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Page 21 July–August 2008 Di Leo continued from previous page with political imperatives. According to Fish, “composition studies is the clearest example of the surrender of academic imperatives to the imperatives of politics.” If composition were to heed Fish’s “academic imperative,” composition instructors would only teach grammar and rhetoric, and not turn their courses into “discussions of oppression and the evils of neoliberalism.” For Fish, good teaching is not a political act—“only bad teaching is a political act.” One way to counter Fish’s charge that politics should be left out of the classroom is to claim that politicizing courses is protected under “academic freedom.” Fish strongly disagrees with this position. Academic freedom for him is simply “the freedom to be an academic, which is, by definition, not the freedom to be anything and everything else.” In other words, it’s the freedom to do the job that you’ve been hired to do (and to not do someone else’s job and to not let someone else do your job). Overall, Fish’s view of higher education is “deflationary.” He denies that higher education has any greater end than merely helping students to master knowledge: it does not teach them to be moral persons or to be agents of change. “The practices of responsible citizenship and moral behavior should be encouraged in our young adults,” writes Fish, “but it’s not the business of the university to do so, except when the morality in question is the morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing, and shoddy teaching.” In fact, “if liberal arts education is doing its job and not the job assigned to some other institution, it will not have as its aim the bringing about of particular effects in the world.” Fish’s arguments are supremely well-reasoned and logical. However, Save the World on Your Own Time leaves the reader with the feeling of having just completed a course on higher education today—where the whole topic has been successfully academicized. In Professor Fish’s course, while we acquire a great deal of knowledge about the state of higher education today, and are shown how to analyze this knowledge, we leave the class having no solid insight into its real-world context. If you must read this book, do it on university time, not your own. While the desire to indoctrinate and inspire students can be abused by faculty, so too can its opposite : the desire to academicize everything. Having taught applied ethics for many years, I respect the aim of being politically and ideologically neutral to topics like abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. Though however much one might wish to avoid it, students do become emotionally involved in the material ; do become politically involved in the material; do want to draw analytical treatments of the topics into the context of their own lives and community— if not the world at large. And why shouldn’t they? Doing ones job here then involves helping students to acquire new knowledge and analytical skills, and preparing them to incorporate this knowledge into their individual lives and their communities. The first part is easy; the second part is difficult. Preparing students to use the knowledge and analytical skills that they acquire in the university and use beyond it is the job of faculty. Borrowing from Kant, one might maintain that content or knowledge without direction is blind; politics (or ideology) without content or knowledge and analytical skills is empty. To be sure, Fish’s book has no eyes. As an academization of the troubles facing higher education today, Fish’s book is persuasively argued. However, Fish’s decision to not address the real world urgency of his subject makes Save the World on Your Own Time nothing more than a clever academic exercise.Those looking for insights into the relationship between higher education and the messy moral and political mechanics of wider society will find little of value in this book. Still, Save the World on Your Own Time contains many entertaining provocations from one of academe’s most outspoken members. In the closing pages, the Dean Emeritus advises university administrators to be “aggressive, blunt, mildly confrontational , and just...

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