Save the World on Your Own Time | 
 enlarge | Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 38748
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.8
ISBN: 0195369025
Dewey Decimal Number: 378.12
EAN: 9780195369021
ASIN: 0195369025
Publication Date: August 11, 2008
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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.
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Teach, Don't Preach December 1, 2008
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.
Divesting the Academy of Left and Right September 13, 2008
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
*Save the World on Your Own Time* is an incisive, engaging, and I daresay inspiring polemic on major issues in higher education today. Stanley Fish does not mince words; the argument he repeats throughout this book is that academics should stick to "doing their jobs": "introduce students to disciplinary materials and equip them with the necessary analytic skills" to engage in disciplinary methods of research (p. 153). Yet proceeding from this modest thesis, Fish outlines a series of logical consequences which expose the folly of the way partisans of the left and the right tackle issues ranging from academic freedom and faculty hiring to deconstruction and Intelligent Design.
How does the humble work of academic inquiry manage to take on these diverse hot-button issues? For starters, Fish pulls the rug out from under all those who see the university classroom as a site to do something other than teach disciplinary methods of research and analysis. Despite the lofty rhetoric of professors who aim to teach their students "civic responsibility" and "tolerance for others," it is Fish's contention that doing something other than engaging in academic study in the university is dangerous. Politics, Fish surmises, has no place in the classroom unless it's the object of academic inquiry in a political science seminar. That is, politics should be something professors analyze, not something they demand allegiance to.
Fish's position may strike many in the academy as deeply conservative, but what emerges from *Save the World* is a deeply committed defense of the academic enterprise itself. The contextual playing out of Fish's logic is persuasive: if the university classroom is the proper site for disinterested academic study, the teaching and learning of disciplinary methods, indeed the pursuit of "truth" through reason and judgment ("truth" for Fish being not some ungrounded universal truth but a historically worked-over, disciplinarily agreed-upon "truth" of human inquiry), then neither liberal nor conservative ideologues have a leg to stand on in claiming a space in academe. Thus, Fish shows, just as the desire to denounce the Bush administration in the classroom (i.e., the act of performing a political statement rather than analyzing it) must be deemed misguided and quashed, so must David Horowitz and others' desire that the university faculty body reflect a "more balanced" political outlook (i.e., a 50/50 liberal-conservative or Democrat-Republican split) be deemed misguided and quashed. Because academics shouldn't "do" politics (that's the prescription, at least, of *Save the World*), then politicians, policy wonks, and partisans shouldn't "do" academics either.
The bulk of Fish's book offers example after example of how the modest proposal of teaching discipline-specific knowledge requires all participants to subject themselves to sound judgment and reasoned argument. Leaving one's political commitments at the door gives everyone the opportunity to engage in academic study not as a project of stupefying (and dull) opinion-sharing but as one of carefully honed argument-making.
Most inspiring, though, is how Fish's call for academics to "do their jobs" and other folks, by implication, to do *their* jobs leads him to conclude that the divesting of public funds from higher education in recent years by private sector-rallying politicians is one of the most dastardly (and woefully misunderstood) cases of one group claiming to know how to do another group's job better. Reading the penultimate chapter is breathtaking not only because you realize that Fish's thesis has come to its logical conclusion but also, more specifically, because you realize that the university culture wars have in many ways distracted us from the actual gutting of public higher education by corporate neoliberal policies and their political spokesmen.
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