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Indeed, Fish would be both more persuasive and more accurate if he took a little more time and care. He makes plenty of distinctions, but the blurred lines never get fully worked out—partly because Fish does not seem to believe there are blurred lines.

Take, for example, the distinction between analysis and advocacy. What if, in the academic search for truth, a professor determines that a position is or isn't reasonable and teaches that to students? Doesn't that advocate while analyzing? Apply this to the test case of evolution. In America, evolution is as much a vexed political and religious issue as it is a scientific theory. So what should a scientist teach? Analyzing why evolution makes sense and laying out its evidence necessarily constitutes a kind of advocacy. Nor would Fish have the scientist balance such a view with an equally affirmative analysis of creationism; the discipline, the rules of evidence, the body of knowledge does not support creationism. As the scientist "academicizes" the issue, therefore, he or she also urges it on students by the very process of analysis.

Or take the "bodies of knowledge" that professors pass on. Teaching involves selectivity: time is limited, and a teacher must choose what materials are most worth studying. But that choice involves commitments which are never purely academic. I am a religious person, for example, and I never urge a religious position on my students. Well and good. But in a course I teach about higher education, I include a week on "Religion and the University." This is a properly academic topic which I duly academicize, but it is no accident that my secular colleague and friend, teaching a very similar course (we designed it together), has no such topic on her syllabus. Who is doing the teacher's job properly? I would argue that we both are, but who we are determines what we find important and thus, in part, what we choose to teach.

Fish never gives these blurred lines adequate attention. Instead, he builds the wall even higher, maintaining a strict separation between classroom and life: "Civic capacities," he suggests, "won't be acquired simply because you have learned about the basic structures of American government or read the Federalist Papers (both good things to do)." It's the parenthetical comment that needs further explanation: why is it a good thing to read these documents? Fish refuses to provide an answer that relates to values, ethics, civics, or behavior: these documents are good to read because they are good to read. But certainly it might help one's civic capacities to read these documents—and that's one very good reason for reading them.

Indeed, I would maintain that there is a link between learning and life, and it is one that should never be abandoned, ignored, or forgotten. It is not severed by unrealistic boundaries; it is not contained by simply "academicizing." The link persists, and, I believe, it is the duty of professors to insist on that link while exploring a body of knowledge and conferring analytical skills (skills that one might use, for example, in life). The danger arises when professors try to do this linking for their students. And there, I agree, we need to practice restraint.

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