Does anyone think there is something fish-y about this op-ed piece?


The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Why We Built the Ivory
Tower 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/opinion/21FISH.html?th=&pagewanted=print&
position=> 


May 21, 2004 
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR  

Why We Built the Ivory Tower 
By STANLEY FISH 
  

CHICAGO 

After nearly five decades in academia, and five and a half years as a
dean at a public university, I exit with a three-part piece of wisdom
for those who work in higher education: do your job; don't try to do
someone else's job, as you are unlikely to be qualified; and don't let
anyone else do your job. In other words, don't confuse your academic
obligations with the obligation to save the world; that's not your job
as an academic; and don't surrender your academic obligations to the
agenda of any non-academic constituency — parents, legislators, trustees
or donors. In short, don't cross the boundary between academic work and
partisan advocacy, whether the advocacy is yours or someone else's. 

Marx famously said that our job is not to interpret the world, but to
change it. In the academy, however, it is exactly the reverse: our job
is not to change the world, but to interpret it. While academic labors
might in some instances play a role in real-world politics — if, say,
the Supreme Court cites your book on the way to a decision — it should
not be the design or aim of academics to play that role. 

While academics in general will agree that a university should not dance
to the tune of external constituencies, they will most likely resist the
injunction to police the boundary between academic work and political
work. They will resist because they simply don't believe in the boundary
— they believe that all activities are inherently political, and an
injunction to avoid politics is meaningless and futile. 

 Now there is some truth to that, but it is not a truth that goes very
far. And it certainly doesn't go where those who proclaim it would want
it to go. It is true that no form of work — including even the work of,
say, natural science — stands apart from the political, social and
economic concerns that underlie the structures and practices of a
society. This does not mean, however, that there is no difference
between academic labors and partisan labors, or that there is no
difference between, for example, analyzing the history of welfare reform
— a history that would necessarily include opinions pro and con — and
urging students to go out and work for welfare reform or for its
reversal. 

 Analyzing welfare reform in an academic context is a political action
in the sense that any conclusion a scholar might reach will be one
another scholar might dispute. (That, after all, is what political
means: subject to dispute.) But such a dispute between scholars will not
be political in the everyday sense of the word, because each side will
represent different academic approaches, not different partisan agendas.


 My point is not that academics should refrain from being political in
an absolute sense — that is impossible — but that they should engage in
politics appropriate to the enterprise they signed onto. And that means
arguing about (and voting on) things like curriculum, department
leadership, the direction of research, the content and manner of
teaching, establishing standards — everything that is relevant to the
responsibilities we take on when we accept a paycheck. These
responsibilities include meeting classes, keeping up in the discipline,
assigning and correcting papers, opening up new areas of scholarship,
and so on. 

 This is a long list, but there are many in academia who would add to it
the larger (or so they would say) tasks of "forming character" and
"fashioning citizens." A few years ago, the presidents of nearly 500
universities issued a declaration on the "Civic Responsibility of Higher
Education." It called for colleges and universities to take
responsibility for helping students "realize the values and skills of
our democratic society." 

 Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard and one of the forces behind
the declaration, has urged his colleagues to "consider civic
responsibility as an explicit and important aim of college education."
In January, some 1,300 administrators met in Washington under the
auspices of the Association of American Colleges and Universities to
take up this topic: "What practices provide students with the knowledge
and commitments to be socially responsible citizens?" That's not a bad
question, but the answers to it should not be the content of a college
or university course. 

 No doubt, the practices of responsible citizenship and moral behavior
should be encouraged in our young adults — but it's not the business of
the university to do so, except when the morality in question is the
morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing and shoddy teaching, and
the desired citizenship is defined not by the demands of democracy, but
by the demands of the academy. 

 This is so not because these practices are political, but because they
are the political tasks that belong properly to other institutions.
Universities could engage in moral and civic education only by deciding
in advance which of the competing views of morality and citizenship is
the right one, and then devoting academic resources and energy to the
task of realizing it. But that task would deform (by replacing) the true
task of academic work: the search for truth and the dissemination of it
through teaching. 

The idea that universities should be in the business of forming
character and fashioning citizens is often supported by the claim that
academic work should not be hermetically sealed or kept separate from
the realm of values. But the search for truth is its own value, and
fidelity to it mandates the accompanying values of responsibility in
pedagogy and scholarship. 

 Performing academic work responsibly and at the highest level is a job
big enough for any scholar and for any institution. And, as I look
around, it does not seem to me that we academics do that job so well
that we can now take it upon ourselves to do everyone else's job too. We
should look to the practices in our own shop, narrowly conceived, before
we set out to alter the entire world by forming moral character, or
fashioning democratic citizens, or combating globalization, or embracing
globalization, or anything else. 

One would like to think that even the exaggerated sense of virtue that
is so much a part of the academic mentality has its limits. If we aim
low and stick to the tasks we are paid to perform, we might actually get
something done. 

Stanley Fish will step down next month as dean of the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company