December 29, 2008

MLA 2008: Politics in the Classroom, Stanley Fish-Style

San Francisco — Is Stanley Fish illogical? Wrong about what happens in the classroom? A provocateur who really likes irritating people?

MLA attendees packed into an overflowing room yesterday to hear Patricia Lynn Bizzell, Judith Butler, and Jonathan Culler, along with Mr. Fish himself, dissect Mr. Fish’s latest book, Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford University Press). Although the discussion here was civil and even good-natured, Mr. Fish annoys people on both the left and the right by maintaining that politics has no role in the classroom and that inculcating values such as social justice and citizenship in students amounts to hubris.

Gerald Graff, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and current president of the MLA, opened the session by saying that he had started hearing a few years ago that the culture wars were over. “I had the feeling that there was some wishful thinking in that observation,” he said, since the culture wars had not so much ended as reached a deadlock. “People on different sides got tired of arguing with each other, and retreated to their armed camps,” he said.

With his latest book, Mr. Fish may have restarted those debates, as each of the scholars found something in his argument to counter. For Ms. Bizzell, a professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, it was Mr. Fish’s dismissal of composition programs and the different ways professors have tried to work with students from diverse backgrounds. “Our job was to teach writing, but we needed new ways of doing that,” Ms. Bizzell said.

Ms. Butler, a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, went after Mr. Fish’s argument for a nonpolitical stance in the classroom as itself a political stance. “Fish draws a distinction between analysis of a point of view and propounding of a point of view,” Ms. Butler said. “This is a political point of view in that it sets out how the political is circumscribed.”

Mr. Culler, a professor of English and comparative literature at Cornell University, compared Mr. Fish to other public intellectuals and said that he had pioneered a different role, as a provocateur. Mr. Fish seems to view the classroom as a realm of provocation as well, Mr. Culler observed — the teacher as provocateur. “To offend people on both sides, that’s really quite hard to do,” he said. “It’s not a cheap trick.”

In his response, Mr. Fish conceded that he needed to better define what he means by the “legitimate” goals of higher education. Still, he insisted, the proper job of the professor is to “academicize” a topic — to examine and analyze it in such a way that the political urgency retreats into the background and the academic urgency comes forward. “Any topic can be so academicized,” he said. “This is what we do, and what we should do.”

To Ms. Butler’s contention that his stance is a political one, he said, “I’m not pitching my argument at that level. I mean something very simple. In an academic classroom, the point of the exercise is to understand a phenomenon … not to give the person leaving the classroom marching orders.”

At one point, Mr. Fish said he was heartened to hear so many serious discussions at this year’s MLA gathering about canonical authors such as Matthew Arnold, John Milton, and Daniel Defoe. “We are back to 1962, when I entered the profession,” he said. “We are back to old questions about old texts, but of course they are not the same questions.” —Liz McMillen

Comments

1. Academics will tell you that higher education classrooms MUST be progressive/Liberal/Socialist because these ideas have no other forum. It’s crap, of course. The fact is the universities have been confiscated and classrooms transformed into indoctrination centers because Leftists want taxpayer funding for their anti-Capitalist humanist agendas – and only movie stars and people like George Soros can afford to believe this tripe without tax monies.

   Fish has got it right. The role of the university professor is not to profess political ideology (not even political SCIENTISTS are supposed to do that), but to teach people how to objectively, rationally, and scientifically analyze phenomenon, social or physical, i.e teah students how to investigate stuff, not what to belive or do with information they gather.

   It is an abomination (Obama nation?) that schools fail so miserably to teach and use my money to boot.

   — Muap Conners    Dec 29, 12:06 PM    #

2. What happens when Fish’s definition of teaching is rejected for a more ‘committed’ version?
   Students are harassed for creating a ‘hostile environment’ when they read a book about the Klan in the presence of Blacks. A graduate student in Education is removed from the program because he endorses physical punishment in his ideal classroom. Dorm residents are questioned about their sexual beliefs by resident bullies empowered by the administration. Students are charged with racism for posting an invitation to a lecture. Such examples could be multiplied easily.

   This is the legacy of the ‘Free Speech Movement’ that swept the campus in the sixties and seventies and deposited those infected by it into the chairs and behind the desks of their former professors. And what lesson have these saviors taught us? Free speech extends only to their ideas. All other opinions are merely evidence of the work still to be done under their banners which proclaim that slavery is freedom and that the new conformity is virtue.

   — arnold asrelsky    Dec 29, 05:29 PM    #

3. I certainly agree with Fish about the need to “academicize” a question. But in my own teaching I rather call it “objectivation through distanciation”: looking at the question from a distance with a cold eye. That is the job of professors: not telling students what to think about a question but how to think about it. And by the way the term “academicize” is ugly…

   — skeptical    Dec 29, 06:29 PM    #

4. comment #1 above destroys his credibiity by claiming higher education classrooms are “indoctrination” centers. Consider for just a moment, #1, what real indoctrination centers consisted of under communism and fascist states: deprivation of food and water and sleep, torture, sometimes murder and physical coercion of loved ones, forced memorization of political tracts, etc., etc. That American students may be expected by their profs. today to study ideas or viewpoints you disagree with may be objectionable, but it’s a far cry from indoctrination. American students arguably at times have to mouth ideas they disagree with to get a grade (and that point is disputable), but even so that is a far cry from being in a reeducation camp of a Stalinist state.

   A related point — I agree with much of Fish’s argument about making questions academic being the task of the college classroom. But that often is not sufficient for the necessary pedagogical purposes, especially in professional schools. A college of education for instance, or a social work program, must also teach the skills and expectations and rules (laws) that are required in the relevant professions. These may include treating people with, say, disabilities with respect; that is practicing professionalism, not the imposition of politically correct policing. Fish overlooks this in his book and tends toward arguing against a straw man with the framework summed up by his title – ‘saving the world,’ which exaggerates the goals of even the most ‘progressive’ pedagogues. But at least old Stanley’s arguments don’t wildly distort facts, unlike commentator #1 above.

   — Marc    Dec 29, 09:24 PM    #

5. Dear Skeptical

   ‘Academicize’ is ugly. But ‘objectivation by distanciation’ is far worse—so much worse that I’m tempted to guess that you are being ironic, but I’m not sure. You’re kidding, right?

   — arnold asrelsky    Dec 30, 01:49 AM    #

6. In pre 2003-Iraq, Professors either kept silent about politics, or were very politicisied, especially those who were members in the one-ruling Baath party or cautiously used symbols and signs to criticise the Saddam regime.Not very much changed after the ousting of the dictator.

   — Kali    Dec 30, 07:39 AM    #

7. I’m not sure what campuses Muap Conners has experienced, but his description certainly does not fit the three land grant campuses or the urban private university where I have taught over the past 30 years! Do students on these campuses ever experience a different political viewpoint or a different cultural tradition than the one with which they grew up? Certainly, but new perspectives come from both the right and the left. Furthermore, as was the case for me as a student in the ’60s, new perspectives are offered for consideration, to be accepted or rejected, not as indoctrination. It has always been my experience that those faculty members whose personal views are the shakiest are the ones most threatened by colleagues who express divergent views. Perhaps Conners lives and works in a more activist environment, or maybe it is Conners’ lack of confidence in his views that makes him feel so thretened by those with alternate viewpoints.

   — Lee C    Dec 30, 10:39 AM    #

8. In graduate school, my main mentor was a clearly and openly self-professed Marxist – he opened my eyes to the way I had, in fact, been indoctrinated by my first 21 years of life into seeing things in a more right-leaning way. Did he “indoctrinate” me? NO – he taught me to think critically about all situations and movements and kept me from growing into the ossified and closed-minded adulthood I was headed toward. Exposure to different points of view and philosophical bents is what education is about – I am much less worried about those who profess a political point of view than those who profess to NOT have one in their teaching…it is those folks who take the status-quo for granted and do not teach our children to THINK and think hard by “stepping outside themselves” and re-looking at what they have simply taken to be the truth because they have heard it repeated often enough….

   — rbuck    Dec 30, 02:07 PM    #

9. About #5: I guess it is a matter of taste! I much prefer “distanciation” and “objectivation” to academicize… Also they refer to a clear thought processes.

   — skeptical    Dec 30, 05:43 PM    #

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