We can always count on Stanley Fish to write something that will surely upset a bunch of faculty. (The small subset of the global population that we are!)
The latest is about academic freedom. This time around, I am not in the group upset with his column :-) Fish articulates a fine point that academic freedom is related to the job that we have to do, and is not the freedom to do whatever we want to do.
To quote Fish, To those who regard academic freedom as an unwarranted indulgence you can say, No, it's not an indulgence, it's a necessary condition for engaging in this enterprise, and if you want this enterprise to flourish, you must grant it. To those professors who turn freedom into license by using the classroom as a partisan pulpit, or by teaching materials unrelated to the course description, or by coming to class unprepared or not at all, you can say, Look, it's freedom to do the job, not freedom to change it or shirk it.
This is what it means to say that academic freedom is not a general freedom like the freedoms guaranteed you by the Constitution and the First Amendment; it is task-specific and task-limited.
I am reminded of an instance where a professor got upset at suggestions directed to all faculty not to convert classes into platforms for presidential elections, particularly when the course materials are not directly related to that. The response: "it is my academic freedom to teach whatever I want to teach in my classes." I agree with Fish that simply aint so.
The same issue of the Chronicle has a review of Fish's latest book. The reviewer is in the "other group" that is not happy with Fish's arguments--a group that I fall into every once in a while. But, perhaps when I am in the "other group" people like the reviewer are in the happy group?
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