasions would agree how useful an independent, intellectually curious, engaged citizenry actually is.
It is a political act to advocate for intellectual accountability, especially when such accountability seems absent from our current politics. Further, it is a political act to advocate for intellectual accountability within a sub-set of any given disciplinary boundaries. One need not see the world through Dr. Fish’s binaries of left and right, political or academic, to realize that his lines are porous.
Dr. Fish is failing to do his job if he cannot or does not examine the web of money, politics, and other “real world” forces that encourage, limit, or constrain his academic enterprises, or more to the point, the academic work of his less well known colleagues, like Byzantine Studies or Classics. Our job is to be intellectually accountable, engaged, and rigorous in our work, which inevitably forces us to be accountable to, engaged in, and leaders in the real world.
— Posted by Michael M. O'Hara Ph.D. -
Stanley Fish writes, “aside from the pleasures it offers you and your students, the academic study of materials and problems is absolutely useless.”
The kind of classroom Fish describes, one in which the students are, among other things, never made aware of the political predilections of their instructor, is the kind of classroom that I was running at the end of my career as an all-but-unpaid adjunct “professor” of English. But I do not believe that what I was doing was without any purpose except pleasure. For one thing, there was little pleasure to be had in an environment in which the salaries of professors such as Fish are subsidized by the labor of adjuncts.
But more to the point, unlike Fish, I believed and continue to believe in truth.
I believe that in the midst of a discussion by two young people on the topic, “Is it worthwhile to go to college?” I was in the right when I said, “Yes, it’s worthwhile because the point of going to college is to learn to distinguish between truth and hogwash and few people learn that anywhere else.”
I did not add that the distinction should have been taught to them in high school, that high schools have failed and continue to fail to teach anything at all, including the most important thing.
In the English 102 courses I was continually given because no one else wanted them (since they involve more work than most tenured professors willingly accept), I taught students to distinguish between facts and gradations of facts, between expert opinions based on facts and analysis, and unsupported opinions that actually constituted arguments from authority. I made it clear that the research paper that was the object of the course was to be based on a close analysis of texts written by people of divergent points of view.
I said, “If you have made your mind up about abortion, you may not write about abortion.”
I said, “If you have made your mind up about the death penalty, you may not write about the death penalty.”
I demanded intellectual honesty. I demanded a true reading, not just cut and paste quotation, of texts cited in papers.
I now realize that it was my demand for intellectual honesty that brought me down in flames. This was prior to the year 2000, prior to a judge’s telling the citizens of the United States that the President they were going to have was not the one they had voted for, and they should “get over it.”
But these students were born and raised in a culture of lies, in which they understood that whatever career they chose—including and especially the teaching of English—they would be forced to compromise their ideals, to say they thought things they didn’t think, to profess belief in goals that would, in the dark night of their souls, disgust them, and to kiss up a lot.
These were students raised by people who once smoked, snorted and dropped, and, in the 1990’s, sat on fat couches in their half-million dollar houses, telling the kids to “just say no.”
These were students raised by people who skinny-dipped and engaged in free love, and, in the 1990’s, carted them to expansive houses of worship in overpriced, gas-guzzling SUV’s.
These were students raised by people who said they didn’t want to pay higher taxes, as they grew enormously fat, swilling four-dollar coffee drinks in front of their computers.
These were students raised by people who wanted them to read, but who never read much of anything themselves, except light entertainment and information they needed in order to make more money.
I told students they would look at an issue from various sides, then and only then formulating a belief about that issue, and supporting it with facts and the opinions of experts who had analyzed the facts.
Because college teaching has become a popularity contest, in which students are allowed to publicly post their opinions of a professor, anonymously and without any support whatsoever, they ran me out. What I asked them to do “was, like, too much work”, as more than one student wrote.
Yes, Professor, at the end of the semester, any student whose only encounter with your thinking has been in the classroom should not be able to answer these questions: “How does Fish feel about abortion?” “What is Fish’s stance on the death penalty?” “What does Fish think of Bush?” “Is Fish a religious man?”
If they can answer those kinds of questions, they will work to please you and get better grades, not to find the truth.
The object of this activity is not pleasing you. It’s about recognizing that there is a difference between truth, or its “best available version” as Carl Bernstein called it, and hogwash.
The means, especially in the classroom of a master, may be pleasurable. But the end is political, always has been, and always will be. It is especially political in these times.
— Posted by L. A. Marland of Austin, Texas
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If Prof Fish applied the analytical reasoning he so passionately advocates to his own position, he would realize that it is itself eminently political and susceptible to the very criticisms he aims at those he accuses of insufficient ‘academicization’.
For one thing, he draws a distinction between the academy, where dispassionate inquiry is supposed to occur, from the rest of society, where anything goes. In reality, sound analytical reasoning skills are required in just about every walk of life and the academy is and has always been a locus not only for training the intellect, but also for imparting such mundane occupational skills as law, medicine, accounting, engineering, etc.
Perhaps more importantly, it is a transparently political process that leads to the systematic exclusion of those from less privileged backgrounds from entry to the academy in the first place, and from the kind of academic life that he seems to glorify. That a few counterexamples exist to this general principle is actually further evidence of how political the process actually is, as it endeavors to cover its tracks.
Decisions about how knowledge of the universe is divided up into ‘disciplines’ is intensely political, as is the segmentation into courses. Reality is not so neat. What is the analytical process that distinguishes a literary work from, say, a technical work? May a technical treatise not possess literary merit?
The nature of the academic process he describes, where ‘professors’ impart information and analytical skills to students and students impart, if anything, frustration or satisfaction to their professor, is thoroughly political, and Professor Fish betrays his commitment to a particular model of society by assuming that this is not subject to question.
The idea that university teachers can - whether they are unique in the respect, as Prof Fish suggests, or not - divorce their academic life entirely from their life as a whole is profoundly political and demands support from evidence and argument, which he declines to provide.
Finally, when professors refuse to divulge their political positions, as Professor Fish enjoins them to do, the true outcome is dishonesty and unfairness to students. By restricting his criticism to those who articulate their views Prof Fish establishes that he is firmly on the side of the status quo. What goes without saying is never contentious and doesn’t drive the thought police into a frenzy. So those who sneak their views in surreptitiously, whether because they are accomplished propagandists, or more likely, because they have, like Stanley Fish himself, never bothered to question their own cherished assumptions, are off the hook.
— Posted by Cikarmak -
How does his a-political position apply to courses like those I teach whose academic subject is expressly argumentative rhetoric? An intrinsic element of such courses is the tradition of Socratic opposition to sophistical attempts to make the weaker argument appear the stronger one. That is, students should learn to distinguish sound arguments from unsound ones, especially those that resort to fallacious reasoning, factitious evidence, and outright lies–often deliberately produced by propaganda agencies including government officials and spin doctors, think tanks, lobbies, public relations and advertising agents. These are the very stuff of the dominant rhetoric of politics and mass media, so don’t academic discourse and making political judgments converge in their study?
— Posted by Donald Lazere
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Where I take issue with Mr. Fish’s idea of “academic purity” (or puritanicism) is that it is more theoretical than practical.
Higher education in the US today is increasingly influenced and polluted by corporate/capitalist forces, and these forces generally have a predictable (rightward-leaning) political position.
Sanitizing the classroom of any political tone whatsoever, in my view, would in today’s society largely cede the development of students political thoughts to the influence of the economically powerful entities which increasingly influence staffing, curriculum, admissions policies, research and development at their university of choice - not to mention increasingly funding the whole student experience as governmental support continues to erode. I don’t see that as a better alternative.
Lastly, my sense is that more often than not, academics are by definition liberal because the fundamental basis of questioning the existing body of knowledge flies in the face of what conservatism essentially stands for: social stasis. To decry “liberal bias” in these institutions (and insist on some sort of theoretical utopian objectivism) is like complaining that a man’s body is “polluted by female estrogen”. It’s just the nature of the beast.
— Posted by Phil Koenig -
Regarding C.B.’s commment (38.): my impression is that Fish’s anti-foundationalism is precisely what informs his advocacy of what he calls academicizing. Reading the original post, I understand that “academicizing” a la Fish is a process that rejects the very notion of objectivity, or empiricism, or, generally, of foundational beliefs; it turns the classroom into a space where competing interpretations (which, as far as I can ascertain, are the basic objects of study - it is not that they interpret some underlying truth or observation, but rather, they are all there is) are analyzed in what I consider to be a formal manner (e.g., “how coherent are they?” is a legitimate question in that classroom, but “is there any truth in them?” is not).
I completely agree with C.B.’s conclusion, though: the approach advocated by Fish is, in effect, upholding the power structure currently in place. In fact, any approach that claims to remove the political pressure on academia by its very nature has to support that power structure, because the reactionary critique of “politicized classrooms” is based on the perception that the academic endeavour undermines it much more than on any specific complaints (as Francois Cornilliat remarks).
And Ari: “distasteful, insulting, heated”? I’ll try to keep it down in the future…
— Posted by Christian Haesemeyer -
I will make fish a trade. I’ll swap the politics out of my classroom when he gives me the corporate media.
Politically democratic people are driven into the academy because it’s a good place to hide and make better survival money. It’s easy and cheap for him to say we should academicize. But he’s just taking a political position.
I understand that this weakens the academic community, but I don’t think we have much of an alternative at the moment.
— Posted by Evan -
I sincerely hope that everyone who cares about this debate has read, or will take the time to read, “The Glass Bead Game” by Hermann Hesse and think about it in context of the questions raised here. On all sides, you’ll learn a lot from this gratifying work of the novelist’s art which lampoons - albeit subtly - academics and the academic world.
— Posted by Christopher Carter Sanderson
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As a teacher, I understand Dr. Fish’s frustration with over-arching ideologies in the liberal arts, but it’s important to say this: Dr. Fish is essentially a right-wing apologist.
In a vacuum, it is possible to argue that there is a risk that critical analysis and logical thinking could be under-emphasized in the presence of a liberal agenda, but consider this: all of the hard sciences, social sciences and humanities stand as a damning confrontation to the advance of absolutism and militarism in Western society. In short, the academic space is a moral space, a last stand against the dehumanizing force of purely predatory capitalism, a force that has no place for academics. Academics are under attack.
For instance, in order to justify the teaching of psychology, you must first justify that statistical and critical analysis of human behavior has a value equal to or greater than the value of taking the same funds that would be allocated towards psychological research and spending those funds, instead, on military outreach and technology. At present, the vast majority of our fund-allocating politicians would prefer that Americans spend their money on military technology, firming up their political futures and expanding that infrastructure. By choosing to be an academic, psychologist or English teacher, rather than a military fundraiser, you are taking a risky ideological stand, and your mission is only preserved if you can maintain a type of morally-based critical analysis that preserves a space for liberal inquiry. Dismiss the liberal arts as over-priced and purely academic and higher education becomes nothing more than learning how to program computers and build bombs.
My students would prefer to discuss the war in Iraq along the lines of what interests them: high-tech vehicles, powerful weapons and ghoulish human destruction. Introduce critical thinking into that body of knowledge and all you get is comparison of a Black Hawk helicopter and laser-guided missile . . . which is more deadly? Which is more fun? The historical premises of the situation hold no interest to them until the matter becomes politically oriented.
Academics are essentially the activity of the individual mind. In today’s world individual critique is under attack, disparaged by our politicians as unpatriotic and weak, and therefore, academics are under attack. Fail to realize that or advocate a neutral point of view and your goal as a teacher is simply planned obsolescence.
— Posted by William H. Payne, M.A. -
The problem with keeping opinions out of the classroom is that there is no theory free data. A philosopher of science named Hanson pointed this out in the 1950s. So whatever we teach embodies or expresses or supports some view or other. I think it makes more sense to present both sides of an issue and then examine them in light of values that we hold. For example, there are some strong reasons for opposing torture. I have not problem expressing an opinion opposing torture. If you do, I feel you may be a moral cripple. The germ of truth in what you say is that teachers should not abuse their power over students by insisting that students agree. So it helps to make clear that you are not infallible and that other opinions could be right and yours wrong. But I think to abjure ethical positions is to abjure our basic human responsibilities to choose and act. We really have no choice. Even sitting down and shutting up is a position. Getting up and saying anything is one too. Better to be up front and promote the dialogue. As the bronze plaque at my university (Wisconsin) says, “Whatever may be the limits that trammel inquiry elsewhere, the great State University of Wisconsin must ever encourage that endless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth may be found.”
— Posted by Max Kummerow
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Let’s assume for a moment that what classical scholars tell us about most of the surviving works of Aristotle is correct, namely that they represent more or less notes generated out of the pedagogical situation at the Lyceum in 4th century BCE Athens.Let’s now consider the Nichomachean Ethics. The most casual perusal of this work reveals that Aristotle very much has a material – and not merely some meta-ethical – agenda going in the Nichomachean Ethics. He really does think – and argue for the fact – that some modes of human behavior are superior to others.
Hmm.
It would seem that on his value neutral classroom model, if Mr. Fish were the Dean of the Lyceum, to be consistent he would have to take Aristotle aside and let him know in no uncertain terms that there will not be a Nichomachean Ethics II taught next semester.
Why? Well isn’t it obvious that the benighted Stagirite has pretty clearly violated many of the Fish norms for proper academic treatment of a subject?
Let’s also try not to focus too much on the fact that Dean’ Fish’s norms, poked at with just a modicum of critical scrutiny, reveal themselves to be more in the nature of somewhat arbitrary and fairly ahistorical obiter dicta than critically grounded principles. Thus, when you note that if the span of pedagogical history from the ancient Greeks to the present were a 24 hour clock, the Fish view of the role of material — indeed advocated — values in the classroom would put us somewhere a bit after 11:00. And that’s PM, Dean Fish.
I’m not saying that Aristotle had it all right. I would just like to get a bit clearer on why, at least on my understanding of Mr. Fish, he did get it right enough when he decided to teach the Nichomachean Ethics the way he apparently did.
And when Mr. Fish has tired of trying to spin Aristotle back into the orbit of his own view of the nature of true pedagogy, I have a few questions I’d like to ask him about Plato and Socrates – at least Plato’s Socrates.
In a proleptic mood, let me quickly add that there are few Platonic scholars today who would seriously try to maintain that the so-called early, aporetic dialogues (don’t even bother getting into, say, The Republic, Phaedo, Phaedrus, etc., etc.) are principally values neutral exercises in teaching critical logical skills, rather than attempts critically to ground some very material choices as far as values are concerned. I offer this implied argument from authority caution about the Platonic corpus not because I think an argument from authority – Mr. Fish’s, mine, or anybody else’s – is the best form of argument. It is not. But just in case he has been too busy to reacquaint himself with Plato – not mention Aristotle – Mr. Fish might want to do himself a favor and accept that this is the current state of the scholarship, a state that is pretty much consistent with what it has been for the past 2400 or so years.
Of course, time has marched on, and our concept of the proper relationship between values and pedagogy is something which, if it had not changed over the course of 2400 years, probably should have. But the issue is not whether it has changed. It’s a question of how much it has changed and, indeed, how much it ought to have changed. And also whether such changes, however great or small, have changed the basic center of gravity in the “liberal” arts from what it very clearly used to be, at least among some reasonably well-established sectors of the “curriculum.”
— Posted by Ed Reno
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Being disturbed by an earlier Fish article, I searched the Internet and found his article “Why we built the Ivory Tower.” The first paragraph gave three rules for success in Academia: “Do your job; don’t do anyone else’s job; don’t let anyone else do your job.” That is a powerful self-protective mechanism for faculty; turf, turf and turf. Indeed, faculty embrace these rules; Inside your turf you’re unchallengable; you don’t challenge any one else; and you don’t let anyone else challenge you. Unfortunately, it’s not so good for the student. It divides knowledge up into ever-smaller non-commicating package, making it exceedingly difficult to deal with the world as a whole.
In short, Fish’s view of academia protects the academics from outside criticism, even within the university, at the expense of teaching the students how to think when confronted with a multi-faceted problem. Good for the academics; bad for the rest of us.
Roger Bacon once said “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” Pity that academics today do not.
— Posted by Dr. William Siler
November 9, 2006 in Academia, Art, Books, Feminisms, Fiction, Games, Literacies, Postmodernity, Public Intellectuals, Research Access, Science, Service Learning, Stories of Favorite Teachers, Teaching, Voice | Permalink
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I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around Mr. Fish’s position here, as I know him to be a prominent academic anti-foundationalist. So I’m trying to figure out how his advocacy of a particular classroom practice jives with anti-foundationalism.
If academicizing things means teaching things that you don’t practice, that is problematic to me. Mr. Fish’s thesis above appears to advocate a number of foundational values. Perhaps he teaches foundational anti-foundationalism.
The bigger problem, I think, rests in Mr. Fish’s assumption that there is ANYTHING, any discourse, any position, any field of study, that is NOT political, in that it advocates certain positions and points of view with certain consequences, and as such, it excludes other interpretations, or it refutes those other interpretations with rigorous argumentation, or it simply contains a political slant or bias by non-deliberate selective focus– the way some things make it on the syllabus and others do not, just because of semester time limits.
One of the deepest characterizations of postmodernism is that it exposes the political tilt of EVERYTHING, which is why postmodernists so strongly advocate anti-foundationalism.
Postmodernism assumes radical critique. It seeks to expose the deep structural biases of the keys to the kingdom, by looking at how rhetorical frames created the Western culture that created the very idea of logic and a syllogism on which most Western logic is based.
A classroom cannot focus on traditional academic pursuits without adopting a political position favoring the Western culture frame of logic, a foundationalist assumption.
And that’s the problem with postmodernism. In deconstructing deep foundations, it becomes a DE FACTO CONSERVATIVE movement in that all forms of advocacy for change (or critique) break down, leading to the net effect of NO CHANGE, a conservative position.
You get so lost in the crumbling foundations, you can never justifiably advocate anything.
So it appears above that Mr. Fish is promoting a conservative political position, and presuming to tell other foundationalists (on the right, left, or middle) who advocate political positions in response to the logical conclusions of social or hard science studies that they should only engage in intellectual exercises and not take action for change, or even discuss what action could be taken for change.
Change is evidently not on the curriculum. The status quo is. Even if logic reveals the house is on fire, or that it is raining outside. Mr. Fish would tell us that calling in a fire alarm or opening an umbrella is a political act that has no place in intellectual instruction.
My response to his taking this foundationalist position is to say that telling us NOT to teach students to open an umbrella when it is raining (or to take steps when hard science studies reveal that global warming will cause dire consequences) is itself a highly CONSERVATIVE political position, and to take such a stance in the classroom is to bring politics into that space.
— Posted by C.B.