Stanley Fish writes about our jobs...

Stanley Fish's blog on the New York Times is great as provocation.

Of course, before you can do your job, you have to know what it is. And you will not be helped by your college’s mission statement, which will lead you to think that your job is to cure every ill the world has ever known – not only illiteracy, bad writing and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ballpark, but poverty, racism, ageism, sexism, war, exploitation, colonialism, discrimination, intolerance, pollution and bad character. (The list could be much longer.) I call this the save-the-world theory of academic performance and you can see it on display in a recent book by Derek Bok, the former and now once-again president of Harvard. Bok’s book is titled “Our Underachieving Colleges,” and here are some of the things he thinks colleges should be trying to achieve: “[H]elp develop such virtues as racial tolerance, honesty and social responsibility”; “prepare … students to be active, knowledgeable citizens in a democracy”; and “nurture such behavioral traits as good moral character.”

Fish says all he can do is "academize" these virtues, not achieve them. As a great many comments to his blog suggest, this is a deliberate misunderstanding of what universities do. Critical thinking about these virtues is exactly what is meant, at the university, by achieving them. What does Fish think that Socrates was trying to do when he engaged his community in reasoned dialogue. Was he a simple moralist? Still, Fish's broader point, perhaps clumsily made, is that some professors think that moralizing is the same thing as academizing. Some students that I advise have told me that they have had the following experience: (1) they expressed the opinion that raises in the minimum wage were perhaps not the "no-brainer"* way to reduce poverty; (2) the comments are received with stunned hostility by a faculty member; (3) discussion is ended. The point is, even if raising the minimum wage in the United States is an effective way to redistribute income to reduce poverty, it is not the only way (an earned income tax credit might be more effective, say), and the point of learning in the classroom is to find out why it might be effective or ineffective in particular places and times.

*On the "no-brainer." Vice-President Cheney's recently remark, accurately quoted, apparently, that "dunking" people in water was a "no-brainer" if the purpose was to save lives... well, it just shows why we need Ethics requirements more than ever, right?