Do colleges teach writing at all?

Stanley Fish writes:

As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.

If Fish could not succeed in his attempts on convincing academic colleagues about the urgency to reform the way we teach writing, what chances do lesser mortals like me have, eh!
At our campus we have "writing intensive" courses that do a poor, poor, job of improving students' skills in writing, primarily because they come to these content courses without getting anything much from the writing and composition courses. I served on the "Writing Intensive Committee" on campus, and three years ago I wrote to the chair of the committee:

[I] have been particularly concerned about the need to emphasize writing skills. For two reasons: one, because of my own personal experiences when I switched to the social sciences after an undergrad in engineering; second, Orwell said it best for me that thinking and writing are related--bad thinkers are bad writers too--and, therefore, students' inability to write well is not in itself a problem as much as it being a symptom of less developed thinking skills.

It will be neat to get into some serious discussions on WI itself--whether it is working, what else can be done, ....

It was quickly obvious that such a framework would not be welcomed by academic colleagues and I ditched the idea. And now I am out of the commiittee too!

Stanley Fish on critical pedagogy and academic freedom

Stanley Fish starts his opinion piece with:

Last week we came to the section on academic freedom in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to you?

The chorus of answers cascaded immediately: “I’d be fired.” Now, I continued, imagine the same scenario and the same set of behaviors, but this time you’re a tenured professor in a North American university. What then?

I answered this one myself: “You’d be celebrated as a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary and an exemplar of academic freedom.”

:-)  There is more in his essay--read the entire piece, and you will lots to agree, and disagree, with.

Academic freedom is not an inalienable right

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?