June 8, 2007

The Scholar in Society

By BRUCE ROBBINS

"Marx famously said that our job is not to interpret the world, but to change it. In the academy, however, it is exactly the reverse: Our job is not to change the world, but to interpret it." Stanley Fish presents that argument (in an op-ed contribution to The New York Times) as a minority opinion. The majority of his colleagues, he says, would "most likely resist the injunction to police the boundary between academic work and political work." If Fish is right that his opinion is