Stanley Fish and this week's readings

In my "underlife" as an NPR junkie, I recently listened to an interview with Stanley Fish, famous literary and legal scholar, which ended up being pretty pertinent to this week's readings. It's 29 minutes long, but worth the listen even if you disagree with every word of it or just listen to a couple of minutes. I nearly lost a quart of ice cream in the trunk while sitting in my driveway listening to it-- and I don't risk my ice cream.


INTERVIEW (audio): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94420624


Mr. Fish just came out with a book entitled Save the World on Your Own Time. In it he argues that undergraduate institutions are not supposed to be engines of social progress; rather the job of professors is "to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same." He objects to professors trying to inculcate their ideas and agendas into the minds of their students, and by extension he believes that such activities as "service learning" do not have a place in the liberal arts curriculum.

He gives an example of a first year composition class, where he asked students to grade the rhetoric in speeches given by Kerry and Bush. Bush was voted the better speaker by a margin of 14-2, and Fish claims he was in the 14 even though he voted for Kerry weeks later. It is this division between academia and belief systems that Fish brings up again and again. "Academic freedom is defined as freedom to do your own (academic) job, but it is not your freedom to do someone else's job, " Fish says.

I didn't agree with everything Fish had to say, but it is interesting to compare his views with our body of readings, especially Powell's piece that clearly states that "the composition classroom has a social action element" (166). For me the argument gets gray when we discuss "critical thinking," a goal that Fish and Powell share. Fish believes that instructors should present students with facts and tools to make informed decisions, while Powell believes in exposing students to diverse readings and a spectrum of thought to widen their perception. Powell says that some of her students (rural, conservative) were "frustrated by the decidedly liberal slant of some of the selected texts" (161), and that over time she has had to revise her approach so as not to alienate students or their "home" values. Fish, on the other hand, believes there is a place for studying controversial texts (i.e., the Holocaust did not happen) not as a vehicle for his own belief system but as a way to encourage discussion and thought.

Identity of teacher and student plays into this discussion too, as Brooke points out. Students might feel more threatened when a female teacher pushes a feminist agenda and readings on her students than a female who hands out a section of Mein Kampf on day one and asks for opinions. Despite the radicalism of the latter, there is a perceived separation between the teacher and the material, and therefore, there is a space for the students to fill with their own ideas.

I am really interested in what others have to say about our role as vehicles for social change or simply purveyors of information. Or both. Hope we can talk about it some more.