By Chris Fauske
Interim Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

Chris Fauske, Interim Dean, SOAS

As always, I’ve been reading.

Some of it for fun, some of it because I am starting to prepare for a return to faculty in September, and some of it because, well, because it’s there.

A few months ago I picked up Stanley Fish’s new book, Save the World on Your Own Time. Reviews were mixed when it came out. But here’s the thing about Fish: he knows how to write a good polemic, and he does something that badly needs doing in this country: He pokes holes in the appallingly simplistic way that American commentators assume that labels such as “liberal” or “conservative” can fit just about any person’s ideas or opinions.

Fish made his name with a remarkable, and lengthy, work Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, a work which, to quote the publisher’s blurb, “reconcile[d] two [rival] camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis:Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are—that is, fallen—and the poem’s lesson is proven on a reader’s impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying.” This was a staggering piece of work, and it impressed neither entrenched side, but it did inspire a new generation of Milton scholars, and, for good measure, a swathe of other lit. crit. types. It wasn’t down to Fish alone, of course, but reader response criticism went mainstream. Fish would go on some years later to publish Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities and that just about sealed his fate. Everybody who had not bothered reading the books (and who does read literary criticism?), and many of those who had, identified in the argument that we have our own perspectives and can, at best, mediate them only partially successfully, the fact that Fish was either, a./ an anything-goes liberal or b./ a hopeless Hobbesian convinced that individual authority is inevitably anarchic.

Fish is neither. He is hopelessly romantic, believing in the joy of reading, of thinking, of speaking, and of arguing critically. 

It is only by committing ourselves to ensuring there is neither a prescribed nor a proscribed agenda that teaching is possible, argues Fish. It is, I think, a profoundly conservative position and the only one that offers the chance of radical thought, startling insight, and progressive outcome.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Joseph Gonzalez took exception to Fish’s argument that teaching is about teaching. That teaching is and of itself a goal. Not so, Gonzalez wrote:

As a graduate student, I agreed with Mr. Fish: I was suspicious of those professors who talked of turning their students into “citizens” and “promoting civic engagement.” Where’s the content? I thought. Where are the academic standards? It all seemed a bit too fluffy.

But as a faculty member, I now see the issue differently. In fact, I have discovered that as my students become better scholars, both more knowledgeable and able to reject simplistic formulations, they naturally become better citizens.¹

Ignoring the fact that he has already proved Fish’s point by putting scholarship before citizenship, Gonzalez then provides a fine example from one of his own classes that speaks almost directly to Fish’s point. By modeling good scholarship and teaching, Gonzalez led his students to an understanding of complexity and challenge, and his students began to be able to deliver nuanced interpretations of the various components of the debate over the war in Iraq. Precisely because Gonzalez was not preaching, did not enter the room with a doctrinaire position, he was able to do his job, which was not to have a position on the war, but to help his students understand how to analyze a given problem in a manner appropriate to scholars. That his students went on to use the skills to become better citizens is most likely beneficial, but not the point. Whether Gonzalez’s students use the techniques he has helped them internalize to support a particular perspective on the war or to ignore it absolutely is irrelevant. His job—our job—is to provide tools, not to compel their use. Just as Fish encourages us all to do in his book.

Steven Kellman struggles from a different perspective to take on Fish, lambasting him for missing the fact that “What is offered for study can be as loaded as how we study it. Replacing Edmund Spenser and Henry James with Gloria Anzaldúa and Amiri Baraka on an M.A. reading list is not a neutral academic procedure.”²

Kellman is impressively wrong on this count. Spenser being dropped in favor of Baraka might be inspired by a political agenda, might be a result of an institution’s commitment to diversity, to multiculturalism, to any of a host of worthy impulses, but that has nothing to do with the classroom. Reading an author—any author, understanding an author—any author, appreciating an author—any author, none of these things requires agreeing with the author. Nor does it require prejudicing one set of beliefs in favor of another.

The argument goes deeper than this potential navel-gazing, however. Math and science have consequences, too, yet as a society we are fully supportive of the idea that science as science is worth doing and worth supporting. What follows from the science is a matter of policy. It should be so for the humanities.

But, as I was saying, one of the amusing things about watching people respond to Fish is how deeply conservative the man is. All he wants us to do is to teach. He wants universities, boards of governors, politicians, trustees, foundations, to let us teach. In return for this wonderful privilege, we should do what it is we sign on to do: teach. Not proselytize, recruit, indoctrinate, or otherwise seek to compel a way of thinking in our students. Just teach.

Or as Fish would have it: Do your job, don’t let anyone else try to do your job, and don’t try to do anyone else’s job. It’s a piece of advice that applies to us all. As teachers, it is not our job to make political statements. That job falls to someone else—lobbyists, politicians, citizen organizers, not teachers. Equally, it is not the job of administrators, trustees, governors, senators, to tell us what to teach or how to teach. But, again, in return, we have an obligation, a freedom, to teach, and an obligation to do nothing more than that, unless it is on our own time.

It may be that as students develop critical thinking skills, the ability to discern fact from fiction, to distinguish wishful thinking from plausible outcome that they will begin to espouse a world view sympathetic to ours. Or not. But the point is that it is not our job in the classroom to espouse a particular societal view. Nor should it be.

That’s all there is to it.

It’s enormously difficult.

But I have learned one thing over the past year or two. If we do set about trying to do someone else’s job,  we’re not going to be doing ours; and if we let others do our job, we render ourselves superfluous.

This article is part of  ASpect’s May 2009 issue, Undergraduate Research.