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Save the World on Your Own Time
Stanley Fish
Oxford University Press
August 2008
On Sale: August 11, 2008
208 pages
ISBN: 0195369025
EAN: 9780195369021
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
What should be the role of our institutions of higher
education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end
to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social
ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce
responsible citizens?
In Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues
that, however laudable these goals might be, there is but
one proper role for the academe in society: to advance
bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the
same. When teachers offer themselves as moralists,
political activists, or agents of social change rather than
as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the
methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true
purpose. And yet professors now routinely bring their
political views into the classroom and seek to influence
the political views of their students. 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 insists that a
professor's only obligation is "to present the material in
the syllabus and introduce students to state-of-the-art
methods of analysis. Not to practice politics, but to study
it; not to proselytize for or against religious doctrines,
but to describe them; not to affirm or condemn Intelligent
Design, but to explain what it is and analyze its appeal."
Given that hot-button issues such as Holocaust denial, free
speech, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are regularly
debated in classrooms across the nation, Save the World On
Your Own Time is certain to spark fresh debate-and to
incense both liberals and conservatives-about the true
purpose of higher education in America.
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