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Last year, I sat with three friends discussing what it was we did (or would do) as English professors. We talked about writing and reading skills; we talked about appreciating literature; and then one person suggested this: "We're teaching students to be secular humanists." She laughed. She was joking, but not entirely.
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If Stanley Fish had been present, he would have been furious. In his latest work on higher education, Fish argues that academics need to leave their proselytizing behind. Professors are not in the business of urging politics or values. Their only job is to introduce students to bodies of knowledge and equip them with analytical skills. That's it. Teachers analyze; they do not advocate—not, at least, in the classroom.
Coming from one of the premier postmodern theorists—someone who helped convince us that nothing is neutral—this position seems somewhat remarkable. In 1991, for example, Fish argued that religious people should accept no place in the academy because their firm beliefs were not open to a marketplace of ideas. George Marsden responded in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship that "Christians and non–Christians can readily share basic standards of evidence and argument." The classroom is a context requiring certain forms of behavior and restraint: "in the very nature of human life," Marsden wrote, "we routinely move from one field of activity to another, each with its own set of rules." Fish, it seems, now agrees. In life, he writes, "we refrain … from inserting our religious beliefs or our private obsessions into every situation or conversation no matter what its content." The classroom, likewise, calls for restraint. It is not a place for partisan politics—even of the most bland and seemingly universal sort, like "tolerance." We do not teach tolerance, says Fish, we teach physics or poetry or psychology: bodies of knowledge, sets of skills.
To the extent that professors do try to advocate in their classrooms, Fish thinks the political Right actually has a valid critique. But this book does not befriend the Right. In various places—and with excellent clarity and skill—Fish shows just how much propaganda some conservatives use to caricature the university as a center of leftist indoctrination, and how much damage that campaign might do. His response to both Left and Right is simply to cease and desist; politics do not belong in the academy.
Fish's central claim seems reasonable. But as is often the case, he refuses to temper, moderate, or nuance his position. Instead, he employs a tone that invites rebuttal. When teaching composition courses, I often write the following advice on student papers: "Don't alienate readers you may want to persuade." I want students to read opposing views charitably, give up unimportant ground, qualify arguments, speak modestly, and nuance their claims. Fish, it seems, does not believe in such maneuvers. Instead, his tone implies that everything is simple: we just need to get with the program.
Such a tone emerges through stylistic choices (paragraphs composed of the single word "wrong") and argumentative method. Fish uses logic like a steel cage: no matter which way we turn, we face his unbending bars of reason. The trouble is, his cages often contain only large prey, obvious examples. It's the small prey, the difficult cases, the details that continually slip through the bars. For Fish, everything is so straightforward that it can be said with a grumpy harrumph! But in reality, these issues aren't straightforward, and the harrumph only makes people want to disagree. Even if the logic were airtight (it isn't), readers might spend all their time looking for a hole rather than accepting what is said and changing their behavior. Fish, it seems, has perfected a voice that often forgets the reason for academic speech: not to pronounce, but to persuade.
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