Save the World on Your Own Time by Stanley Fish;

Author:Stanley Fish;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2008-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

BENEFITS AND REWARDS

Those magic phrases—academic freedom and free speech—are what provide an alibi for professors who cannot tell the difference between a soapbox and a teacher’s podium. It seems that every other day there is a report in the newspaper about teachers who inveigh against George Bush, or call Israel the new Third Reich, or ridicule the claims and practices of organized religion, or champion the claims and practices of organized religion. These reports almost always provoke outrage and lead to demands by citizens and legislators that the offenders be removed from the classroom and taken off the payroll. Faculty associations and liberal watch-dog groups (most of the activities found objectionable emanate from the left) respond by invoking academic freedom and free speech, and pretty soon the debate—predictable and dreary—becomes one about the nature of academic expression and the extent to which it does and does not have limits.

But this can of worms need never be opened if academics begin with the understanding that they are first and foremost academics and not wise men, gurus, and saviors, and that the only obligation to which they must be faithful is the obligation to present the material in the syllabus and introduce students to state-of-the-art methods of analysis. A teacher who understands this to be his obligation will never even be tempted to cross the line between pedagogy and activism. If everyone followed me in the resolve always to academicize, there would be no point to monitoring the political affiliation of faculty members, for that affiliation, whatever it might be, would not (except in the most attenuated way) be generating the analyses, descriptions, and data entries that serve as the basis of study and publication.

The advantage of this way of thinking about the issue is that it outflanks the sloganeering and posturing both sides indulge in: on the one hand, faculty members who shout “academic freedom” and mean by it an instructor’s right to say or advocate anything at all with impunity; on the other hand, state legislators who shout “not on our dime” and mean by it that they can tell academics how to do their jobs.

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