Wow, and it's that's so interesting. You said you've been teaching for 60 plus years.
Ah, yes.
And you have written your first book. So I'm going to...
No, no, this is book number 22.
What?
Yeah.
Book number 22. Yeah, talk to me.
If you live this, if you live this long, you do a lot of work. Yeah, I have 22 books.
Okay. Some of them on English literature, some of them on legal matters, and a few of them on
higher education and how higher education works. Yeah.
And especially how free speech and academic freedom operate or should operate on college campuses.
Yeah. Okay. Wow. And I know that that was something we had spoken about recently.
Yeah.
Freedom of speech and considering in five days, you'll be starting
classes and everything will be intact. Tell me more about that.
Well, my position is simply that there is no freedom of speech on college campuses,
and there shouldn't be. That is, if you take the phrase academic freedom and you forget about the
word freedom, or at least don't emphasize the word freedom, which is such a powerful word in our
culture, and realize that academic is an adjective which tells you what kind of freedom is being
either asserted or defended here. And the answer is academic freedom. Then you ask the question,
what is academic freedom? And the answer is academic freedom is the freedom to do
the academic job, which means that if you're a teacher, what you're free to do is follow the
syllabus that you and your department have legitimated. You are not free as a teacher
to go outside the syllabus and start talking to your students about your personal views,
whether they be political or economic or anything else. So there's no freedom on the part of the
instructor who must follow the evidence of the material that he or she is teaching and not
introduce extraneous matters. Because once you start pronouncing, or as we sometimes say,
bloviating and sending your views out to the students, you're no longer a teacher. You're a
political agent, some kind of polemicist. But the students themselves also, at least in my understanding,
have very little, if any, freedom. Because their freedom is the freedom to go along with the
instructor's questions and to interrogate the materials of the class. The student is not free
to choose those materials or to complain about the teacher's methods. The student is in an
apprentice position. Remember, the student is being educated and is therefore not the educator.
And then this also extends to university administrators who should not be using their
microphones as university administrators to pronounce on political or social matters
in the world as if simply because they had an advanced degree, they had general wisdom
on every subject under the sun. So my message is always to academics, stick to your knitting.
Do what you've been trained and paid to do. And don't make the mistake of thinking that you're
a wise person. If you're any good, you're a competent person. That is, you know your job
and you know how to do it. So I think the word freedom is unfortunate when it's used in the phrase
academic freedom because it suggests to people something wide open, that people can say whatever
they like. And as far as I'm concerned, in the academy, what you say has to be dictated by your
subject matter. And if you do something else, you're not doing your job. How about that?
Yeah. How about that, Dr. Fish? I totally am hearing what you're saying. And as a previous
college student myself, it's very interesting to hear you talk about how they go off the syllabus
and go into things that they're actually not supposed to be teaching.
Yeah. Let's say I'm teaching a course on American political theory since World War II.
And I'm surveying all of the things that have happened and all the various movements that we've
gone through. At the end of the semester, my students should not have the slightest idea
of what my own political beliefs are because that's not the purpose of a class to introduce
them to my beliefs. They should have an idea if I've been any good at what I'm doing and telling
me what the primary political movements of the last 40 or 50 years have been. And I think that's
again what I mean by stick to your knitting. I have a three-part mantra. A, do your job. B, don't
try to do someone else's job, the job of a preacher or of a psychoanalyst or something. And C,
don't let anyone else do your job. Don't let governors, legislators, donors, or even parents
into your classroom. Keep your classroom academic and at the end of the course, your students will
have learned something, but what they won't have learned is what you personally believe because
that's not part of the package. Wow. You know, this is a really good conversation to have on a
podcast because it is often believed that teachers are definitely inputting their personal
opinions, rather be about politics or whatever topic they're teaching on. So I do have the
question of wondering, where's the line between free speech and responsible, you know, in regards
to all of this? Where is, is there a line? Well, certainly there's a line in the academy, that is
in the academic world. And I've already see, I think indicated where it's drawn. You're free to
speak on matters that are related to the course and the materials. Otherwise, you're not free.
But freedom of speech in our democratic society is quite a different thing because the assumption
there is the more voices, the better and the more people who are participating in the fashioning of
our laws, the better. So there you want everyone to be able to have a megaphone, although really
only the richest of people have the largest megaphone, but you want, you want at least
theoretically the possibility of every citizen who has an opinion to be able to voice that opinion
and perhaps influence the course of political affairs. Now, if that were the rule in the
academic world, it would be a disaster. An instructor would never get past the first five
minutes of the first day of class because he or she would have to listen to every silly opinion
every student in the classroom had. Now in the, again, political, in the political context,
we should listen to everyone's opinions, even the ones that we might think were silly, because that
kind of what we might call universal participation in the process is what goes on in a democracy.
It's not what goes on in a college classroom.
Yes. Well, I mean, it's such a, it's interesting because it's such a touchy topic, right?
It is a touchy topic. Remember last year, presidents of major universities, Harvard,
Columbia, University of Pennsylvania lost their jobs because first of all, they made the mistake
of going before a congressional committee asking them questions. If I had been a president of the
university, and I almost was once, but if I had been a president of the university and got a call
from a committee of Congress asking me to come in and explain myself, I would have said,
I have a dentist appointment or something like, oh, I'm going on a religious retreat
or something like that. I mean, these, these, I can't believe how incredibly dumb these people
were to walk into that situation and assume that they could get out of it alive, which they did not.
And it's because they couldn't answer questions about freedom of speech on campus in ways that
were clear and accessible. It is a fairly technical subject. And so they were putting themselves
at a disadvantage. But then in the spring, when all of those protests around the Israeli and Gaza
war became part of the campus scene, all of these questions became very urgent and heightened.
And there the issue was to what extent should students and perhaps some faculty have the right
to protest? And my answer may not surprise you to no extent whatsoever. The right to protest is not,
is again, a political right. It belongs to you as a citizen, as you're operating in the political
structures of our society. It's not an academic right. So if you protest, disturb the workings of
the institution, you should be thrown out of campus and perhaps expelled.
Wow. And because you have taught so long, do you believe that there is external pressure that has
caused academic freedom to change? Yes, there have always been external pressures. That is,
the academy is kind of like a ripe target. It's visible. Colleges and universities,
unless they're online, but colleges and universities occupy large tracts of land.
Their buildings are kind of tall and grand. Everyone drives past them, even if they don't
enter those buildings. Therefore, the investment that people have in education leads them to think,
I can do this better than they can. So from the beginning, in the 19th century, in the United
States, it was members of the church who wanted to take over universities and push them in a direction
that they thought proper. Later, it was large corporations that wanted the university and its
curriculum to reflect their desires. Later still, it was various movements, social movements,
social justice movements, et cetera. The point is that there are always constituencies that want to
step in and tell you as an academic how to do your job and what your job should be. And my message is
don't let them. Yeah. And so with the many years, and I know I keep saying it, but you have come from
so many years of teaching and stuck with teaching, is there a comparison to the US and
different countries in your opinion regarding academic freedom? I'm sure there is. I don't know
enough about other countries, but I do know that our universities and colleges are the beacons of
the educational world and students from other countries wish to come to the United States. So
that says something. I do think that what I would call the robust, a robust ethic of ethics,
ethic of academic inquiry, which is a phrase I like better than academic freedom, a robust
ethic of academic inquiry is very much alive in the United States, perhaps more so than in other
countries. But our colleges and universities are in fact the envy of the world. There's no doubt about
it. Yes, yes. And as you, as you began teaching this year and things start going, what are you,
what do you pose as your future challenges in this? Because, because so many other instructors
are expressing their opinions in class and you, Dr. Fish know your A, B and C,
do you think that that may affect how many people choose to come or stay into your class because of
that? Well, it's, it's possibly so. It's possibly the case, although I don't know. Now, as for
others, there are others who have decided or have been persuaded that it's their job not only to
teach the courses they're assigned to teach, but to save the world. And I once wrote a book, this
back in 2008 called Save the World on Your Own Time, meaning, look, you're paid by a college or
university often funded by the state to teach this subject or that subject, to meet with students,
to assign papers, to correct those papers. That's what you're supposed to do. If you have an
extraordinary desire or if you have a desire to save the world, to go out and do good works,
there's nothing wrong with that. Do it after school and on weekends. And if that's not enough,
get out of the academy and go to do the work you really want to do. Or as I've sometimes put it,
the academy, love it or leave it. That's a good one. That's, that's a good one right there.
So it's, it's, I see that you have much passion behind your teaching and that you have really
thought about a lot of things. And I do love your A, B and C. A, do your job. B, don't do someone
else's job. And C, don't let anyone else do your job. I believe that that can go in probably every
career field possible. That's right. And in fact, in most other career fields, you know, when I was,
when I was a dean at the University of Illinois, I went to talk to the state legislature
because they were always cutting our budgets and saying, we shouldn't be teaching these courses,
but we should be teaching those courses. And I said, look, most of you as state legislatures,
only state legislatures for certain part of the year, you're part-time legislators and you have
businesses, corporations, doctors' offices, factories. Suppose I were to walk into one of your
places of business and say, after about 45 minutes of walking around, here is the way I think you
should do things. You would throw me out and you would be right. And yet you're sitting up here in
Springfield, Illinois, never having been in my classroom and telling me how I should do things.
So I said to them, look, if you want me to listen to you, come and sit at my feet in my class
for 15 weeks and then maybe I'll let you say something.
I love that. It seems like you've been in several positions when it comes to education.
Because I don't want to take too much more of your time, I have one of my favorite questions.
What are the greatest joys of what you do?
Well, the greatest joys of what I do is unpacking material that might seem dense and
inaccessible and navigating or teaching students how to navigate through those materials so that
at a certain point they feel both that they've entered a new world and that they are competent
citizens in that new world. If by the end of the course my students feel that they could then turn
around and teach the course, then I will be extremely pleased. Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more
and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving
us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro
yourself.