Nerd Notes: Stanley Fish on the Political-Activist Classroom

From prof-blogger Instapundit comes a link to an interesting-looking new book by well-known academic Stanley Fish.

Here's the link to the book on Amazon, and here is a related article on Inside Higher Education. The gist of Fish's book? He says that professors should leave their political or activist inclinations out of the classroom. Blurb:

Stanley Fish is very clear about what college professors should do in the classroom.

They “can (legitimately) do two things: (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills — of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure — that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over.”

And what should they not do? Everything else.

In a new book to be published this month by Oxford University Press, Fish, the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University, argues that instructors need to approach their jobs narrowly — and to, as the title implies, Save the World on Your Own Time.

That doesn’t mean they can’t have opinions, espouse views outside of the classroom or make partisan pronouncements in public. But the argument — that professors should do their jobs, and nothing else — does establish a framework through which the book tackles every major academic controversy, from Ward Churchill (a professor who erred in melding politics and his academic work, Fish says, not in expressing those views per se) to the intelligent design movement (a relativistic attempt to sneak a nonscientific idea into the classroom) to Larry Summers (a man who went beyond the bounds of his job description).

This looks like it's worth a look. Goodness knows, on this blog we've talked a great deal about campus culture. The Inside Higher Ed piece includes a brief interview with Fish, and here is one little piece of his response:

It’s my conviction that teachers should not have posters . . . on the doors of their office that indicate some political, partisan or ideological affiliation. The office . . . is an extension of the scene of teaching, and no student should enter an office [believing that] some ideas are going to be preferred and others are better not uttered. The larger part are those professors who are sincerely convinced that it is their job to take their students and mold both their characters and their ideological views . . .

Interesting, interesting! See a previous, related post here on another professor's observations. I repeat here what I said there: "Frankly, I don't think my students should know what my politics are, because that'll squash any pretense at open, honest discussion of all relevant perspectives and evidence in a given issue or topic." I stand by that.