End Times - In Which I Agree With Stanley Fish
Yeah, I know. But I've read the past couple of pieces Fish has written in the NYT about the academy's response to accusations of indoctrination, and they've been pretty well balanced. His latest piece includes the following:
In response to the Students for Academic Freedom's insistence that professors "should not be making statements ... about George Bush if the class is not on contemporary American presidents," the subcommittee offers this grand, and empty, pronouncement: "[A]ll knowledge can be connected to all other knowledge." But if the test for bringing a piece of "knowledge" into the classroom is the possibility of connecting it to the course's ostensible subject, nothing will ever fail it, and the only limitation on the topics that can be introduced will be the instructor's ingenuity.
My point is made for me by the subcommittee when it proposes a hypothetical as a counterexample to the stricture laid down by the Students for Academic Freedom: "Might not a teacher of nineteenth-century American literature, taking up 'Moby Dick,' a subject having nothing to do with the presidency, ask the class to consider whether any parallel between President George W. Bush and Captain Ahab could be pursued for insight into Melville's novel?"
But with what motive would the teacher initiate such a discussion? If you look at commentaries on "Moby Dick," you will find Ahab characterized as inflexible, monomaniacal, demonic, rigid, obsessed and dictatorial. What you don't find are words like generous, kind, caring, cosmopolitan, tolerant, far-seeing and wise. Thus the invitation to consider parallels between Ahab and Bush is really an invitation to introduce into the classroom (and by the back door) the negative views of George Bush held by many academics.
Read the whole thing - for Fish, it is remarkably succinct, perhaps because the NYT has a pretty strict word limit on op-eds.
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What I remember of Stanley Fish was in the 70s, he gave a talk hawking his book on Irony, in which he dismissed the misguided efforts of Wayne Booth.
He was dismissive of my humble question relating it all to Kenneth Burke.
A man on the way up! Here he is back on the way down.
Life is ironic that way.
Booth had a sense of humor as well as a sense of irony. That and the law of averages explain Fish.
I assume that your pal Irony is going to barely going to fit through the door, BAW, having feasted upon these comments:
9:09am It's not just me who thinks Bush is dictatorial -- so does everyone else. Look at his poll numbers!
9:28am Any liberal professor would encourage dissent! DUH!
9:37am Well, no professor would compare Bush to Ahab if he weren't so darned comparable!
That's all I could take. The ignorance of the academy is invincible.
Angie -
I had a feeling the comments section would devolve accordingly. What's the academic corrollary to "Physician, heal thyself?"--"Professor, teach thyself?"