Agenda:
- Everything You Wanted to Know About Teaching 1020 but Were Afraid to Ask
- Review of Responses to Save the World on Your Own Time
Observation Assignments:
- Laurie Bonventre – Joe
- Sarah Kern – Danny
- Michael Risitch – Amy, Derek
- Chinmayi Kattemalavadi – Katrina
- Clay Walker – Andy, Andrew
- Jane Asher – Sue, Aaron
Assignments for 11/0:
- Read Effective Grading
- Post your response to Fish’s text as a comment to this post w/in 48 hours of the end of class
- Grade sample papers (coming via e-mail tonight)
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October 28, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Amy Metcalf
Amy Metcalf
ENG 6001
October 26, 2009
Most people are familiar with the maxim “don’t drive angry,” but there is another rule of conduct I would like to propose to Stanley Fish and that is “don’t write while bitter.” Over the summer I had the pleasure of reading Denis Leary’s Why We Suck – in the book, Leary’s introduction clearly states that he is a bitter asshole, and that the reader should consider this fact while taking in his various arguments. In Leary’s case, the reader knows there is an element of humor involved, after all, Denis Leary is a famous comedian known for his bitter attitude toward aspects of American life. My question is: what’s Stanley Fish’s excuse?
Unfortunately, the majority of Fish’s suggestions are filled with the undertone of a very obvious issue. It seems that Fish has a desire to keep “outside” political powers away from the University. In the op-ed piece What Should Colleges Teach as well as in Save the World on Your Own Time, Fish expresses a concern that “hot-button” issues like relativism and atheism attract the attention of Neoconservatives like groups lead by Lynne Cheney which move to “pressure colleges and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements.” (Fish) What is interesting is the fact that Fish doesn’t take issue with the pressure of changes within academic departments, as long as the department is offered money by the institution or group applying the pressure. Fish seems to be using the guise of stressing the importance of teaching writing and only writing for his own fears of some neoconservative take-over of the University – which itself is a clear indicator of some aspect of political ideology.
Ultimately, I understand that Fish just wants to get down to the basics – but unfortunately, we’re not teaching those basics to our students. From what I understand, I can feel rather confident in saying that I will not be teaching my students the parts of a sentence, nor will I be asking them to use an entire semester to construct some faux language so that they may have a better grasp of how grammar is constructed. Not to say that those things wouldn’t be valuable – but that’s not the mission of most college-level composition classrooms. Instead, I think it would benefit instructors to think about how they can fine-tune a student’s ability analyze an argument. Fish does suggest this exact method of instruction, but muddles his overarching goal a bit by moving in and out of believing that certain political issues shouldn’t be used in composition courses, but also suggesting that the issues can be discussed as long as they’re not discussed on the basis of slinging opinions back and forth. Perhaps this naïve, but I have a difficult time believing that any college-level instructor could believe that spending an entire class period as an open forum of opinion-based discussion is contributing to the instruction of anything. What I do believe is that Fish means well, but his bitterness and paranoia make it difficult to see through to the good points he makes about composition instruction as a whole.
October 28, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Andrew Winckles
To me, the problem of Stanley’s Fish’s argument in Save the World on Your Own Time is far more central that the simple question of politics in the classroom or whether professors should attempt to make their students better citizens. No, the central issue I have with his argument is his definition of strict disciplinarity as such. For me, disciplinarity means little, it is the problem in the academy, not the solution. Specialization and definition have stunted our intellectual growth by prohibiting us from working across different disciplines and discourses – including politics and social justice. However, speaking of my own “discipline” of literature (at least as it is defined by him), Fish writes:
“But literary study could only have this effect [of raising awareness of social justice issues] only if it were no longer literary study, that is, if the study of stylistic effects, genres, meters, verse forms, novels, romance, epic, the contest of interpretations – everything that belongs to literary study as something distinctive, something one could master, something one could teach – were made instrumental to an end not contemplated by those who either produce the literature or consume it.”
If this were true, I would simply just quite school now. There is simply not enough hope to this concept. Luckily, it simply cannot be, for Fish fundamentally misunderstands what the study of literature is. Just because we explore social and political issues, both past and present, in the literature classroom does not mean that we do not study style, genre, meter, form. For example, a poem by P.B. Shelley like “The Mask of Anarchy” possesses is societal utility, sheds light on injustice, and prompts social action best when we understand its formal elements which are part and parcel of the literature classroom. It is only when we understand the brilliant way in which Shelley utilizes the popular ballad and the parallel structures of Hebrew poetry, that we truly understand why the poem is powerful and why it continues to speak today. Thus politics, social issues are inseparable from the study of “purely” literary issues. Even with authors who, unlike Shelley, may not have had an explicit social agenda, it is absurd to think that we can understand them without both a knowledge of the historical discourse in which it was created and how that discourse and text speak to our time.
This brings me back to my point about disciplinarity, for Fish’s conception of a discipline is far to narrow – it is only when we open up the disciplines that we truly begin to get at the heart of what a text means. In this, it seems that the explicitly interdisciplinary writing classroom is the ideal location for exploration of the intersections between culture, texts, and writing. This also means that Fish’s prescription for the writing classroom (they should focus on teaching mechanics and grammar) is once again misplaced. This is not to say that these elements have no place in the writing classroom, but only that they are incidental, easily dealt with. No, the purpose of the writing classroom is to explore these important politically charged issues that all of us bring into the classroom in a rhetorically and critically challenging way – utilizing multiple disciplines to color our discussion. Grammar and mechanics will fall into place later, but only when the class has been given the opportunity to explore issue they actually care about, which they actually see having real-world applicability.
October 28, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Aaron Pellerin
Aaron Pellerin
Dr. Jeff Pruchnic
ENG 6001
28 October 2009
Grilled Fish
In Save the World on Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues for an apolitical university, insisting, among other things, that faculty should do their jobs (which Fish maintains should not contain any political or social content), that they should not try to do anyone else’s jobs (by which Fish means those jobs which entail political or social content), and that they should not let anyone else (by which Fish means people with political or social agendas) do their jobs for them. On one hand, I agree with Fish’s sentiments on the broadest level. Universities – and their faculty, administration, and staff – should not be in the business of creating or supporting social or political policies. The purpose of a university is to educate students and to produce knowledge; the university should focus on these goals, and in turn, outside forces (political or otherwise) should not try to interfere with the university’s pursuit of their goals.
On the other hand, I disagree with much of what Fish says when he attempts to support his argument. For instance, he seems to be rather undecided about the role of “content” in the classroom, particularly in writing classes. At one point, he demands that the writing classroom be content-free, saying that “Content should be avoided like the plague it is” (45). Yet at other times, he discusses at some length how to incorporate socially- or politically-oriented content in a way that is acceptable to him (his suggestion is to academicize and thereby depoliticize the material). In a previous response I have already given my opinion of Fish’s content-free writing class model, so here I will restrict myself to pointing out the contradiction in Fish’s arguments: here he calls content a plague, there he calls for academicizing content to make it appropriate for the classroom. Which is it – content or no content?
However, my biggest problem with Fish has to do with his concept of the political, and how he suggests dealing with politics in the classroom. As an example of how to academicize a political topic, Fish takes the question of George W. Bush’s presidency. My first objection is that rather than a hypothetical general discussion of Bush, Fish uses the hypothetical question of whether Bush was the worst president ever – in other words, his hypothetical situation conveniently assumes a professor who frames the debate as blatant political commentary. Leaving that aside, Fish recommends changing the thrust of the question so that the debate is about how presidents have been ranked historically and about the American obsession with ranking things; according to Fish, “The more this line of inquiry is pushed, the less the question ‘Is George W. Bush in fact the worst president in our history?’ will be foregrounded. The urgency of that question … will have been replaced by the urgency to understand a phenomenon” (28). The problem is, Fish has not depoliticized the question of Bush’s efficacy – he has simply dodged it. Rather than showing how to include a political question in a non-political way, he has shown only how to deflect such a question. In doing so, he avoids answering what, for me, is the most interesting problem he raises: how can we (and I think we can) include political and social content in our courses without making the classes inappropriately political or social?
October 28, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Danny Sain
In Save the World on Your Own Time, Stanley Fish largely rejects the relatively recent turn in post-secondary education towards working, in universities, at producing good citizens rather than producing good students. According to Fish’s understanding of the role of a university education, we should not be teaching civic virtue, but rather teaching skills such as the how to analyze literary and cultural texts and how to transmit the ideas and knowledge that result from those analytical inspections. As Fish says,
Teachers…teach materials and confer skills, and therefore don’t or shouldn’t do a lot of other things—like produce active citizens, inculcate the virtue of tolerance, redress injustices, and bring about political change. If course a teacher might produce some of the effects—or their opposites—along the way, but they will be, or should be, contingent and not what is aimed at. (66)
The problem, as Fish explains it, is that the aim of universities to produce good citizens is an effect based on hope, and one which we cannot actively or effectively teach in the classroom. For all our posturing, we simply do not know how to teach like this and, even if we did, we would not know how to measure the effects of our efforts. As a result, these efforts fall under the heading of “Someone Else’s Job” and, as such, we should leave it alone in favor of doing our own jobs.
Certainly there is some logic in Fish’s argument, and he addresses what is surely one of the foremost ethical concerns of the contemporary university, but I find myself questioning the ultimate fairness of his claims, as well as what he sees as a legitimate alternative to the issue-based teaching model that he attacks. I suppose my problem with Fish’s claims is that I believe it still is the focus of the university to teach analytical skills and to train students in how to transmit knowledge, and what Fish is essentially against is the way the contemporary educators go about imparting these skills to students. Obviously there must be some medium through which these skills are transmitted, just as there must be some texts that are handled in order to work on and hone one’s analytical prowess. What Fish seems to be against, then, are the ways that we handle information and the specific literary and cultural texts that we choose to use in teaching. The goal of education has always been to affect students ways of looking at and interpreting the world, so it seems that Fish’s real problem is the way of looking currently being employed. And this is the point where I fail to understand Fish’s argument. There is a reason why using cultural issues to teach analysis and writing is effective: these are the issues that life—not just academic life—centers around; these are the issues that dominate and/or come to dominate students’ live as a matter of course, and so these are the issues that students dig into and attach themselves to in a way that most cannot with other issues. There is a reason why teaching Shakespeare will often fail where teaching “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” will succeed. There is value in using that which a student’s mind readily gloms onto as a means to force them to hone their analytical and communication skills, a possibility of succeeding at making them better students by engaging them as civic entities. And engaging students like this in no way necessitates proselytizing activities that seek to make students think along certain lines or in particular ways; we can respect student beliefs and opinions while forcing them to analyze and engage those beliefs and assumptions in new ways, in the process forcing them to better present and represent those beliefs and opinions, an activity which fulfills every aim of the university while making them better citizens. “Good citizen”, after all, does not denote a particular mode of thought or stance, but that one handles whatever mode of thought or stance responsibly and effectively. Fish, in his book, seems to miss this point entirely.
October 28, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Joe Paszek
“The name I give to this process whereby politically explosive issues are made into subjects of intellectual inquiry is ‘academicizing.’ To academicize a topic is to detach it from the context of its real world urgency, where there is a vote to be taken or an agenda to be embraced, and insert it into a context of academic urgency, where there is an account to be offered or an analysis to be performed” (Fish 27).
While I do believe that there is much to be gained from Stanley Fish’s 2008 text, Save the World on Your Own Time, sometimes I feel that Fish finds it all to easy to detach politics from the classroom. In the process of ‘academicizing’ every issue that floats into his pedagogical domain, a mechanism that I do in fact find necessary and vital to the teaching of students, Fish supplies the reader with a gamut of examples that are rich for academic/rhetorical exploration. These examples (for instance, his 2004 classroom discussion of John Kerry’s speech) are, however, also very heated, ‘hot topic’ issues. Fish posits, with relative ease, “the arguments put forward in relation to them should be dissected and assessed as arguments and not as preliminaries to action on the part of those doing the assessing” (25-6). Furthering this, Fish also stresses that we as instructors should be wary of crossing the fine line between academic exploration and political indoctrination, that students should leave class with nothing more than a better grasp on the tools necessary for critical analysis (and hopefully an understanding of how a sentence works!). As a new instructor, I can’t help but wonder about my own ability to completely detach my own discussions/argumentations/opinions, especially when it comes to issues that impact my day-to-day living, with the political and rhetorical issues that are written on my own skin. I may in fact find it relatively easy to ‘academicize,’ for instance, Obama’s health care plan, or the war in the Middle East, or even sex-education policies in the school system, but how do I make completely academic gay rights and the marriage issue? In effect, how do I academicize myself?
My first inclination is to refuse myself permission to address these topics in class if I cannot separate myself from my emotions. Should I, as Fish demonstrates, eventually run my writing class as a section on the proper use of the semi-colon and other variously ill used grammatical mechanisms? Should I take away all topics that might be misconstrued as liberal indoctrination? A second urge is to present this material to the class, reveling in my own bias, hoping to bring 24 un-expecting, naïve students over to my gay agenda. Echoing my thoughts from last week’s readings, how hard should I work to present a balanced perspective in my classes? Should I care as long as the material that I am presenting offers up a logical and rhetorically sound critique? While our job may not be to produce more capable, fruitful citizens, I still do believe that a vital component of the college classroom is to introduce students to perspectives that are not their own, to make them aware of the variances of social and political opinion.
October 28, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Derek Risse
In Save the World on Your Own Time, Stanley Fish responds to a host of professors and administrators that read the classroom as a site for potential socio-political intervention. From Fish’s perspective, this politicizing pedagogical position is ultimately more controversial than it is productive, namely because it gives rise to a number of public relations quandaries—the pervasive public fear, for instance, that the university operates as a “left” breeding ground. Although political intervention may appeal to any given professor’s liberal sensibilities, at the end of the “business” day, our work involves teaching students how to write and interpret texts (71). From this perspective, the university functions less as a site for liberal indoctrination and more as a space where professors introduce students to important systems of knowledge (52). Our business, in these terms, is not to tell students what to do when they “step into the ballot box” or negotiate a contract, but rather, to teach them how to investigate texts, helping them learn the ins and outs of something like Plato’s Republic or Joyce’s Ulysses. This approach, in Fish’s terms, is burdensome enough. Moreover, he argues that professors are not even particularly qualified to teach politics or to create political bodies. This type of learning practice, simply put, is not the responsibility of university professors.
Though Fish is particularly invested in revising course curricula, he seems equally interested in how the university presents itself to the public. This is to say, that Fish’s interest in what goes on in the classroom is rooted in his concern with how the public perceives the university more generally. In the section entitled “Don’t let anyone else do your job,” he crafts a list of the typical defenses university officials provide when interrogated by political representatives or members of the public. Generally, those in administrative positions justify university contributions in terms that are somewhat foreign to their work. We justify our work by playing someone else’s game. Alternatively, what Fish counsels is that administrators boldly stand up for intellectual analysis that may never yield a definitive or useful answer—at least for the public:
“Stand up…for research conducted just because researchers find certain problems interesting, for wrestling with puzzles only five hundred people in the whole world are eager to solve—and when those values are dismissed or scorned, challenge the scorner to exhibit even the slightest knowledge of what really goes on in the classroom or the laboratory” (104)
As politically uncontroversial as Fish recommends that professors proceed in the classroom, he renders quite a different picture of the type of involvement required of those in administrative positions. Here, Fish is interested in conflict as a tool, citing his own experiences as giving credence to this philosophy. We need, in these terms, to reeducate people, not to pander to the masses (158).
Interpreted in this light, the university functions as a place where professors should be rewarded for pursuing pedagogical practices that might not fit with mainstream conceptions of what education should contribute, but inhibited from politicizing the classroom environment and stepping outside of the bounds of their “business”:
“Academic freedom, correctly (and modestly) understood, is not a challenge to the imperative always to academicize; it is the name of that imperative; it is the freedom to be an academic, which is, by definition, not the freedom to be anything and everything else” (80)
Surprisingly, despite my own political pedagogical interests/motivations, I find that I am persuaded by some of Fish’s arguments. My main point of contention, as I have one, relates to how we read the type of work that Fish advocates. In chapter two, Fish argues that he is interested in a pedagogy that facilitates, “the art of speaking and writing precisely with attention to grammatical form.” If we consider that is our task, at least partially, to teach students how to be persuasive as they write and speak, how do we see this interest in remaining forever attentive to grammatical form conflicting with the sometimes-political nature of rhetorical practice? Although Fish admits that he is not wholly against the inclusion of cultural, social, or political material in classroom practice, there seems to be a way in which teaching people how to communicate requires stepping beyond the material at times. Simply put, how might we reconcile the political tension of rhetorical practice with Fish’s interest in grammaticality? Can we teach students to be cognitive of how political issues play rhetorically without falling back on certain fundamentally personal political inclinations?
October 30, 2009 at 10:19 am
Andy Engel
I want to discredit Fish’s text because of his curmudgeonly attitude, but I found myself grudgingly agreeing with him on his wish “to define academic work precisely and narrowly in opposition to those who would expand it to include everything under the sun and a few things above it” (17). While there is some merit here in rejecting an over-politicization of higher education, Fish throws around terms like “right” and “true” a bit too often and exposes an aspect of his view that is too empirical for my taste. He states his goal as an educator: “What I strive to determine, together with my students, is which of the competing accounts of a matter … is the right one and which are wrong” (38). This cloistered approach is both an idealized and unattainable goal, and we are doing our students a disservice by attempting to practice education in space of some vacuous rhetoric. This can be seen when Fish emphasizes a “content-based writing class” and is proud of his assignment for students in which they supposedly learn syntax by creating a new language (40). This raises a question I am still struggling with, how does one have a composition class in which nothing is composed? Is it a grammar class? On this point, Fish hedges somewhat, “All composition courses should teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else” (44). I am at a loss to put my finger on this rhetoric he speaks of so approvingly.
For all of Fish’s emphasis on “being distinctive” (168), in following good pedagogical practices, I come away from the text with a sense that his call to arms is itself paradoxical and troubled. While I am intrigued by his push for being explicit about the function of a university, a professor, and a student, I can’t help but see this as an overly universalizing approach. I return again to a reading from Prof. Marback’s course this week, Brian Street. Street takes up a discussion of literacy (encompassing both writing and reading skills) as a whole contextual practice and one that should only be evaluated with this context in mind. Obviously, Fish has a very constrained view of the duties of educators, “To academicize an issue is to detach it from those contexts where it poses a choice of what to do or how to live … and insert it into an academic context where it invites a certain kind of interrogation” (170). While this is methodology has some merit, it is severely limited if it does not address the original context of the give issue being discussed. “Just apply a simple test,” says Fish, “am I asking my students to produce or assess an account of a vexed political issue, or am I asking my students to pronounce on the issue?” (30). This is not an either/or debate; we do not and should not have to choose between staunchly “academic” and taking the “everything’s political” road. There is a middle ground: while it is good to strive for a rigorous approach to material in the classroom, that should not exclude some of these other, perhaps moralizing questions from being included as well. These more politicized aspects are as much a part of the issues we are discussing as the rhetorical moves they employ. To ignore or discredit these “less academic” aspects of our topics does our students as disservice by disconnecting them and their discussion from the larger context.
October 30, 2009 at 11:20 am
Katrina Newsom
Katrina Newsom
Fishing for New Approaches in Teaching and Saving the World at the Same Time
Reading Stanley Fish’s Save the World on Your Own Time caused me to put into practice the central argument of the book: Analyze the work of the person and not the person. Since I am on a roll, I think there are a few more slogans I can use to summarize his project. “Teach do not preach. Do the job but don’t let …” okay, enough of that. What I am trying to get at is that although Fish may seem a bit crass in his argument, he is making astute observations and claims about some of the issues that are occurring in the classroom. As a student, I have experienced the professor who used the class as platform to campaign for some political office of God knows what. I remember feeling frustrated and cheated, because I had to spend an a half of hour or more listening to them preach their convictions. Even if I agreed with their position, I would have preferred this type of conversation to take place over coffee. Also, I found that when a teacher discussed their political opinions in the class two things usually occurred (both of which where nonproductive): one, many of the students withdraw from the class discussion and two, the students who remained invested in discussion tend to spend time going on a tangent about their own personal views. If anyone has experienced such an occurrence, they know that usually this type of conversation usually spiraled out of control. The lesson for that day was not discussed thoroughly and many left the class feeling ill prepared.
For these reasons, I agree with Fish who suggests that teachers should academicize current events and conversations in order to incorporate them into one’s pedagogy. I think students suffer a disservice if they are isolate from such things. Also, if as Fish suggests, the job of teachers are to “introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience,” and that they are to “equip those same students with the analytical skills [that] will enable them to move confidently within those traditions” in and beyond the class then it is imperative that they engage the students in ongoing issues of today. However, I believe that teachers can introduce them to such conversation using analytical tools. I remember when I taught the Eng three thousand – something English and African American studies, I encountered several instances in the class when students wanted to take the discussion of a particular text outside the text into the realm of opinion. I allowed them make their points (within a limited amount of time of course) and used what they stated as an opportunity to return the conversation back to the lesson. A practice I also use in the Writing Center as some of you may know.
I can understand some of the reasons why an instructor may be invested in giving their opinions in class, especially, when I begin to think about the research work that some of them are doing. It may be difficult to not speak out against injustice. And to be quite frank, some issues are so entrenched in controversy, it is virtually impossible to move within the discourse of the topic without letting an opinion or two seep out.
One of the major concern I have as a Black, African-American, Negro, Colored or what every of code is used to describe me now-a-days is that I catch myself using the narrative point of view “we” when discussing some work. In the Writing Center this week, I was helping a student with an assignment for Political Science. For the assignment, he was taking the perspective of an African American male who moved north in the early 20th century. I caught myself at one point saying “we”. I recalled saying it only once however, I was nervous that I created a gap between the student and me. As both a student and a teacher, I try to stay away from this narrative position, because like opinions, it can isolate students.
Although it is an aside to Fish’s argument, his argument caused me to think of this concern. Both Logan and Royster in their articles discussed ways to academicize race and race relations in order to be productive in the classroom. Does anyone else have a suggestion of how to approach this issue?
October 30, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Sue Muecke
Is Berube the new Fish or is Fish the new Berube? As I paged through Save the World on Your Own Time, I found myself increasingly forgetting which of the two pedagogues had written the book. The hyperbolic self-love, the pomposity with which they share their “secret knowledge” with the reader – the way I wanted to chuck the book out a window – all their similarities seem to have conflated the authors into some Fish-Berube hybrid in my mind.
Take their views on politics in the classroom. Both Berube and Fish believe that professors’ personal political views should be kept out of the classroom. However, both also seem to believe that there’s a strict divide between the classroom and non-classroom worlds, that essentially what’s outside the classroom stays outside the classroom. Fish states that “after hours, on their own time, when they write letters to the editor or speak at campus rallies, [professors] can be as vocal as they like about anything and everything” (Fish 29). And while Berube is “a fairly opinionated and outspoken liberal-progressive writer outside the classroom,” he’s conscientious enough to “keep most of [his] political opinions to [himself] when [he] enter[s] the classroom” (Berube 3).
It’s completely ridiculous, though, to assume that such a separation between classroom and “real world” is possible. Do Fish and Berube honestly believe that their students will have never read anything they’ve written? Certainly Berube says something much like that in What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, but I feel such an opinion does his students a disservice. At the very least, Fish’s and Berube’s reputations undoubtedly precede them – I would bet, in fact, that some of their students register for their classes specifically because they are the ones teaching them. So it’s at best naïve and at worst moronic of them to assume that their political views could ever be kept outside the classroom. Fish and Berube may choose to not discuss their political affiliations in class, but that doesn’t mean their students are unaware of them.
But then I pity the students in Fish’s writing class, a class where students are taught how to write properly but not how to say anything. Apparently, both content and meaning are “the enem[ies] of writing instruction” (Fish 46). Instead, “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” (Fish 44). Yes, God forbid an instructor actually be interested in what he or she is teaching! And how does Fish propose to teach grammar and rhetoric? A classic writing instruction textbook? Diagramming sentences? No, nothing as pedestrian as that – instead, he makes his students make up their own languages throughout the course of the semester.
I suppose I can see Fish’s point – that such an exercise introduces students to concepts such as syntax, lexicon, tense, and mood in a practical hands-on capacity. But I’m not convinced that such experience in a personal made-up language easily translates back to English’s grammar rules. And even if it does, I think what one has to say is at least as important as how one says it, so Fish’s eliminating content from writing instruction strikes me as completely preposterous. Overall, I do think Fish has some valid points. I think there is a benefit to a professor’s keeping his/her personal views outside the classroom. I just question whether such a thing is possible in practice.