> ======================
>
> ZNet Commentary
> A Farewell Message From Stanley Fish: "Good Professors Do What They're
> Told" June 14, 2004
> By Paul Street
>
> Some ZNet readers have by now caught a whiff of the putrid Stanley
> Fish droppings that floated to the top of the New York Times editorial
> page last week. Fish's May 21st New York Times commentary, marvelously
> titled "Why We Built the Ivory Tower," is dedicated to the proposition
> that academics need to quit messing around in areas where they don't
> belong, like the struggle for a just and democratic society.
>
> Fish, an academic mini-celebrity who will thankfully step down this
> June as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Science at the
> University of Illinois at Chicago, thinks that all good little
> professors need to remember where their bread is buttered and what
> they are "qualified" to talk about. They need to focus more on "the
> responsibilities [they] take on when [they] accept a
> paycheck...meeting classes, keeping up in the discipline, assigning
> and correcting papers, opening up new areas of scholarship and so on."
>
> Good little academics in Fish's ideal university respect "the
> injunction to police the boundary between academic work and political
> work." They do not "surrender [their] academic obligation to the
> agenda of any non-academic constituency," like say, the more than 1
> million black children who live in "deep poverty" - at less than half
> the federal government's notoriously inadequate poverty level - in the
> United States. Fish can find many of those children by taking short
> ride from his Near West Side Chicago campus in his expensive sports
> car - one of the many accoutrements of the academic good life he
> publicly loves to enjoy.
>
> Good UIC professors receive their departing Dean's approval when they
> understand that the appropriate and responsible academic vocation is
> to turn Karl Marx on his head: Their "job," he says, "is NOT to change
> the world, but to interpret it."
>
> Good academics don't mess with foolish efforts to instill democratic
> values, public morality, and global and social justice in their
> students and the wider community. The politics that ought to concern
> them is "the politics appropriate to the enterprise they signed onto.
> And that means arguing (and voting) about things like curriculum,
> departmental leadership, the direction of research," etc.
>
> Good academics stick to "their job." They do what their employers pay
> them to do. And "while academic labor might in some instances play a
> role in real-world politics [imagine! PS] - if, say, the Supreme Court
> cites your book on the way to a decision [now there's a feather in
> your academic cap! PS] - it should not be the design or aim of
> academics to play that role."
>
> In Fish's ideal higher-educational system, people like historian
> Howard Zinn (who let students obtain credit for undertaking activist
> causes to change history), Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Henry
> Giroux, and Robert McChesney - to name a few of my favorite
> public-intellectuals-activists who receive academic paychecks - are
> dangerously deluded. They are renegade, wrong-headed boundary
> crossers.
>
> Has their painstaking work of research and interpretation into
> difficult and relevant topics - for example the theft of the 2000
> presidential election (completed by Fish's noble Supreme Court), the
> concentration of the communications system into ever fewer media
> hands, the encroaching dismantlement and re-segregation of public
> education, the mass-murderous economic sanctions imposed on Iraq
> (1991-2003), the dangerous Bush Doctrine, the disastrous and illegal
> US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the corporate neo-liberal assault
> on living and working standards and sustainable ecology, or emergent
> neo-fascism in the world's most powerful nation - led them to the
> conclusion that "modern" America and indeed the world is in need of
> dramatic democratic transformation of the sort that involves massive,
> many-sided citizen engagement?
>
> "Too bad" and "wrong answer," says Fish. "Return to your offices,
> libraries, and department meetings, lowly professors," says the openly
> materialist (Fish once claimed that the only reason he read poetry was
> to get rich as a literary critic) dean.
>
> "It is not your role - and we don't pay you - to concern yourselves
> with such issues and to hold such opinions. You must control your
> ideas and feelings on these and other matters and insert them gently
> into a clever, carefully crafted lecture, monograph, or article, one
> that is sensitive to the latest developments in your specialized
> academic field.
> You should be content to see the product of that labor collect dust on
> an academic library shelf, unless it happens to be benevolently
> rescued from the condescension of posterity by a wise high-state
> official. This, my dear little professor, is the limit of your
> appropriate political ambition as long as you are privileged to toil
> in the ivory tower."
>
> One wonders what Fish might have told a hypothetical German academic
> whose research in the 1920s led her to believe that her homeland was
> heading towards a fascist-totalitarian takeover that would culminate
> in the racist mass executions. By Fish's "aim low" standard of
> appropriate academic focus, this academic would have needed to "stick
> to the tasks she was paid to perform," keeping her terrible knowledge
> within proper academic boundaries. If a leading German state official
> saw fit to read one of her books or hear one of her lectures on the
> matter, well, perhaps that would be her good and appropriate chance
> for political relevance.
>
> By the middle and late 1930s, of course, it would have been too late
> as her wise policymakers would happen to be Nazis. But oh well,
> politics and policy are what Fish calls "someone else's job," and so
> good professors are like good Germans, content to leave policy to
> those who are "qualified" to conduct high state affairs - people like
> George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.
>
> It is interesting in the context of this analogy to note the strong
> parallel between Fish's thesis and a much more robust and impressive
> (if equally toxic) argument made by the German sociologist Max Weber,
> who also warned academics not to "outrageously" advance democratic
> ideas in the sacred realm of the lecture hall (see Weber's 1918
> lecture on "Science as a Vocation" http://www2.
> pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/ DSS/ Weber/scivoc.html).
>
> It is interesting and revealing that Fish makes Karl Marx - western
> academia's and modern social science's favorite defining whipping boy
> (Weber's field was formed to throw bourgeois social-scientific cold
> water on Marx's dangerously social-democratic theories) - the symbol
> of what he opposes in academic behavior.
>
> If he was looking for intellectual giants who thought differently than
> him, he could just have readily and far more relevantly cited the
> heralded mainstream American educational philosopher John Dewey. Dewey
> thought that the basic purpose of education was precisely to produce a
> genuinely free and democratic society, one that is not controlled by
> the wealthy few and does not tolerate such outrages as the
> simultaneous and geographically proximate existence of super-affluent
> deans alongside desperately poor ghetto children. Such in large
> measure was the core democratic and historical mission of American
> public education, a system Weber disdained.
>
> Ironically enough, most academics function in pretty much the narrow,
> anti-Marxist/anti-Deweyite lines that Fish prescribes. Where ARE all
> these excessively, hyper-activist and democracy- and
> social/global-justice obsessed academicians that Fish bemoans? Chomsky
> and Zinn et al. are very much the ivory tower exceptions as far as I
> can tell. Intellectual radicals like me - a former academic turned
> left public intellectual (as in "for the public," not simply "in the
> public") - often end up doing what we see as academics' real jobs
> (including much of what Fish abhors) at teach-ins, public lectures,
> and the like.
>
> What a sad and curiously anti-intellectual and authoritarian testament
> Stanley Fish has chosen to leave for all to see in the nation's
> leading newspaper of record.
>
> Paul Street is an urban social policy researcher in Chicago, Illinois.
>
Janine M. Jurkowski, MPH, PhD
Department of Disability and Human Development
University of Illinois at Chicago
1640 W. Roosevelt Ave Room 736 M/C 626
Chicago, Illinois 60608
312-413-1294
[log in to unmask]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Allison A. Brown
RRTCADD (M/C 626)
Dept. of Disability and Human Development
University of Illinois at Chicago
1640 W. Roosevelt Rd.
Chicago, Illinois 60608
312.413.1588 (V)
312.413.0453 (TTY)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"A classified and hierarchically ordered set of pluralities, of variants,
has none of the sting of the miscellaneous and uncoordinated plurals
of our actual world." (Dewey, 1925)
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