"Save the World On Your Own Time"

That's the title of Stanley Fish's latest book. In the book, as the dust jacket says, Fish argues that "the only goal appropriate to the academy is the transmission and advancement of knowledge. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the mthods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. . . . Those who do this will often invoke academic freedom, but Fish argues that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that comes into the professor's mind." He is, in short, an anti-Gutmann, an anti-Nussbaum (although, wrongly in my view, he doesn't mention either of these scholars). I'm only a third of the way through the book, but it's a great... [read full story]