Save the World on Your Own Time

ISBN: 0195369025

Author: Stanley Fish

In this provocative look at higher education, Stanley Fish argues that 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 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 under the guise of academic freedom. 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.