SPEAK POWER TO TRUTH: Save the World on Your Own Time. By STANLEY FISH

Stanley Fish likes the imperative mood. Three of the seven chapter titles in Save The World on Your Own Time are commands: ‘Do Your Job’; ‘Don't Try to Do Someone Else's Job’; ‘Don't Let Anyone Else Do Your Job’. More ‘Do's and ‘Don't's follow in the main text of what Fish calls ‘my one-note song’, ‘this severe account of what academics should and shouldn't do’. Things that academics ‘shouldn't do’ include: ‘announcing one's political allegiances in class, poking fun at the administration in power, railing against capitalism, giving the writing course over to discussions of various forms of discrimination’, ‘speaking truth to power, standing up for free speech, protesting against various forms of injustice’. A forbidding list. Fish's ‘Do's are generally more engaging than his ‘Don't's. When he concentrates on the things we should do (and leads by example) he is not just persuasive but exhilarating. I was surprised – and impressed – to hear that he teaches a ‘freshman writing class’. Such courses are a staple in North American universities, but many tenured academics see them as a chore and avoid them. A scholar of Fish's stature could easily pass the burden on to other hands and devote his teaching exclusively to (say) Milton. But in true Miltonic fashion he lays the lowliest duties on himself. He does not brag about it. The fact comes out casually, in an aside: ‘On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment… ’. For Fish, teaching ‘freshman writing’ is just doing what comes naturally. He is most persuasive in the delightful section of ‘Do Your Job’ entitled ‘A Radical Proposition: Teach Writing in Writing Classes’. Fish's agenda is ‘radical’ in the sense of going back to the ‘roots’. Some instructors of writing courses (motivated by zealotry or boredom) yield to the temptation to smuggle in ideological content. Fish sees this as an abdication: All composition courses should teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. No composition course should have a theme, especially not one the instructor is interested in. Ideas should be introduced not for their own sake, but for the sake of the syntactical and theoretical points they help illustrate, and once they serve this purpose, they should be sent away. Content should be avoided like the plague it is, except for the deep and inexhaustible content that will reveal itself once the dynamics of language are regarded not as secondary, mechanical aids to thought, but as thought itself. If content takes over, what won't get done is the teaching of writing, something the world really needs and something an academic with the appropriate training can actually do.

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