AWA: Academic Writing at Auckland

The so-called ‘role of the academy’ has long been the subject of scholarly dispute. Calling into question the professional obligations of the university, it is inextricably linked to the contentious issue of ‘academic freedom’, a phrase which in itself has become almost synonymous with the foul-cries of educators and administrators, forced to relinquish their autonomy to the sea of legislation aimed at regulating curricular content. Enter renowned academic Stanley Fish, who in recent decades has emerged as one of the most vocal—and as such, controversial—participants in the academic freedom debate. Fish is adamant in his position that the university’s only legitimate rights and responsibilities are those which pertain to “the pedagogical task of passing on knowledge and conferring skills”.[1] This opinion constitutes the backbone of Fish’s text The Task of Higher Education, wherein he denounces the moralising, non-academic concerns of many mainstream universities, and proposes a stricter enforcement of the boundaries between ‘academic activity’ and ‘partisan political activity’.

To Stanley Fish, the thought of a professor “surrendering his academic obligations to the agenda of any non-academic constituency”,[2] exemplifies everything that he finds so intolerable about the state of American colleges. Conversely, it is the opinion of former Harvard president Derek Bok, that the university has both the potential and the prerogative to “go beyond intellectual pursuits”, and instill in its students a sense of moral character and social responsibility.[3] Bok represents just one of the countless academics in favour of this approach, who claim that Stanley Fish’s contrasting “aim-low”[4] definition of scholarly duty “belies a rich history and deep tradition of civic responsibility within American Higher Education”.[5] Not so, according to writer and activist David Horowitz, whose text Academic Freedom highlights the strong correlation between Fish’s values, and the principles on which the academic policies of most American universities are based.[6] It is clear that Horowitz too aligns himself with Fish’s stance on classroom politics, with the former having incorporated many of the latter’s viewpoints into his own Academic Bill of Rights. With this in mind, we can ascertain that although the two contemporaries would unlikely identify themselves as allies, there have been multiple instances of overlapping opinion throughout the respective careers of Fish and Horowitz.

Such an overlap is clear upon examination of both Fish’s The Task Of Higher Education and Horowitz’s Academic Freedom, wherein the scholars’ shared concern for institutional neutrality and objectivity resonates. With specific reference to the frequently ‘unauthorised’ discussion of matters of war and peace in the classroom, Fish and Horowitz condemn the politically slanted ‘teachings’ of run-of-the-mill professors, whose areas of professional expertise rarely intersect with the agendas they are consciously or unconsciously pushing. Fish refers to this sort of transgression as the “abandoning of responsibilities that belong to them [the professors] by contract, in order to take up responsibilities that properly belong to others”.[7] Fish reasons that it is precisely this blurring of professional boundaries that compromises the integrity of higher education, and thus with the reputation of the academy at stake, both he and Horowitz are emphatic that no good can come of a situation wherein universities “allow their faculties to enter the political fray”.[8] 

On this note, it is interesting to consider Horowitz’s allegation that the establishment of political forces inside the university was conducive to the ‘administrative paralysis’ that obstructed the processing of his Academic Bill Of Rights.[9] Certainly this idea of the university having a political affiliation—regardless of whether it is left or right—goes against all definitions of ‘institutional neutrality’ and undermines Fish’s assertion that it is not the business of the academy to have “any policy except an educational policy”.[10] As Horowitz points out, however, Fish’s demand for a strictly apolitical university introduces the paradoxical dilemma that “any administrative attempt to remove politics from the curriculum would be opposed as itself a political intervention into the curriculum”.[11] Here, Fish clarifies that the ‘removal of politics from the curriculum’ is not his objective, he merely wishes to draw attention to the distinction between academic and partisan labours.[12] Insisting to the last that “any subject matter can be taught from an appropriately academic perspective”,[13] Fish maintains that such controversial topics as the aforementioned ‘war and peace’ debate need not be struck from the list of classroom-appropriate conversation, providing the facilitators of such conversations remember that their obligations are intellectual and not ideological.

In suggesting that the intellectual can in fact be isolated from the ideological, it would appear that what Fish is essentially gesturing towards is the concept of a hypothetical ‘post-ideological’ university. This emerges as a complex and abstract proposition indeed, and one that is perhaps best examined in relation to the perspectives of experts in the field of interpellation—experts such as noted philosopher and critical theorist, Slajov Žižek. Žižek has cautioned that the idea of a post-ideological existence “proceeds a little too quickly”,[14] and as such, we can conceivably presume that he would find the possibility of Fish’s ‘post-ideological university’ just as difficult to reconcile with. Arguing that a particular reality cannot simply “dissolve itself” through the act of “recognizing its own effective conditions”,[15] Žižek’s assessment of the post-ideological society recalls Louis Althusser’s theory that “the idea of the possible end of ideology is an ideological idea par excellence”.[16] Fish remains absolute that when it comes to academia, he can sever the ideological from the intellectual, but it occurs that this conviction comes loaded with ideological freight in and of itself.

As a text, The Task of Higher Education is exemplary of Stanley Fish in that the author makes no apologies for his unpopular point-of-view and succeeds, to an extent, at addressing and subsequently debunking his critics. Fish’s resoluteness that his is the one and only ethical course of action for the university goes a long way in convincing the reader that his word is the truth. Yet for all his enthusiasm in presenting his case, Fish’s argument loses credibility when it transpires that his crusade to fashion a learning environment unadulterated by ‘partisan activity’, constitutes—albeit ironically—partisan activity by very definition. In other words, in attempting to introduce his readers to the ideal of a standpoint-neutral university, Fish unintentionally reinforces the fact that no standpoint can ever be arrived at independently of its economic, social, or political context. On that note, we can conclude that where ‘the role of the academy’ is concerned, the innate relationship between politics and academia will continue to prevail after all.

Works Cited

Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. New York: Oxford University Publishing, 2008.

Fish, Stanley. “We’re All Conservatives Now.” New York Times, December 20, 2010.

Fish, Stanley. “Why We Built The Ivory Tower.” New York Times, May 21, 2004.

Horowitz, David. Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom. New York: Encounter Books, 2007.

Street, Paul. “A Farewell Message From Stanley Fish: Good Professors Do What

They’re Told.” University of Utah. http://www.sa.utah.edu/bennion/welch/sfish.htm (accessed March 17, 2011).

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989.

[1] Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (New York: Oxford University Publishing,

2008), 13.

[2] Stanley Fish, “Why We Built the Ivory Tower,” New York Times, May 21, 2004.

[3]Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time, 14.

[4] Paul Street, “A Farewell Message From Stanley Fish: Good Professors Do What They’re Told,”

University of Utah, http://www.sa.utah.edu/bennion/welch/sfish.htm (accessed March 17, 2011).

[5] Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time, 15.

[6] David Horowitz, Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom (New York:

Encounter Books, 2007), 1.

[7] Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time, 14.

[8] Horowitz, Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom, 12.

[9] Ibid., 8.

[10] Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time, 17.

[11] Horowitz, Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom, 8.

[12] Fish, “Why We Built the Ivory Tower.”

[13] Stanley Fish, “We’re All Conservatives Now,” New York Times, December 20, 2010.

[14] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 30.

[15] Ibid., 28.

[16] Ibid., 2.