1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,600
Wow, and it's that's so interesting. You said you've been teaching for 60 plus years.

2
00:00:05,600 --> 00:00:06,480
Ah, yes.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,360
And you have written your first book. So I'm going to...

4
00:00:09,360 --> 00:00:11,440
No, no, this is book number 22.

5
00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:12,500
What?

6
00:00:13,120 --> 00:00:13,680
Yeah.

7
00:00:13,680 --> 00:00:16,160
Book number 22. Yeah, talk to me.

8
00:00:16,720 --> 00:00:22,320
If you live this, if you live this long, you do a lot of work. Yeah, I have 22 books.

9
00:00:22,320 --> 00:00:32,320
Okay. Some of them on English literature, some of them on legal matters, and a few of them on

10
00:00:32,320 --> 00:00:37,760
higher education and how higher education works. Yeah.

11
00:00:37,760 --> 00:00:47,520
And especially how free speech and academic freedom operate or should operate on college campuses.

12
00:00:47,520 --> 00:00:52,560
Yeah. Okay. Wow. And I know that that was something we had spoken about recently.

13
00:00:52,560 --> 00:00:53,200
Yeah.

14
00:00:53,200 --> 00:00:57,680
Freedom of speech and considering in five days, you'll be starting

15
00:00:57,680 --> 00:01:01,680
classes and everything will be intact. Tell me more about that.

16
00:01:02,400 --> 00:01:08,080
Well, my position is simply that there is no freedom of speech on college campuses,

17
00:01:08,720 --> 00:01:15,680
and there shouldn't be. That is, if you take the phrase academic freedom and you forget about the

18
00:01:15,680 --> 00:01:23,120
word freedom, or at least don't emphasize the word freedom, which is such a powerful word in our

19
00:01:23,120 --> 00:01:30,640
culture, and realize that academic is an adjective which tells you what kind of freedom is being

20
00:01:30,640 --> 00:01:36,320
either asserted or defended here. And the answer is academic freedom. Then you ask the question,

21
00:01:36,320 --> 00:01:42,080
what is academic freedom? And the answer is academic freedom is the freedom to do

22
00:01:42,080 --> 00:01:48,880
the academic job, which means that if you're a teacher, what you're free to do is follow the

23
00:01:48,880 --> 00:01:57,360
syllabus that you and your department have legitimated. You are not free as a teacher

24
00:01:57,360 --> 00:02:02,720
to go outside the syllabus and start talking to your students about your personal views,

25
00:02:03,440 --> 00:02:10,240
whether they be political or economic or anything else. So there's no freedom on the part of the

26
00:02:10,240 --> 00:02:17,360
instructor who must follow the evidence of the material that he or she is teaching and not

27
00:02:17,360 --> 00:02:24,400
introduce extraneous matters. Because once you start pronouncing, or as we sometimes say,

28
00:02:24,400 --> 00:02:32,080
bloviating and sending your views out to the students, you're no longer a teacher. You're a

29
00:02:32,080 --> 00:02:40,560
political agent, some kind of polemicist. But the students themselves also, at least in my understanding,

30
00:02:40,560 --> 00:02:46,880
have very little, if any, freedom. Because their freedom is the freedom to go along with the

31
00:02:46,880 --> 00:02:55,360
instructor's questions and to interrogate the materials of the class. The student is not free

32
00:02:55,360 --> 00:03:02,240
to choose those materials or to complain about the teacher's methods. The student is in an

33
00:03:02,240 --> 00:03:09,360
apprentice position. Remember, the student is being educated and is therefore not the educator.

34
00:03:09,360 --> 00:03:16,800
And then this also extends to university administrators who should not be using their

35
00:03:16,800 --> 00:03:23,840
microphones as university administrators to pronounce on political or social matters

36
00:03:23,840 --> 00:03:31,200
in the world as if simply because they had an advanced degree, they had general wisdom

37
00:03:31,200 --> 00:03:39,760
on every subject under the sun. So my message is always to academics, stick to your knitting.

38
00:03:40,560 --> 00:03:48,240
Do what you've been trained and paid to do. And don't make the mistake of thinking that you're

39
00:03:48,240 --> 00:03:55,120
a wise person. If you're any good, you're a competent person. That is, you know your job

40
00:03:55,120 --> 00:04:02,640
and you know how to do it. So I think the word freedom is unfortunate when it's used in the phrase

41
00:04:02,640 --> 00:04:08,720
academic freedom because it suggests to people something wide open, that people can say whatever

42
00:04:08,720 --> 00:04:15,840
they like. And as far as I'm concerned, in the academy, what you say has to be dictated by your

43
00:04:15,840 --> 00:04:21,840
subject matter. And if you do something else, you're not doing your job. How about that?

44
00:04:21,840 --> 00:04:29,360
Yeah. How about that, Dr. Fish? I totally am hearing what you're saying. And as a previous

45
00:04:29,360 --> 00:04:38,400
college student myself, it's very interesting to hear you talk about how they go off the syllabus

46
00:04:38,400 --> 00:04:42,880
and go into things that they're actually not supposed to be teaching.

47
00:04:42,880 --> 00:04:52,080
Yeah. Let's say I'm teaching a course on American political theory since World War II.

48
00:04:52,960 --> 00:04:58,400
And I'm surveying all of the things that have happened and all the various movements that we've

49
00:04:59,520 --> 00:05:07,200
gone through. At the end of the semester, my students should not have the slightest idea

50
00:05:07,200 --> 00:05:13,280
of what my own political beliefs are because that's not the purpose of a class to introduce

51
00:05:13,280 --> 00:05:19,680
them to my beliefs. They should have an idea if I've been any good at what I'm doing and telling

52
00:05:19,680 --> 00:05:27,600
me what the primary political movements of the last 40 or 50 years have been. And I think that's

53
00:05:27,600 --> 00:05:37,840
again what I mean by stick to your knitting. I have a three-part mantra. A, do your job. B, don't

54
00:05:37,840 --> 00:05:45,360
try to do someone else's job, the job of a preacher or of a psychoanalyst or something. And C,

55
00:05:45,360 --> 00:05:53,840
don't let anyone else do your job. Don't let governors, legislators, donors, or even parents

56
00:05:53,840 --> 00:06:01,200
into your classroom. Keep your classroom academic and at the end of the course, your students will

57
00:06:01,200 --> 00:06:08,080
have learned something, but what they won't have learned is what you personally believe because

58
00:06:08,080 --> 00:06:17,520
that's not part of the package. Wow. You know, this is a really good conversation to have on a

59
00:06:17,520 --> 00:06:27,760
podcast because it is often believed that teachers are definitely inputting their personal

60
00:06:28,560 --> 00:06:35,760
opinions, rather be about politics or whatever topic they're teaching on. So I do have the

61
00:06:35,760 --> 00:06:45,760
question of wondering, where's the line between free speech and responsible, you know, in regards

62
00:06:45,760 --> 00:06:51,520
to all of this? Where is, is there a line? Well, certainly there's a line in the academy, that is

63
00:06:51,520 --> 00:06:59,280
in the academic world. And I've already see, I think indicated where it's drawn. You're free to

64
00:06:59,280 --> 00:07:07,600
speak on matters that are related to the course and the materials. Otherwise, you're not free.

65
00:07:08,240 --> 00:07:15,520
But freedom of speech in our democratic society is quite a different thing because the assumption

66
00:07:15,520 --> 00:07:22,720
there is the more voices, the better and the more people who are participating in the fashioning of

67
00:07:22,720 --> 00:07:31,120
our laws, the better. So there you want everyone to be able to have a megaphone, although really

68
00:07:31,120 --> 00:07:36,400
only the richest of people have the largest megaphone, but you want, you want at least

69
00:07:36,400 --> 00:07:44,000
theoretically the possibility of every citizen who has an opinion to be able to voice that opinion

70
00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:50,960
and perhaps influence the course of political affairs. Now, if that were the rule in the

71
00:07:51,440 --> 00:07:57,440
academic world, it would be a disaster. An instructor would never get past the first five

72
00:07:57,440 --> 00:08:03,440
minutes of the first day of class because he or she would have to listen to every silly opinion

73
00:08:03,440 --> 00:08:10,400
every student in the classroom had. Now in the, again, political, in the political context,

74
00:08:10,400 --> 00:08:17,600
we should listen to everyone's opinions, even the ones that we might think were silly, because that

75
00:08:17,600 --> 00:08:25,040
kind of what we might call universal participation in the process is what goes on in a democracy.

76
00:08:25,040 --> 00:08:28,640
It's not what goes on in a college classroom.

77
00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:36,160
Yes. Well, I mean, it's such a, it's interesting because it's such a touchy topic, right?

78
00:08:36,160 --> 00:08:42,640
It is a touchy topic. Remember last year, presidents of major universities, Harvard,

79
00:08:43,680 --> 00:08:51,680
Columbia, University of Pennsylvania lost their jobs because first of all, they made the mistake

80
00:08:51,680 --> 00:08:58,720
of going before a congressional committee asking them questions. If I had been a president of the

81
00:08:58,720 --> 00:09:04,560
university, and I almost was once, but if I had been a president of the university and got a call

82
00:09:04,560 --> 00:09:10,480
from a committee of Congress asking me to come in and explain myself, I would have said,

83
00:09:10,480 --> 00:09:18,800
I have a dentist appointment or something like, oh, I'm going on a religious retreat

84
00:09:18,800 --> 00:09:25,520
or something like that. I mean, these, these, I can't believe how incredibly dumb these people

85
00:09:25,520 --> 00:09:31,120
were to walk into that situation and assume that they could get out of it alive, which they did not.

86
00:09:31,120 --> 00:09:39,680
And it's because they couldn't answer questions about freedom of speech on campus in ways that

87
00:09:40,640 --> 00:09:47,120
were clear and accessible. It is a fairly technical subject. And so they were putting themselves

88
00:09:47,680 --> 00:09:54,960
at a disadvantage. But then in the spring, when all of those protests around the Israeli and Gaza

89
00:09:54,960 --> 00:10:03,520
war became part of the campus scene, all of these questions became very urgent and heightened.

90
00:10:04,080 --> 00:10:11,280
And there the issue was to what extent should students and perhaps some faculty have the right

91
00:10:11,280 --> 00:10:19,840
to protest? And my answer may not surprise you to no extent whatsoever. The right to protest is not,

92
00:10:19,840 --> 00:10:26,000
is again, a political right. It belongs to you as a citizen, as you're operating in the political

93
00:10:26,000 --> 00:10:33,920
structures of our society. It's not an academic right. So if you protest, disturb the workings of

94
00:10:33,920 --> 00:10:38,560
the institution, you should be thrown out of campus and perhaps expelled.

95
00:10:39,360 --> 00:10:48,400
Wow. And because you have taught so long, do you believe that there is external pressure that has

96
00:10:48,400 --> 00:10:55,760
caused academic freedom to change? Yes, there have always been external pressures. That is,

97
00:10:56,720 --> 00:11:02,560
the academy is kind of like a ripe target. It's visible. Colleges and universities,

98
00:11:03,120 --> 00:11:08,480
unless they're online, but colleges and universities occupy large tracts of land.

99
00:11:08,480 --> 00:11:15,760
Their buildings are kind of tall and grand. Everyone drives past them, even if they don't

100
00:11:15,760 --> 00:11:28,080
enter those buildings. Therefore, the investment that people have in education leads them to think,

101
00:11:28,080 --> 00:11:36,560
I can do this better than they can. So from the beginning, in the 19th century, in the United

102
00:11:36,560 --> 00:11:43,920
States, it was members of the church who wanted to take over universities and push them in a direction

103
00:11:43,920 --> 00:11:50,720
that they thought proper. Later, it was large corporations that wanted the university and its

104
00:11:50,720 --> 00:12:00,320
curriculum to reflect their desires. Later still, it was various movements, social movements,

105
00:12:00,960 --> 00:12:08,240
social justice movements, et cetera. The point is that there are always constituencies that want to

106
00:12:08,240 --> 00:12:17,360
step in and tell you as an academic how to do your job and what your job should be. And my message is

107
00:12:17,360 --> 00:12:26,480
don't let them. Yeah. And so with the many years, and I know I keep saying it, but you have come from

108
00:12:27,360 --> 00:12:34,480
so many years of teaching and stuck with teaching, is there a comparison to the US and

109
00:12:34,480 --> 00:12:39,760
different countries in your opinion regarding academic freedom? I'm sure there is. I don't know

110
00:12:39,760 --> 00:12:46,000
enough about other countries, but I do know that our universities and colleges are the beacons of

111
00:12:46,000 --> 00:12:52,640
the educational world and students from other countries wish to come to the United States. So

112
00:12:52,640 --> 00:13:03,600
that says something. I do think that what I would call the robust, a robust ethic of ethics,

113
00:13:03,600 --> 00:13:10,320
ethic of academic inquiry, which is a phrase I like better than academic freedom, a robust

114
00:13:10,320 --> 00:13:19,040
ethic of academic inquiry is very much alive in the United States, perhaps more so than in other

115
00:13:19,040 --> 00:13:25,120
countries. But our colleges and universities are in fact the envy of the world. There's no doubt about

116
00:13:25,120 --> 00:13:35,280
it. Yes, yes. And as you, as you began teaching this year and things start going, what are you,

117
00:13:35,280 --> 00:13:41,760
what do you pose as your future challenges in this? Because, because so many other instructors

118
00:13:41,760 --> 00:13:50,720
are expressing their opinions in class and you, Dr. Fish know your A, B and C,

119
00:13:50,720 --> 00:13:56,880
do you think that that may affect how many people choose to come or stay into your class because of

120
00:13:56,880 --> 00:14:05,600
that? Well, it's, it's possibly so. It's possibly the case, although I don't know. Now, as for

121
00:14:05,600 --> 00:14:13,200
others, there are others who have decided or have been persuaded that it's their job not only to

122
00:14:13,200 --> 00:14:20,560
teach the courses they're assigned to teach, but to save the world. And I once wrote a book, this

123
00:14:20,560 --> 00:14:29,920
back in 2008 called Save the World on Your Own Time, meaning, look, you're paid by a college or

124
00:14:29,920 --> 00:14:37,280
university often funded by the state to teach this subject or that subject, to meet with students,

125
00:14:37,280 --> 00:14:44,880
to assign papers, to correct those papers. That's what you're supposed to do. If you have an

126
00:14:44,880 --> 00:14:51,760
extraordinary desire or if you have a desire to save the world, to go out and do good works,

127
00:14:51,760 --> 00:14:59,520
there's nothing wrong with that. Do it after school and on weekends. And if that's not enough,

128
00:15:00,080 --> 00:15:07,200
get out of the academy and go to do the work you really want to do. Or as I've sometimes put it,

129
00:15:07,200 --> 00:15:13,920
the academy, love it or leave it. That's a good one. That's, that's a good one right there.

130
00:15:14,800 --> 00:15:23,200
So it's, it's, I see that you have much passion behind your teaching and that you have really

131
00:15:24,240 --> 00:15:30,880
thought about a lot of things. And I do love your A, B and C. A, do your job. B, don't do someone

132
00:15:30,880 --> 00:15:40,640
else's job. And C, don't let anyone else do your job. I believe that that can go in probably every

133
00:15:40,640 --> 00:15:47,280
career field possible. That's right. And in fact, in most other career fields, you know, when I was,

134
00:15:47,280 --> 00:15:53,760
when I was a dean at the University of Illinois, I went to talk to the state legislature

135
00:15:54,800 --> 00:15:58,800
because they were always cutting our budgets and saying, we shouldn't be teaching these courses,

136
00:15:58,800 --> 00:16:04,080
but we should be teaching those courses. And I said, look, most of you as state legislatures,

137
00:16:04,640 --> 00:16:10,000
only state legislatures for certain part of the year, you're part-time legislators and you have

138
00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:16,480
businesses, corporations, doctors' offices, factories. Suppose I were to walk into one of your

139
00:16:16,480 --> 00:16:23,680
places of business and say, after about 45 minutes of walking around, here is the way I think you

140
00:16:23,680 --> 00:16:30,800
should do things. You would throw me out and you would be right. And yet you're sitting up here in

141
00:16:30,800 --> 00:16:37,840
Springfield, Illinois, never having been in my classroom and telling me how I should do things.

142
00:16:38,400 --> 00:16:44,960
So I said to them, look, if you want me to listen to you, come and sit at my feet in my class

143
00:16:44,960 --> 00:16:48,720
for 15 weeks and then maybe I'll let you say something.

144
00:16:48,720 --> 00:16:56,080
I love that. It seems like you've been in several positions when it comes to education.

145
00:16:57,920 --> 00:17:02,480
Because I don't want to take too much more of your time, I have one of my favorite questions.

146
00:17:03,440 --> 00:17:05,840
What are the greatest joys of what you do?

147
00:17:06,880 --> 00:17:13,600
Well, the greatest joys of what I do is unpacking material that might seem dense and

148
00:17:13,600 --> 00:17:22,080
inaccessible and navigating or teaching students how to navigate through those materials so that

149
00:17:22,080 --> 00:17:28,960
at a certain point they feel both that they've entered a new world and that they are competent

150
00:17:28,960 --> 00:17:36,640
citizens in that new world. If by the end of the course my students feel that they could then turn

151
00:17:36,640 --> 00:17:44,240
around and teach the course, then I will be extremely pleased. Thank you for being here today.

152
00:17:44,240 --> 00:17:49,440
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions

153
00:17:49,440 --> 00:17:53,920
as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more

154
00:17:53,920 --> 00:17:58,560
and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving

155
00:17:58,560 --> 00:18:03,440
us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro

156
00:18:03,440 --> 00:18:08,240
yourself.