Synopses & Reviews
Through his columns in the
New York Times and his numerous best-selling books, Stanley Fish has established himself as our foremost public analyst of the fraught intersection of academia and politics. Here Fish for the first time turns his full attention to one of the core concepts of the contemporary academy: academic freedom.
Depending on whos talking, academic freedom is an essential bulwark of democracy, an absurd fig leaf disguising liberal agendas, or, most often, some in-between muddle that both exaggerates its own importance and misunderstands its actual value to scholarship. Fish enters the fray with his typical clear-eyed, no-nonsense analysis. The crucial question, he says, is located in the phrase academic freedom” itself: Do you emphasize academic” or freedom”? The former, he shows, suggests a limited, professional freedom, while the conception of freedom implied by the latter could expand almost infinitely. Guided by that distinction, Fish analyzes various arguments for the value of academic freedom: Is academic freedom a contribution to society's common good? Does it authorize professors to critique the status quo, both inside and outside the university? Does it license and even require the overturning of all received ideas and policies? Is it an engine of revolution? Are academics inherently different from other professionals? Or is academia just a job, and academic freedom merely a tool for doing that job?
No reader of Fish will be surprised by the deftness with which he dismantles weak arguments, corrects misconceptions, and clarifies muddy arguments. And while his conclusionthat academic freedom is simply a tool, an essential one, for doing a jobmay surprise, it is unquestionably bracing. Stripping away the mystifications that obscure academic freedom allows its beneficiaries to concentrate on what they should be doing: following their intellectual interests and furthering scholarship.
Review
"With his customary flair and insight, Stanley Fish discusses essential contemporary issues of academic freedom. Fishs views are consistently trenchant and illuminating. They should be required reading for anyone interested in these questions."
Review
"Stanley Fish makes a full-throated attack on conceptions of the academics role and academic freedom that depart from the job description 'teaching and research in accordance with the standards of the discipline in which I'm engaged.' Fish demurs to more grandiose alternative job descriptions, such as revolutionary, social critic, public servant, or exceptional human being. Once academics move beyond the standards of their discipline, then according to Fish, they no longer are functioning as academics or entitled to any freedom unique to academics. For academic freedom is nothing more than the freedom necessary to fulfill the academic's role, which is defined by the standards of his or her discipline. Fish's argument is one that every academic should confront and, in my opinion, should accept."
Review
"In this bracingly clarifying book, Stanley Fish shows why the concept of academic freedom, as it is widely invoked, is radically incoherent. He follows this unsettling revelation by convincingly demonstrating why academic freedom makes sense only if it is understood as the freedom of academics to do their distinctive jobs--intellectual analysis, research, and teaching. In the process he shows why academic freedom must not be confused with saving the world."
Synopsis
Schrecker, the leading historian of the McCarthy-era witch hunts, examines both the key fronts in the present battles over higher ed, and their historical parallels in previous eras offering a deeply-researched chronicle of the challenges to academic freedom, set against the rapidly changing structure of the academy itself. The Lost Soul of Higher Education tells the interwoven stories of successive, well-funded ideological assaults on academic freedom by outside pressure groups aimed at undermining the legitimacy of scholarly study, viewed alongside decades of eroding higher education budgets -- a trend that has sharply accelerated during the recent economic downturn.
Synopsis
Advocates of academic freedom often view it as a variation of the right to free speech and an essential feature of democracy. Stanley Fish argues here for a narrower conception of academic freedom, one that does not grant academics a legal status different from other professionals. Providing a blueprint for the study of academic freedom, Fish breaks down the schools of thought on the subject, which range from the idea that academic freedom is justified by the common good or by academic exceptionalism, to its potential for critique or indeed revolution. Fish himself belongs to what he calls the “Its Just a Job” school: while academics need the latitude—call it freedom if you like—necessary to perform their professional activities, they are not free in any special sense to do anything but their jobs. Academic freedom, Fish argues, should be justified only by the specific educational good that academics offer. Defending the university “in all its glorious narrowness” as a place of disinterested inquiry, Fish offers a bracing corrective to academic orthodoxy.
About the Author
Ellen Schrecker is professor of history at Yeshiva University who has written extensively about the Cold War red scare. Among her books are No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, and Cold War Triumphalism: The Abuse of History after the Fall of Communism. Schrecker is the former editor of the American Association of University Professors magazine, Academe.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Academic Freedom Studies
The Five Schools
2. The Its Just a Job” School
Professionalism, Pure and Simple
3. The For the Common Good” School
Academic Freedom, Shared Governance, and Democracy
4. Professionalism vs. Critique
The Post-Butler Debates
5. Academic Exceptionalism and Public Employee Law
6. Virtue before Professionalism
The Road to Revolution
Coda
Appendix
Academic Freedom, the First Amendment, and Holocaust Denial (a talk given by the author at Rice University, April 2012)
Works Cited
Index