Punching the Academic Clock

No one should be surprised about this book, a collection of Fish’s recent columns from The New York Times and elsewhere. From the book flap, he still seems to be an academic (holder of an endowed chair at Florida International University) as well as a newspaper columnist. Could it be that at last he has found not so much his true as his happiest position? Fish is engaged, precisely, in saving the world on his own time, while continuing to punch an academic clock, ticking because, well, arguably America’s most famous public intellectual works on his own time. This is one of many duplicities in this sly, maddening, entertaining book.

Its argument is founded upon a simple, unyielding premise: the academy is one realm, the world quite another. Teachers are not moralists, therapists, political counselors, and agents of global change. They are pedagogues, pure and simple. The purpose of teaching is not to remedy sexism, racism, and economic oppression. It is to impart the knowledge proper to its respective discipline and to develop critical thinking skills. Period. Whether the question is the presidency of George W. Bush or the meaning of academic freedom, there is always a line between the academy’s way of considering such matters and the world’s. Fish always knows where to find that line.

Early on, he states the issue most emphatically: “There is no topic, however politically charged, that will resist academicization” (28). What this means in practice is, say, turning a claim about the Bush presidency being the worst in American history into an inquiry about the “phemonenon” of making this claim in the first place (through understanding the peculiar American obsession with ranking everything). As he later concludes most eloquently, “The academic enterprise excludes no topic from its purview, but it regards any and every topic as a basis for analysis rather than as a stimulus to some moral, political, or existential commitment. Not to practice politics, but to study it; not to proselytize for or against religious doctrines, but to describe them; not to reaffirm or reject affirmative action, but to explore its history and lay out the arguments that have been made for and against it” (169).

Even more than to historicize, to academize means formalize. On this basis, Fish gets off some of his best lines. For example, “the really dull classroom would be the one in which a bunch of nineteen- or twenty-year-olds debate assisted suicide, physician-prescribed marijuana, or the war in Iraq in response to the question, ‘What do you think?’” (39). This way lies the World, in the form of television talk shows. Back inside the walls of Academe, on the other hand, where these same students must learn how to write, the agenda should be unashamed: “All composition courses should teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else” (44). No nonsense about themes or ideas. Indeed, “content should be avoided like the plague it is” (45). This is wonderful stuff. No wonder Fish terms his view of education “deflationary.” His very title is in fact so described. Leave the World to its demands to be saved. Fish is content to regard it and its demands to be studied.

In one respect, the whole book amounts to an extended, spirited deflation of anything Fish chooses to bring into view—from questions such as whether the university should be in the business of fashioning citizens (don’t even think about it) to the rhetoric of “transformative experience,” “special mission,” or “shared governance” (114). About the latter, we read that in fact what really matters is not the sharing (information only, please) nor even the governance (the administration will always hold all the cards) but just talk about such things. In the academy, we do need talk. But insofar as it concerns the value of what we’re doing, the less talk, the better. “It may seem paradoxical to say so,” Fish writes at one point, “but any justification of the academy is always a denigration of it” (154). If it is objected that his own contentment with an objective characterized as “the...