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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
Comment on this article Education: the Deflationary View Pick up the mission statement of almost any college or university, and you will find claims and ambitions that will lead you to think that it is the job of an institution of higher learning to cure every ill the world has ever known: not only illiteracy and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ballpark, but poverty, war, racism, gender bias, bad character, discrimination, intolerance, environmental pollution, rampant capitalism, American imperialism, and the hegemony of Wal-Mart. Yale College’s statement starts well by promising to seek students “of all backgrounds” and “to educate them through mental discipline,” but then mental discipline turns out to be instrumental to something even more valuable, the development of students' “moral [and] civic … capacities to the fullest.” I’m all for moral and civic capacities, but I’m not sure that there is much I or anyone else could do as a teacher to develop them. Moral capacities (or their absence) have no relationship whatsoever to the reading of novels, or the running of statistical programs, or the execution of laboratory procedures, all of which can produce certain skills, but not moral states. Civic capacities—which mean, I suppose, the capacities that go along with responsible citizenship—won’t be acquired simply because you have learned about the basic structures of American government or read the Federalist Papers (both good things to do). You could ace all your political science and public policy courses and still drop out and go live in the woods or become the Unabomber. So what is it that institutions of higher learning are supposed to do? My answer is simple. College and university teachers can (legitimately) do two things: (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills—of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure—that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over. I’m not saying that there is no connection at all between the successful practice of ethical, social, and political virtues and the courses of instruction listed in the college catalogue; it’s always possible that something you come across or something a teacher says may strike a chord that sets you on a life path you might not otherwise have chosen. But these are contingent effects, and as contingent effects they cannot be designed and shouldn’t be aimed at. (It’s not a good use of your time to aim at results you have only a random chance of producing.) Nor am I saying that academic work touches on none of the issues central to politics, ethics, civics, and economics; it is just that when those issues arise in an academic context, they should be discussed in academic terms; that is, they should be the objects of analysis, comparison, historical placement, etc.; the arguments put forward in relation to them should be dissected and assessed as arguments and not as preliminaries to action on the part of those doing the assessing. The action one takes (or should take) at the conclusion of an academic discussion is the action of rendering an academic verdict, as in “that argument makes sense,” “there’s a hole in the reasoning here,” “the case is still not proven." These and similar judgments are judgments on craftsmanship and coherence. The judgment of whether a policy is the right one for the country is not appropriate in the classroom, where you are (or should be) more interested in the structure and history of ideas than in recommending them (or dis-recommending them) to your students. Recommending them is what you do when you are a parent, or a political activist, or an op-ed columnist, all things you may be when the school day ends, but not things you should be on the university’s or state’s dime. It might be objected that while it may be easy to remain within academic bounds when the debate is about the right interpretation of Paradise Lost, the line between the academic and the political has been blurred before the discussion begins when the subject is ethics and students are arguing, for example, about whether stem cell research is a good or bad idea. But students shouldn’t be arguing about whether stem cell research is a good or bad idea. They should be studying the arguments various parties have made about stem cell research. Analyzing ethical issues is one thing; deciding them is another, and only the first is an appropriate academic activity. The view I am offering of higher education is properly called deflationary; it takes the air out of some inflated balloons. It denies to teaching the moral and philosophical pretensions that lead practitioners to envision themselves as agents of change or as the designers of a “transformative experience,” a phrase I intensely dislike. I acknowledge a sense in which education can be transformative. A good course may transform a student who knew little about the material in the beginning into a student who knows something about it at the end. That’s about all the transformation you should count on. Teaching is a job, and what it requires is not a superior sensibility or a purity of heart and intention—excellent teachers can be absolutely terrible human beings, and exemplary human beings can be terrible teachers—but mastery of a craft. Teachers who prefer grandiose claims and ambitions to that craft are the ones who diminish it and render it unworthy. Not that he much needs my help, but I feel the need to stand up for Stanley Fish and the position he put forth. Fish did not argue, as some of his critics here suggest, that universities should ignore moral questions, or offer only subject matter acquisition and skills attainment, or are morally irrelevant. A more reasonable reading of Fish is that when it comes to moral controversies, university faculty should present all sides of the question and help their students to develop the ability to assess those arguments, so that they can come to their own reasoned positions on the issues. To those who disagree, I would ask from what authority does a faculty member offer moral truth? How does a PhD in history or a career of intensive study of Shelley or invertebrate biology give one license to tell students the “right” answer to moral questions?
Rhetorical questions Professor Solow’s interpretation of Fish’s piece indeed furnishes a reasonable position. Whether or not Fish meant it, however, he certainly did not say so. In response to Solow’s rhetorical query “from what authority does a faculty member offer moral truth?”, I would counter-question: from what pedagogy does a faculty member avoid having moral effects upon students?
Knowledge is socially located The contents caption and cartoon accompanying Stanley Fish’s article oversimplify his proposal. Fish is not so brash as to give professors orders, nor does he use the term “preach.” And he does not say they should teach “knowledge” rather than “politics,” “Religion,” or “morals.” Fish does argue that college and university professors should refrain from advocating “right” interpretations and from recommending or “disrecommending” particular ethical or social policy positions. Instead, they should go no further than say whether they believe a given argument “makes sense,” has “a hole” in its “reasoning,” or is “still not proven.” Fish does not seem to recognize that “knowledge” is socially located, and that facts are generally framed within some paradigm or structure of meaning and value. Consider, for example, how economics is taught by proponents of unfettered free market capitalism; or how appellate court opinions usually set out “the facts” so as to accord with their conclusions of law. Would Fish really wish to deter professors from stating a position as “devil’s advocate” in order to stimulate serious argument? Does he really believe a professor should never contend that some idea, condition, or policy is wrong, e.g., racial or gender-based discrimination, torture, genocide, or the execution of innocent persons? In the real world, the problems people confront embrace not only facts and reasoning, but also complex and fundamental questions of meaning, purpose, and value. Shouldn’t colleges and universities help prepare their students both to analyze, and also to take a stand on such matters?
A broad education and the Golden Rule I’m amazed that a Distinguished University Professor has such a narrow view of the connection between ethics and teaching, such as Stanley Fish’s contention that “moral capacities (or their absence) have no relationship whatsoever to the reading of novels.” Actually, the liberal arts in general and literature in particular (among others) have a strong relationship to developing moral capacities. Novels allow readers to understand the moral world and personal experience of characters distinctly different from ourselves, and in a much more accessible (and, to suit Professor Fish, also less contingent) manner than, say, anthropological fieldwork. Novels thus offer the opportunity to put oneself in another’s shoes, which is an essential moral capacity. Understanding others is a fundamental part of the basic Western moral creed “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” People do seem to vary in their ability and willingness to act on the Golden Rule, but I think it is a safe bet that many of those who are better at it gained some of their morals from a broad education. Dare I suggest, some may even have broadened their capacity for empathy by learning from teachers who hoped for, intended, and even attempted to provide such an outcome. Fish’s narrow, technocratic view of teaching and learning is a rather thin argument to prevent conclusions over policy discussions where he dislikes the outcome. Even if, as a matter of personal preference, Fish prefers “war, racism, gender bias, bad character, discrimination, intolerance, environmental pollution, rampant capitalism, American imperialism, and the hegemony of Wal-mart,” it seems like a losing argument to disparage the ethical dimensions of teaching in general amongst the Yale alumni—why not side with recently profiled Yale great William F. Buckley in promoting this agenda?
Fish vs. Levin I find substantial irony in Stanley Fish describing a “deflationary view” of higher education, where students can do no more than learn and analyze subject matter. Meanwhile President Levin, a few pages later in your July/August issue, celebrates the civic virtue of new graduates as they confront the challenges of global warming, terrorism, and the “benefits of health and prosperity to those without them.” Fish pooh-poohs “transformational” education, acknowledging that it might happen by accident. Since the 1960s, academics like myself have pursued the goal of transforming the hearts and minds of secondary school graduates. We know there are no guarantees, but we hope a proportion of our students will grow intellectually, emotionally and socially into adults who will serve their God and country, reflecting the civic virtues of Yale’s founders.
You go, Stanley! The article by Stanley Fish deflating the moral pretensions of academicians is a rare gem. It’s the kind of thinking I have seen only in the National Association of Scholars' attack on the whole academic mess—“the dissolution of the traditional curriculum, the widespread intrusion of political ideology into classroom instruction, the curtailment of academic freedom and open expression, and the ubiquitous imposition of race and gender-driven 'diversity' policies at all levels of academic life.” Fish's values are exactly those of our teachers when Yale was one of the four greatest universities in the world, before the Mafi-Acs took over in the 1960s. We need more like Professor Fish. Long may he wave.
Where does Fish leave moral philosophy? Stanley Fish’s “deflationary view” of education might better be described as jaundiced: by delimiting the field to knowledge acquisition and skills attainment, he totally disregards the cultivation of dispositions and attitudes. Far from being gratuitous or expendable, these latter facets are essential and indeed unavoidable—just try teaching any class without implicitly engaging and imparting virtues and values such as patience, discipline, respect, fairness, and integrity! Likewise, Fish’s conception of moral philosophy is terribly anemic, if not entirely empty: in claiming that the only proper business of academic ethics is analytical argumentation without rendering judgments, he reduces moral theorizing to the point of incoherence—what are the putative conclusions of the critical arguments made by ethicists, if not decisions about moral matters?
A responsibility to address moral issues Stanley Fish’s arguments against incorporating civic and moral education in a liberal arts university contradict the fundamental purposes of education in a democratic society. One of the greatest virtues of the American system of higher education is its distinctive holism: it provides students with access to the full diversity of subjects that inform human knowledge and human experience without forcing them to pigeonhole themselves at the age of 18 and study exclusively one subject. The breadth of a liberal arts education expands one’s capacity for individual development and one’s empathy for peoples, ideas, values, and realities that are foreign from one’s own life experiences and that may challenge and even contradict one’s own convictions and perceptions of reality. The goal of an American education is not exclusively knowledge transmission. If human beings were robots, Fish’s arguments would perhaps be more plausible. But we are not robots. A college education must recognize our humanity in all its multifarious complexity. We are highly subjective individuals embedded in a particular democratic society with its own unique set of values, aspirations, hypocrisies, blind spots, successes, and failures. We cannot nor should not try to ignore this as we go about the task of education. On the contrary, for a college education to be relevant and meaningful, it must take on issues of social importance, including poverty and inequality, racism, sexism, prejudice, and the bigotry these social and psychological phenomena inspire. Education is an act of conscientiousness that should expand one’s conscience and one’s mind, and that should make one aware of reality in its fullest sense. If we abstract ourselves out of the moral and civic challenges that confront us in the United States and around the world then we will create parochial, unoriginal, and indifferent learners. They will find themselves products of an educational system that distances and alienates them from the fierce urgencies of the society in which they live and from the web of ethical obligation to other human beings and to other living things. Moral and civic capacities are bound up in the literature that we read, the topics that we debate, the art that we produce, and the interactions and relationships that make up collegial life. When we read novels that expand our capacity for empathy and for compassion; when we study history and learn about the dangers of radical utopianism on both the right and the left; and when we study the psychology of prejudice and authoritarianism; we enable ourselves to confront these challenges and to build better communities that respect human rights and protect the fundamental values of our nation’s constitution. There was nothing contingent to my education about one of my professor’s speaking to his class about his homosexuality and the discrimination he faced at Yale during the 50s, 60s and the 70s as a result; there was nothing contingent about an entire course I took on the subject of altruism and the rescue of persecuted minorities at Yale; and there was nothing contingent about what I learned in a class on nature writing about the environment, its fragility, and the web of relationships that sustains it which can so easily be fractured and undermined by human myopia, greed, and destructiveness. The best, most significant, and most transformative aspects of my Yale education were those that engaged ethical and civic issues head-on, fearlessly, sensitively, rigorously, and critically -- and with a deep sense of obligation and commitment to the ceaseless exploration of what is a just, equitable, and humane society and how it can be achieved. In a world in which genocide rages, tens of thousands of people die every day of preventable diseases and extreme poverty, and environmental destruction on a massive scale takes place, the university cannot afford to address these topics as though they are taking place on another planet and do not have immediate relevance and moral salience to our lives and the lives of others. To do so would be to adbicate the most basic responsibility of the university to serve the public good. As former Brown University president Vartan Gregorian eloquently stated in a commencement address at Brown:
Yale is not and should not be a vapid talking shop of high-minded intellectuals engaged in the narcissistic pursuit of knowledge. At Yale, I knew that what we discussed and studied mattered, that it made demands of me, that it could, should, and often would change my values, my commitments, and my sense of reality.
“Taking the life out of teaching won’t help” Okay, Professor Fish, what makes a good teacher, anyway? Reading your article makes it look like being boring is just the ticket. What a dreary time those “bright college years” could be. All we’re aiming for is to “introduce students to bodies of knowledge” and to “equip students with analytical skills.” As an erstwhile teacher of design, I hardly think that this is the task. I can’t teach my students a body of knowledge that will imbue them with the ability to design. And analytical skills, while helpful, won’t do the trick either. I have to demonstrate to them a way of finding within themselves a means of seeing and understanding their environment and the puzzles it contains that will allow them to develop new ideas and create new things. I see no necessity to proselytize in the process. But students should be arguing about stem cell research and everything else as well. This is how they test both their ideas and their skills; this is how each student builds his(her) own point of view. Professor Fish sounds like he is afraid that we will send kids off to college and they’ll come home with a bunch of newfangled ideas. Well, after everyone has spent so much money, time, and effort, I certainly hope that they would! One can’t draw a straight line between reading novels or executing laboratory procedures and the development of certain moral states, but I suggest that everything, ultimately, is grist for the mill. If teachers step back, lower their expectations of the proper influence they should have on their students' lives, and just “teach,” they are probably wasting their time. As it is, the knowledge that sticks with college students is most likely to be what they learned, in many different ways, from their fellow students. At some point, students have to be able to do whatever it is that they undertake to do, and to understand what it takes to do it well, and to behave morally and ethically in the process. Taking the life out of teaching won’t help. Carved into the stone outside my window at Branford College were the words, “Thy light and truth shall set me free.” Even as a non-religious person, I understand the need for light to accompany truth.
“Dangerously out of touch” Stanley Fish’s “deflationary” view of university education, which seeks to limit the goals of a liberal arts education to “analyzing” ideas rather than making moral evaluations, might be more accurately called “impoverished.” The classroom is one of those precious places where people gather for the exchange of ideas. Like any other of these places, from caucuses to congregations, it is subject to many perils and imperfections, but is also constitutively—not, as Fish would haveus believe, contingently—related to deliberation, consideration, the making and even changing of opinions, most importantly moral ones. For a teacher, hoping to make every class “transformative” may indeed be unrealistic. Trying to cleanse the classroom of its moral content and purpose, however, is not just unrealistic, it is also dangerously out of touch with the passions and interests that drive most students and teachers to show up to class in the first place.
You can’t take ethics out of teaching If what Stanley Fish means to say is that he objects to stridently polemical or politically correct classroom bullying by the professoriat, then who could object to that? But to empty the act of teaching of ethical content is empirically impossible and intellectually dishonest. Ethical behavior and moral reasoning is inextricably intertwined with teaching young people in any setting, whether or not Mr. Fish wants to face up to his responsibilities. Had, for instance, some Yale professor taken this view many years ago, my then-senior counselor might not today be facing SEC civil charges and grand jury investigation for options backdating.
Students need more from a university Stanley Fish revels in the moral irrelevance of education, but his essay reads like a parody of ivory-tower insularity. Yes, the world benefits from technical proficiency. But universities don’t exist simply to replenish the ranks of bloodless academics. Teaching is a versatile craft that can be put to many legitimate ends, and equipping students to engage in the world outside the academy is surely no vice. Fish is free to opine otherwise, yet his blinkered view of the purpose of higher education shows that he understands little about what students demand, and the broader community needs, from a university. But apparently, I’m being a bad student simply by venturing any opinion on the matter. In Fish’s world, the pupil’s duty is simply to analyze the structure of Fish’s normative claims—not to decide whether Fish is making any damn sense.
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