Some remarks on Stanley Fish on Academic Excellence and Campus Protests
For those of you who can read Dutch or like to play with Google translate, I have published an editorial (with my colleague Saskia Bonjour) in the NRC on the University of Amsterdam’s response to the student protests (here).
My friend Katharine Gillespie alerted me to a piece by Stanley Fish in THE LAMP: A CATHOLIC JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, SCIENCE, THE FINE ARTS, ETC. a few weeks ago. The piece is ostensibly directed at fellow academics and formally at “university administrators.” It’s a very American piece (even Vietnam era), framed as it is by the salience of ‘Tinker v. Des Moines (1969)’ and with great emphasis on ‘free speech.’ The very idea of ‘academic freedom’ is wholly absent. (More on that below.)
I am interested in Fish’s argument because he tries to get at a position a lot of academics (and the wider public) instinctively want to embrace. That position may be worth defending. But first I want to suggest that Fish doesn’t do such a great job at it.
Fish frames his contribution by introducing two main options. First (the one he rejects): (i) a stance in which a university tries to “contribute” to “alleviate” a social bad.* Even as stated this is a rather non-maximalist position. It doesn’t assume that universities can solve social problems nor does it aim to solve all social problems. (I return to that below.) Non-trivially, it also doesn’t state that all members of a university ought to contribute to alleviating a social cause. (Fish relies on a fallacy of composition in the position he rejects.) Even so let’s call this the soft-activist stance.
It’s worth noting that the soft activist stance is incredibly common in places you won’t think of as woke: engineering schools, medical schools, and agricultural schools. For (many) public universities and many public grant agencies that fund university researchers all over the world have missions to serve the public interest in some way.) Many of these have charters that demand from members of the faculty the soft-activist stance. Many of these professors are also members of a profession with (ethical) code of conducts that also flirt with the soft-activist stance. So, it is quite clear that Fish (a famous Miltonist when I was an undergraduate back in the day) is tacitly presupposing something like a liberal arts campus. By contrast, for Max Weber it was totally obvious (even uninteresting) that “science contributes to the technology of controlling life by calculating external objects as well as man's activities.” (From Science as Vocation” translated by H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills) That is, the soft activist stance.
I’ll let him present his own (second) position — the (ii) ‘truth for its own sake’ stance — in his own words:
Nothing in our charters, employment contracts, or compliance requirements directs us or authorizes us to play a role on the world’s stage. No applicant for a position is asked to produce political credentials; the credentials you must produce are academic. What training have you had in the field in which you propose to teach? What writings of yours have been accepted at leading journals? What new paths of research do you intend to go down? Those are the questions, not what rallies do you pledge to attend or what causes do you promise to fight for? An interviewer wants to know if you will be a competent academic performer, not if you will be a good person on the right side or on any side.
If this account of what institutions of higher learning appropriately do—they don’t do everything, they do the academic thing—is accepted, a conclusion (no doubt counterintuitive to many) immediately follows: colleges and universities have no obligation to foster or even allow political protests on campus. Indeed, it is quite the reverse, for if the overriding and defining imperative is to ensure the flourishing of the academic enterprise—classes being taught, research being conducted, procedures being followed—administrators have a positive duty to remove any impediments to that flourishing, including tent encampments, sit-ins, obstacles to exits and entries, building occupations, forcing the cancellation of classes and a host of other things now occurring.
Let me note three point of agreement: first, non cynically, we agree that “administrators have a positive duty to remove any impediments to” the flourishing of the “academic enterprise.” Of course, they do need to balance that against some other constraints (e.g., the law), and also the (opportunity) costs involved in removing such impediments. While one may well disagree over what the flourishing of the academic enterprise involves, I am going to bracket that momentarily.
Second, colleges need not have an obligation to foster political protests on campus. Some influential colleges (I have written on UPENN) claim that they intend to foster and develop citizenship, and in that case it would be self-contradictory not to foster political protests. But not all colleges have gone down that road. A lot of my colleagues often insist that we ought to foster ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic values,’ but unless it’s part of the university’s mission statement I agree with Fish that it is not self-evident part of the nature of a university. (However, in some countries — Germany-- a defense of the constitution with its democratic values is required; other countries involve oaths to the their constitution, too, of the professoriate.)
Third, I also agree with Fish that we hire for expertise not for political credentials. I am myself rather skeptical about the role of diversity statements as a means to produce politically desirable outcomes. (In practice, they mostly are an extra burden for the underpaid and favor those with connections to understanding what is expected in them.)
Because he is only focused on freedom of speech, and not academic freedom, it should not be odd about Fish’s position that he seems to miss that lots of academic experts have genuine expertise that may well contribute to alleviating a social bad (leaving aside the professional schools I mentioned above): economists, public health specialists, water sanitation, constitutional lawyers, logistic experts, including (I hasten to add) experts on crowd control. In many fields it is completely legitimate to treat such expertise as a significant factor in hiring. And how they contribute their expertise to social life is covered under academic freedom.
In fact, people tend to forget how much world-shaping expertise there is on any moderately decent university campus. (I sometimes think university leadership also tends to forget this.) If a university president really wants to incentivize a faculty’s attention to “contribute” to “alleviate” a social bad, it could do so. Of course, the leadership’s interest in a particular social bad need not be ranked as most urgent for the local campus expert. And it would be a great violation of academic freedom to force faculty to work on the university’s leadership or students’ pet projects. (Interestingly enough sponsored research does sometimes manage to create the right sort of pull in faculty attention.)
What’s lurking in Fish is a conflation between political/ideological commitment and the expertise that may or may not contribute to the alleviation of social ills. Obviously, the latter may well be shaped by non-trivial values and commitments, but it is important to recognize that they are not constituted by them. One may well be a small-pet veterinarian or ecologist because one is an animal-lover, it doesn’t follow that one’s expertise is exhausted by fondness for animal sentience. This conflation also means that Fish misses there may be more stances than the two that frame his general argument.
In fact, Fish’s position is completely untenable in the human and policy oriented sciences. I love quoting Max Weber on this very point, “the capacity to distinguish between empirical knowledge and value-judgments, and the fulfillment of the scientific duty to see the factual truth as well as the practical duty to stand up for our own ideals constitute the program to which we wish to adhere with ever increasing firmness.”
In an earlier piece I used this Weber quote argue for the idea that if one grants that students have academic freedom (and can contribute to it), they can also participate in it by questioning the worth of or the emphasis on a university’s research, including the means by which it contributes to a (perceived) social ill. And this questioning may well be in the form of a protest (regular readers know I am not especially impressed by the epistemic and rational nature of a crowd gathered in unison). To offer a forgotten example: in my life-time student activists have played a non-trivial role in shaping awareness about some of the costs of using animals in medical research.
Now, there is a question, of course, how far this practical duty to stand up for our ideals goes. Undoubtedly, Weber would argue (and famously does argue) for self-restraint in the class-room. This is my own position, too (especially in required courses).+ But outside of it, he does allow the scholar “to intervene in the struggles of world views and party opinions, he may do so outside, in the market place, in the press, in meetings, in associations, wherever he wishes.” (Sometimes this may be highly imprudent, of course.)
Campuses occupy an intermediary position between what Weber calls the ‘'market place’' and the class room. My own (quite Liberal) view is that these are, thereby (and for other reasons), excellent sites for local experiments in living. Included thereby is some contribution to social knowledge. Again, I don’t want to overemphasize this contribution. Most experiments go nowhere, after all (well at least before P-Hacking).
It’s undoubtedly true that sometimes student protests really are an impediment to the flourishing of the academic enterprise. Local administrators will have to make complex contextual judgments about these matters, and are likely to be second-guessed. After I published my piece in NRC today, both the Dean and the University President (and some people on social media) informed me that I am mistaken about the chronology that led to Monday’s police activity on campus. Of course, some of our colleagues who were among the protestors or on site dispute the university’s and mayor’s version of the events.
Because these cases will involve local judgment, and are ineliminably contested because they also involve debates over facts and values, it is tempting to remove such a source of conflict altogether: to pacify and sanitize university life and to keep protests at a very arm’s length and make space for pure research alone, and major sporting events. (I would be happy with such a gig—make me an offer!)
My own view is that it is permissible for a university to understand its corporate mission in terms that make political protests an impediment to academic flourishing. But for many universities this desire is a kind of fantasy. It is precisely because when we hire faculty we hire for expertise (and teaching skill), we create relatively diverse faculty because universities recruit globally and from society’s with nontrivial value pluralism (surveys about political preference in a two-party system don’t capture this diversity).** The same is true of our student bodies.** (That’s compatible with a kind of transnational cosmopolitan ethic we find on some campuses that is at odds with certain non-trivial political commitments.)
Student protests create focal points for attention and discussion about a particular university’s contribution, direct or indirect, to a social bad. Like all protests this will involve enormous selective perception. They will involve imperfect judgments. And this may involve colossal failures of judgment. Luckily, the stakes on campus are not so high that this downside risk should make us fearful.
*I removed references to Columbia University.
+There are interesting issues pertaining to courses that involve activist-scholarship. As well as disciplines (anthropology comes to mind) where ethical commitments about one’s ethical responsibility to study objects are being internalized in research methods.
**That’s compatible with, of course, faculty also agreeing on many topics in virtue of having similar life-trajectories (long periods in the classroom, apprenticeships, etc.) and class interests. But I’ll address viewpoint diversity some other time.