Stanley Fish, Save The World On Your Own Time, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008, 189 pp. $ 19.95 (hardback). ISBN: 978-0195369021.

Though this book by literary theorist Stanley Fish is about the academic
world in general, I thought that its content might be of interest for the
readers of this list. In this book, Fish makes a compelling plea for a
value-free academy which would be only oriented toward true academic goals,
the pursuit of knowledge and its transmission to the students.

Fish’s main argument in this book is that how laudable are the ideals of a
tolerant and peaceful society, which would foster democracy and struggle
against gender discrimination and economic oppression (among others), this
should not be the true purpose of an institution of higher learning to
promote them. When professors offer themselves as moralists or political
activists, they do not only waste their time; they also abdicate their true
role: that of advancing knowledge among the students population by means of
carefully chosen teaching materials and pedagogical virtue (indeed, one of
the only “virtues” that has its place in a university). Though the book
itself contains seven chapters (plus an introduction), it is mainly
articulated around three ideas: 1) do your job, 2)don’t try to do someone
else’s job, 3) don’t let anyone else do your job.

According to Fish, the only job which is relevant here is “a) introduce
students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry they didn’t know
much about before, and b) equip those same students with the analytical
skills that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and
to engage in independent research should they choose to do so” (p. 18). That
does not mean that political and current questions cannot be brought into
the classroom, but in order to be relevant, those questions have to be
“academicized”. “To academicize an issue is to detach it from those contexts
where it poses a choice of what to do or how to live … and insert it into an
academic context where it invites a certain kind of interrogation” (p. 170).
Instead of asking ourselves if John Kerry is right or wrong, we can analyze
(grammatically, rhetorically …) his discourse and ask whether he is
convincing or not, without offering a judgment on the political ideas that
are at stake. Doing the latter, argues Fish, would transform the classroom
into the kind of sterile TV shows students can quietly watch at home, and
would provide no advancement of knowledge. Then, Fish tackles the two main
criticisms which could be made about his statement: the idea that everything
is political and that you cannot totally separate your analysis from your
opinion on the question. About the first criticism, Fish argues that it is
crucial to make a distinction between the academy politics and the partisan
politics. Whereas the latter is about social goals and international
relations, the former is about the good interpretation of a poem, or the
relevant choice of a textbook. Those can involve some harsh debates, even
harsher that debates over death penalty or abortion, Fish argues, and they
are the only debates which should be allowed in the classroom. And about the
second criticism, Fish argues that separating analysis from judgment is what
we do all the time if we want to behave in society, when we decide, for
example, to refrain our religious beliefs during everyday conversations.

But what about free speech and democracy, which (almost) everybody regards
as utterly important values, shouldn’t they be fostered in the classroom?
Fish’s answer in the second part of his argument - don’t try to do someone
else’s job - is unequivocal. It’s a no. Democracy and free speech are only
political values, and not academic ones. Democracy, for example, is the idea
that everybody’s voice weighs the same in our society, but it’s not true in
a university. Teachers teach, students learn and administrators manage. That
students take the same part as administrators in the numerous administrative
tasks involved in the functioning of a university might not be a very good
idea. As for freedom of speech, Fish argues that it is very different from
academic freedom. The idea that any opinion must be valued is indeed totally
opposite to the goals of the academy. Actually, only true and endured
opinions, ones that can be demonstrated or rationally discussed, have their
place in the university. That a professor, as a citizen, must be protected
by the First Amendment is incontestable, but within the university this
right is limited by the ability of this professor to do his job. Thus,
academic freedom is only the freedom of pursuing the research of truth and
the advancement of knowledge, not the freedom of offering any political view
to the classroom without analytical insight. Fish provides many interesting
examples of how a university should (or should not) react to the political
events of the day, especially when they involve students or faculty members,
including a very fine understanding of the issues at stake during Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia.

This brings us to the third part of Fish’s argument. If professors do not do
their job or try to do someone’s else job, they will end up being despised
by people outside of the academy, who will pretend they can do the job as
well. Businessmen, opinion leaders, politicians and lobbyists argue that the
faculty offers a biased leftist point of view and that ideological and
political balance should be introduced in the university, by being open to a
different set of ideas. They denounce gender and race studies and plead for
creationism. The irony of some arguments does not escape Fish’s mind. Coming
mostly from the right wing, those activists often use a very vulgar
conception of post-modernism, a movement they abhor and long tried to fight,
  to enforce their conservative political views. According to them,
post-modernism is teaching that no theory can be held to be true, so that
every opinion should be valued on an equal footing. But Fish argues that
this is a very bad understanding of what post-modernism is. “Postmodernism
is a general and abstract description of the way knowledge is established
and challenged. It tells us that any establishing or challenging of
knowledge is a historical rather than a transcendent event” (p. 134). But
historical contingency has nothing to do with scientific relativism, because
“[y]ou can be persuaded by postmodern arguments on the very general level of
their usual assertion … and you can still hold firmly to judgments of truth,
accuracy, correctness, and error as they are made in the precincts of some
particular realm of inquiry” (ibid.). Holding against those who argue that
post-modernism is the denial of scientific knowledge, Fish claims that, on
the contrary, this conception of knowledge shares the same properties than
the values which should be at the core of the academy: it serves no
political or ideological views and it is totally useless to society in general.

This brings Fish to the last point of his reflection. Because the true
purpose of liberal education is merely to give students a hint of the
advancement of knowledge in any given discipline, it has almost no cash
value for the society as a whole. It does not make better men and women,
just men and women with better analytical skills. It does not contribute
much to the national product; sometimes it does not even help people find a
job. The question is: how can you raise funding with such a discourse? The
answer provided by Fish is deceptively simple: you can’t. But if you pretend
that higher education can have any practical interest for the rest of the
world, you end up managing your university like a business and consequently
undermine the true beauty of academic activity: its fundamental uselessness.

Fish’s book is not flawless. Some of his examples are a bit far-fetched
(when he tries to “academicize” the question of whether George W. Bush has
been the worst president of the United States ever). Elsewhere, there are
some contradictions. For example, he could have eschewed writing he voted
for Gore in 2000 and for Kerry in 2004 to counterbalance arguments that some
may find too conservative. At the end of the book, his defense of the
academy makes him write that most faculties are ideologically unbiased,
which is a bit contradictory with some examples he introduced before. But
overall, Save The World On Your Own Time makes a fascinating read. This is
particularly timely regarding the current status of our discipline.
Historians of economics often offer themselves as moralists and political
activists, when they denounce the evils of free markets, of mathematical
reasoning and general equilibrium model-building. Sometimes, they try to
prevent their students from investigating the topics they find “morally
hazardous” - meaning: opposite to their own conception of moral -, reducing
fascinating scientific debates to mere ideological wars. But if historians
of economics do not do their job - which consists in writing the history of
economics - and try to do someone’s else job, who’s going to do theirs?

Yann Giraud