The Audacity of Fish

As many have seen, for some insane reason the Chronicle of Higher Education made the decision to have a conversation with Stanley Fish about about virtue mongering. In fact, the title of the article is "The Unbearable Virtue Mongering of Academics." It's almost as if Fish knows how unbearable he is and is punishing the rest of us bleeding-heart commies by not shutting the hell up.

Preparing to read anything involving Fish is similar to prepping oneself for dental work. You know it's going to be exhausting and painful--why are we doing this? Why is The Chronicle still fawning after Fish like a naive school girl? I can only guess because he's bored and egotistical enough to think anyone is still granting him credence--and they have space to fill. Len Gutkin, the author of this eye-roll inducing piece masquerading as journalism, is quick to fawn over him. What a joke. 

Fish has, unsurprisingly, continued with his opinion that the university should--in no way, shape, or form--take a political stance. He uses examples such as a request for him to speak being rescinded and the Provost at IUB's rebuke of their racist, sexist, business professor as examples of universities politicizing. He goes on to defend the idea that a Holocaust denier should be able to teach (even History, if he could keep his beliefs to himself) and remain in the university.

The problem with all of this is not just Fish, or The Chronicle. The problem is the illusion that one can live in a world where things like academia and politics can be mutually exclusive. A friend was telling me about a common prompt in basic economics courses--"why are diamonds more valuable than water?" I said that it was unethical to pose such a question, one is a stone that no one has to have, the other is a commodity that is necessary for the survival of every human being on the planet. I was told I was misunderstanding and trying to think too deeply...this is just about understanding scarcity. My response was that his response captured exactly what is wrong with society, with academia as a whole. We have people who believe that you can divorce morality from these abstract theoretical problems. They're focusing on scarcity, not what happens to the people who can't afford water.

Fish is wrong and will always be wrong because his entire premise rests on the idea that institutional (or instructional) neutrality is ever possible. It isn't. When we try to divorce from the moral, the ethical, the political, we instead advocate for the other side.

Service Learning

Paula Mathieu's Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition introduces a "public turn" in composition where more and more instructors are looking at ways that writing outside of the university could be done within a university course. Mathieu's introductory chapters of Tactics of Hope relate to last week's reading: Paul Heilker's "Rhetoric Made Real: Civic Discourse and Writing Beyond the Curriculum." Heilker states that "Composition students have suffered for too long in courses and classrooms that are palpably unreal rhetorical situations." He claims these made up situations support the idea that writing has nothing to do with the real world, and therefore students are missing the essential and important connection between the classroom and the community. Service learning is proposed as a solution to this lack of real word scenarios for students to write for, allowing for students to get writing experience that's relevant while connecting them to the community outside of the university.

Although service learning sounds good in theory, there are a few things that concern me. In the descriptions provided by both Mathieu and Heilker, service learning sounds like a lot of extra work for students. Although they would be getting practical experience and helping their community, it appears there would be a lot of work outside of class to accomplish the goals of service learning. I participated in a course during my undergrad where we partnered with The Facing Project and Muncie's A Better Way to interview and write the stories of victims of domestic abuse. The course was an incredibly valuable experience both professionally/academically and personally, but it did require a lot of work that other courses of the same level did not. We had to travel off of campus during weekdays, which was difficult with everyone's schedules. We were also dealing with some pretty traumatic material, so there were some mental health days we had to work into our schedule as well. After my own experience, I would be worried about trusting a group of freshmen to handle the same workload and emotional intensity.

I haven't seen much service learning other than my own experience, so I would love to know other people's opinions on the concept and how other's have incorporated service learning into the classroom.

Passion in the Classroom?

I wasn’t sure what to title this post, mainly because I am still working through the contents of Chapter 13. There were many components that didn’t sit well with me, such as hooks’ discussion of her “erotic” attraction to a male student and the quasi-romantic letters her students would write at the end of a course. Reading those sections angered me: even though she pushes for a view of passion that goes beyond eroticism, it still includes eroticism, and that is something I will never get behind.

I agree that education should encourage students to make change in their everyday life, and in order to do so, we need to view the classroom as it is: a non-neutral space. Naturally, when we read students’ writing, we are entering a vulnerable space. Students enter the classroom and write with their own experiences, values, bias, and privileges, something that hooks explains in her chapter on class. If we want students to apply what they learned in the classroom to their everyday life, we have to address these topics, all which center around race, class, gender, (dis)ability, sexuality, etc. in some way.

These are topics that will ignite passion, whether it be confusion, anger, guilt, depression, or determination (or something else). This passion I fully support, and I agree that the classroom needs to 1) welcome these moments passion, 2) encourage acts of disruption and interruption, and 3) value students’ efforts to push back against the oppressive system of education. This type of passion extends beyond the classroom and creates a bridge for students between the “academy” and what they experience every day. The two are not separate, but, as hooks explains, students are forced to choose between adopting the white, middle-class values that dominant the academy or defending their own. Students should not have to choose, and valuing a passionate disruption of this oppressive system is one step forward.        

I am all for this; however, we can do this without opening passion up to erotic feelings. Just like we can’t pretend that everyone is equal in the classroom, we cannot pretend that power structures between students and instructors do not exist. I am all for subverting power structures, and I am keeping in mind that hooks is a woman of color in a position that is dominated by white people. But at the end of the day, the instructor is still in a position of power, and when that power is abused, intentionally or not, education comes to a halt.  

I pose the following questions: How did you navigate hooks' discussion of passion? What role should passion play in the classroom?      

Hooks

As Hooks argues for multicultural change in chapter 2, I think there are a few important things to look at as we navigate our classrooms. Hooks mentions that a culture of domination "necessarily promotes" (28) and addiction to lying and denial. One of these forms of lying takes the shape of this notion that "racism does not exist anymore, and that conditions of social equality are solidly in place that would enable any black person who works hard to achieve economic self-sufficiency" (29). This reminds me of some of the media messages that you hear from time to time that preach unity through sameness. However, those who adopt this seemingly positive mantra fail to realize that, without developing that critical consciousness Hooks argues for, that this message unfortunately carries with it the potential to subsume the other into a dominant white discourse. As a white male instructor, I definitely need to re-tool my goals, readings, and syllabi to better reflect this revolution of values Hooks talks about. So, one question I have is, how do you all currently see (or do not see) yourself practicing Hooks' hopes for a multicultural education?

Additionally, I think an interesting thing to discuss is how we approach the task of educating colleagues about this sort of work, especially with the added goal of informing about how their practices ought to shift. This is a tough realm to navigate, especially given our current positionalities in the field.

"Made by people and ... in turn making them"

I really appreciate Paulo Freire's perspective in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Although I will admit at times, it's a bit abstract and I start to have mini-existential crises about what certain abstract words actually mean. I have had my students read what is Chapter 2 but also known as the essay on "The Banking Concept of Higher Education." With that, I also showed them the video that some of us watched in Dr. Lee's class as well. As a refresher/reference, here it is:

This video connects to the ideas that children are being indoctrinated in order to be cogs in the greater machine that is capitalism. They are not getting an "authentic education" (Freire 66), as they are not learning through "'A' with 'B'" (Freire 66). Moreover, their standardization of behavior, tests, and thinking allows for them to stunt their capacity for critical thinking as well as further oppress them in the system. Also connected to this, Freire declares (and worth quoting in full):

Reflection upon situationally is reflection about the very condition of existence: critical thinking by means of which people discover each other to be 'in a situation.' [...] Humankind emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled. Intervention in reality—historical awareness itself—thus represents a step forward from emergence, and results from the conscientização of the situation. Conscientização is the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence. (82)

So, with that in mind, my questions become: How do we "emerge" from our "submersion" as graduate students? How can we do the same with our students? How can we help develop true and lasting conscientização both inside and outside the classroom? How can we begin to destroy these systems that oppress? How do we move beyond "mere activists" (Freire 99)? How do we destroy and rebuild with everyone else?


P.S. I would like to apologize if any of this is repeated information from what y'all discussed in class on Thursday, as I was away for a conference.

Fish Casts a Wide Net but Catches Very Little

In Stanley Fish's Save the World on Your Own Time, higher education is under attack. It's under attack by neoliberals and neoconservatives alike, all wishing to purpose and indoctrinate their ideologies on their students. What's hard about Stanley Fish's book is that a lot of his arguments follow fairly sound logic, even agreeable logic at times. My purpose in this blog isn't to outline exactly what it is that I agree with or disagree with--that argument would require much more space than I have here--but instead to focus on the last two chapters in his book. One focuses on funding and the other acts as a quick bowtie that includes two rebuttals, or voices from the opposition. Fish casts a wide net with Save the World on Your Own Time and, though he catches very little in my opinion, there are some logically sound arguments I think we should be discussing all day, every day.

I won't try to understand how a university is ran, how money is moved, how it is attained, where it goes, etc., but what I can say is that I agree with Fish on one thing: public perception makes or loses money for a university. There's a strong opinion, specifically from Republicans, that students are wasting their time in college, especially at liberal arts schools, like Ball State. They pander on their media soapboxes, write blogs and articles for Breitbart, and podcasters like Alex Jones work hard to persuade their audiences that higher education is bloated and a money pit for the public.

In chapter six, I felt there might be some solutions to academia's struggle for cash and fighting public perception. Albeit, these are two solutions Fish thinks will never be implemented. We can all agree that his lack of faith might be a ploy to move academics to action, like a truth or dare. One solution is to educate the public on the happenings of a university. This comes with a catch for it would then make colleges and universities "accountable" (159). Educating the public and then hoping for more public funding would indeed make universities more accountable. However, as Fish points out later, academics are too soft. We must stand up to the challenge, play the offensive, and not be afraid to be aggressive. I like this idea. And when it comes to funding and public perception, what better way than to be bold? Educating citizens, particularly ones outside the realm of academia, could then enable universities to justify and boldly ask for more funding, funding that could, in theory, lessen the cost for its students (even though, as Fish points out, not much of student funding goes to the school).

So should we be more aggressive when confronting false public perceptions? I absolutely think so. The people that downplay the importance of a higher education are the same ones who think we all sit around safely in arm chairs typing away on social media, attacking anyone we disagree with, when, in reality, we're in the business of fighting ignorance. Aren't we? Well, I agree with Fish on this one, we're still losing. I want to add again that I know absolutely very little on the administration side of higher ed but, as Fish details, the very same administration I'm criticizing here are the ones that have the power to confront politicians, to treat them as equals, and to show a sort of bipartisan (I don't like that word but it works here) effort to work together. We have a student loan crisis and students are not confident in their decisions to come to college since the real world is telling them to get a real job. We need to work on that.  

Something's Fish-y (Get it?): Funding and Stanley Fish

In Chapter 6 of Save the World on Your Own Time, Fish gets into the funding aspect of higher education. I found his argument to be a complete double standard with what he has already presented as his argument about the role of higher education. When discussing what higher education should do about politicians refusing to support funding, he states that we should be "making them uncomfortable" and "causing them pain" like he did during his time as a dean (which he will NOT let us forget about) in order to get our voices heard and create real change in university funding. We should be fighting back against politicians that make false claims against higher education in hopes of educating the public and securing more money. In this way, does this not go against his argument that educators should simply "do their jobs," which he defines in Chapter 7 as "setting up a course, preparing a syllabus, devising exams, assigning papers or experiments, giving feedback, holding office hours, etc"? (169). He even goes on to specify that "instructors should do neither less nor more," yet now he wants us to fight politicians for funding as well?  We are expected to keep politics out of our instruction while still subjecting ourselves to politics for funding. The initial fight for funding originates with the needs that arise in our classrooms that are then brought to the administration, giving us a direct role. Not to mention that most administrators serve as instructors as well. Are we still therefore not responsible in some way to get funding for our universities? Fish seems to expect us to be political in our professions only when he deems appropriate, like to pander for money and support from politicians who mostly don't care. We are expected to shelter our students from real political arguments, but still take them on ourselves behind the scenes.

Another issue I have with Fish's argument in Chapter 6 is this idea that college tuition is low. He discusses this "pact" between the state and the university where "In return for financial support from taxpayers, universities agreed to keep tuition low and provide access for students from a broad range of economic backgrounds, train graduate and professional students, promote arts and culture, help solve problems in the community, and perform groundbreaking research" (155). He then focuses on how states have broken this pact by not supplying more funding as costs for colleges rise. He does not really address that colleges have broken it as well and how we could fix it together, instead stating that "the universities have pretty much been doing their part." Since when has tuition ever been low enough to truly serve students from a wide range of economic backgrounds? There are still MANY who cannot afford to take on this debt and do not go to college because of it. In comparison to other costs, as Fish breaks down further into the chapter, tuition barely covers the true cost of an education, but it is still by no means low and is still used as a gate-keeping method. Scholarships, grants, funding etc. help, but for Fish to not even discuss how this could all be solved by pushing for the implementation of free college education for all is just frustrating and ignorant. He's obviously not Feeling the Bern.