Product Description

What should be the role of our institutions of higher education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce responsible citizens?
In Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues that, however laudable these goals might be, there is but one proper role for the academe in society: to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. And yet professors now routinely bring their political views into the classroom and seek to influence the political views of their students. Those who do this will often invoke academic freedom, but Fish argues that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that comes into the professor's mind. He insists that a professor's only obligation is "to present the material in the syllabus and introduce students to state-of-the-art methods of analysis. Not to practice politics, but to study it; not to proselytize for or against religious doctrines, but to describe them; not to affirm or condemn Intelligent Design, but to explain what it is and analyze its appeal."
Given that hot-button issues such as Holocaust denial, free speech, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are regularly debated in classrooms across the nation, Save the World On Your Own Time is certain to spark fresh debate-and to incense both liberals and conservatives-about the true purpose of higher education in America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #321929 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780195369021
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Fish's lively polemic skewers the popular perspective that universities have an obligation to foster ethical, social, and political virtues, arguing that academic institutions are best served by admitting to the distinct (and limited) nature of their task: [to] introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry... and equip [them] with the analytical skills that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research. To professors using their podium to politically influence or engage with their students, the author chides: Do your job, Don't try to do someone else's job and Don't let anyone else do your job—and offers refreshing takes on Ward Churchill, Bob Newhart and how writing ought to be taught. Despite the repetitive reiteration of initial premises and a few rhetorical inconsistencies, Fish's penultimate chapter shows off his unconventional style in its most personable guise; he lays out a simple strategy by which academics and administrators may fight (not work with) those who demand that academia justify itself; he writes, The only honest thing to do when someone from outside asks, 'what use is this venture anyway?' is to answer 'none whatsoever.' (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
A college teacher has just two professional responsibilities, Fish says: (1) “introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry” and (2) “equip those students with the analytical skills” needed to absorb those traditions and perform independent research. Those should take up all a teacher’s professional time. Political advocacy, religious instruction, and pet causes should be prosecuted outside the classroom. To show that conscientiously pursued teaching can take all one’s work time, he sketches his own way of teaching English composition, intriguingly enough to make one wish to have been in his classroom. He is trenchant and cogent on the dangers of trying to do someone else’s work and of allowing someone else to do yours, and the particulars in his argument include his defense of academic work (it is not good for something but good in itself), his experienced administrator’s revelation that public (i.e., tax) support of higher education has plummeted throughout the U.S., and his evisceration of the activist maxim everything is political. All who care about higher education should read this book. --Ray Olson

Review

"Particularly clear and engaging prose--a far-from-common gift in such a high-powered thinker."--Rocky Mountain News
"Fish's lively polemic skewers the popular perspective."--Publishers Weekly
"Is deeply committed to teaching and to higher education and relishes presenting his views with zest and wide-ranging scholarship... is a great debater and is ready to scold all who confuse the issues, including faculty, students, trustees, and members of Congress... this work is recommended for public and academic library readers who enjoy a lively interchange."--Library Journal
"Exhilarating, the thought polished and white hot, this book makes the reader think and often wince, especially teachers like me who have aged out of the intellectual into the easy and congenial. A close reading of Save the World should purge much nonsense from classrooms."--Sam Pickering, author of Letters to a Teacher
"Stanley Fish's new manifesto calls for a major revolution in public education. Many will disagree with this provocative book. None will be wise to ignore its impact."--Richard A. Epstein, Hoover Institution
"This is a passionate defense of "Scholarship as a Calling" like the inspiring lecture of that name by Max Weber. But, of course, Fish is irrepressibly livelier than Max Weber."--E. D. Hirsch, author of The Knowledge Deficit, and The Schools We Need
"In this wise and witty book, Stanley Fish offers thoughtful suggestions for making university teaching more effective and more beneficial for our students. It is a powerful argument for learning and teaching from one of our generation's most provocative academic leaders."--John T. Casteen III, President, University of Virginia
"Exhilarating, the thought polished and white hot, this book makes the reader think and often wince, especially teachers like me who have aged out of the intellectual into the easy and congenial. A close reading of Save the World should purge much nonsense from classrooms."--Sam Pickering, author of Letters to a Teacher
"Hard to put down...and well worth reading."--First Things
"Stanley Fish's new manifesto calls for a major revolution in public education. Many will disagree with this provocative book. None will be wise to ignore its impact."--Richard A. Epstein, Hoover Institution
"Fish offers a vigorous defense of that abstemious understanding of the teacher's task, laced with numerous examples of its egregious violation."--First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life

Customer Reviews

Divesting the Academy of Left and Right
*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.

Teach, Don't Preach
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.

Against "Practicing Without a License"
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.