The Academic Imperative

Page 20 American Book Review the ACAdeMiC iMperAtive Jeffrey R. Di Leo save The World on your oWn Time Stanley Fish Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us 208 pages; cloth, $19.95 “Do your job,” Stanley Fish advises his readership , and the troubles facing higher education will disappear. If you teach in a college or university, your job essentially entails two things: introducing your students to knowledge, and providing them with the analytical tools to confidently navigate through this knowledge. For Fish, when academics forget or are ignorant of this imperative, trouble begins. Author of ten books and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Harper’s, New York Times Book Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fish is one of the most provocative and outspoken voices in American higher education. Known for defending theses that can be outlandish and controversial, Fish maintains his reputation in this latest book. Not averse to making enemies or picking academic fights, Fish’s latest provocation will undoubtedly draw ire from both the Left and the Right. Fish comes down hard on academics who utilize the classroom as a platform for their political beliefs. While engaging in academic politics is part of our job description (e.g., arguing about the content and manner of teaching, curriculum, and department leadership), indoctrinating our students with our political beliefs is not. Outside of the university, we are free to practice politics whenever and however we see fit; inside the university, however, our political engagement is strictly limited. Fish explains that while the free expression of ideas is a cornerstone of liberal democracy and a prime political value, it is not an academic one. Academic value stems from the dissemination of knowledge and traditions by faculty who are experts: faculty are hired for their academic expertise, not their political values. Outside of the university, there are many appropriate venues for faculty to be politically active; inside of the university , the pursuit of the truth of texts by faculty is their primary obligation. “Truth,” writes Fish, “is a pre-eminent academic value.” But, how then does one “refrain from inadvertently raising inappropriate issues in the classroom ?” Fish’s response is quite simple: that we must “academicize ” our classroom material, particularly potentially politically explosive issues. “To academicize a topic,” writes Fish, “is to detach it from the context of its real world urgency, where there is a vote to be taken or an agenda to be embraced , and insert it into a context of academic urgency, where there is an account to be offered or an analysis to be performed.” And, Fish argues, “There is no topic, however politically charged, that will resist academicization.” The failure of faculty to academicize the subject matter of their courses often leads to the replacement of academic imperatives Di Leo continued on next page Ball continued from previous page critics assumed that Milton was a poet of absolute, unquestioned certainty. Stanley Fish perfectly expresses this paradigm at the start of his 2001 summa, How Milton Works: “conflict, ambivalence, and open-endedness—the watchwords of a criticism that would make Milton into the Romantic liberal some of his readers want him to be—are not constitutive features of the poetry but products of a systematic misreading of it….” But Milton critics are increasingly dissatisfied with such an approach because it seems to extinguish the most interesting parts of Milton’s writing, and they have become increasingly open to analyses that emphasis incertitude, fissures, and unresolved tensions. Whereas earlier editors of Milton tended to reproduce Fish’s view of Milton as a poet of certainty, this edition goes in the opposite direction. In their descriptive headnotes to the poems—essential for setting the terms for classroom study and casual reading—Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon present the conflicts without ironing out the complexities. For example, Milton’s companion poems, “L’Allegro” (The Happy Man) and “Il Penseroso” (The Thinking Man) feature a speaker asking the goddesses of Mirth and Melancholy what sort of a life they can offer him, and critics usually assumed that of course Milton privileges the more philosophically inclined “Il Penseroso” over the supposedly superficial “L’Allegro.” But the editors...