Responses to Fish

The responses to Stanley Fish’s penetrating op-ed in last week’s Times are, in many respects, as interesting as the op-ed itself.

Commenting on increasing calls for colleges and universities to teach “democratic citizenship,” Fish cautioned academics against crossing “the boundary between academic work and partisan advocacy.” As he correctly noted, “Universities could engage in moral and civic education only by deciding in advance which of the competing views of morality and citizenship is the right one, and then devoting academic resources and energy to the task of realizing it.” Instead, Fish noted, academics should focus on “the search for truth and the dissemination of it through teaching.”

The Times published several letters to the editor criticizing Fish. A couple seem to deliberately misunderstand Fish’s argument, which was not that academics should cease comment on political matters outside the classroom, but that institutions of higher learning are ill-equipped to teach “democratic citizenship” because of the inherently political nature of the concept. (I would add that structuring curricula around such a goal also means giving short shrift to a traditional liberal arts education.) Pace University president David Caputo, however, openly challenges Fish, noting

Today's students care about the social issues of their world, else why would we be seeing large campus majorities doing volunteer work? Far fewer students, however, vote. Getting a taste of social concerns by undertaking modest service projects as part of classes that put such projects in larger contexts, as my university's faculty now requires, is one tool for closing that gap.

Campuses with this approach are modeling the habits, skills and excitement of taking part in the democratic process, whatever side one may end up on.

This comment is fascinating in a variety of ways. First, if “large campus majorities [are] doing volunteer work,” then why would Pace or any other school need to require such work as part of courses? It appears as if Caputo wants students to work in certain types of volunteer projects—projects selected by the faculty—that place social issues “in larger contexts” and would make participants more likely to vote. I’d be willing to wager that, say, pro-Israel, anti-gay marriage, or pro-life “service projects” do not occupy prominent places in the Pace roster.

The organization that Fish’s op-ed directly attacked, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), has now also responded. AAC&U president Carole Geary Schneider writes that since “the nation has a unique opportunity to engage an entire generation with the difficult questions that challenge both our democracy and the global community . . . campuses are replacing the ivory tower ethic with a new vision of purposeful engagement with the wider world. College faculty cannot presume to ‘know’ the right answers to the world’s hard questions. But it is their business to explore those questions, in all their complexity, with their students.”

Geary Schneider’s letter avoids confronting Fish’s main points, probably because Fish’s basic argument is irrefutable. If colleges restructure their curricula away from traditional liberal arts topics and toward addressing the “world’s hard questions,” the criteria by which professors and administrators determine what constitutes a “hard question” becomes critical, raising issues associated with the ideological imbalance of humanities and social science faculty. Nor does Geary Schneider—or any of Fish’s other published critics—explain why the current generation of students, unlike their predecessors, should receive not a liberal arts education but one focused around their professors’ conception of what entails “democratic citizenship.”