The conversation about what teachers should and should not be doing in a college classroom could go on forever, and I may return to it in a future post, but for now I want to take one more stab at clarifying my position. Many of those who, in their comments on my last column, find fault with what I say assert what is for them an obvious and incontrovertible truth: everything is, at bottom, political, and therefore any effort to avoid politics in the classroom by “academicizing” political questions is doomed to failure. Earl Brown Jr. reports that when he told a student that “the purpose of teaching was not to inculcate students with your values,” she replied, but “all acts are political acts.” He wanted to respond but found that he didn’t know how (“I had no ready response”). I am happy to tell him that help has arrived.

Let’s first get on the table a few examples of the classroom activities said by my respondents to be politically inflected, whether the instructor is aware of it or not. Peter Gardner observes that in a class in which the texts of John Milton or John Rawls (my examples) are being taught and debated, “the instructor has selected those texts and framed those arguments,” and he asks, “Are those choices apolitical?” Anthony Dimatteo makes the same point: Fish’s case falls apart, he maintains, “as soon as we begin to write a syllabus,” for “we select some texts for our students to read and not others” and “we choose some topics to discuss and present some opposing views, but not just any topic and not just any view.” C.B. generalizes the point: “Anything, any discourse, any position, any field of study,” he insists, is political “in that it advocates certain positions and points of view with certain consequences, and as such, it excludes other interpretations.” Michael M. O’Hara agrees and, for good measure, accuses me of bad scholarship “[Fish] ignores countless years of scholarly analysis of the complex web of politics that surround and undergird nearly everything in the scholarly enterprise.”

Well, it would be hard for me to ignore a strain of scholarly analysis to which I have been a prominent contributor, but that is a minor, and a personal, matter, and I pass it by. It is no doubt true that a web of politics surrounds and undergirds everything that goes on in higher education. Private and public sources fund colleges and universities, and they could have chosen – and some would say should have chosen – to fund something else. Within the college, resources are given to some departments and withheld from others. Within those departments, some courses are required for the major and others are not. And the instructors of those courses focus on some issues and downplay or completely marginalize others. At every level, then, selections are made that would have been made differently by others who had different ideas of what is valuable or central to the enterprise. And one could, I suppose, regard those differences as political, if the political is defined as the realm in which competing agendas, reflecting opposing views of the way things should be, fight it out.

Defined that generally, the realm of the political is in fact coincident with the entire realm of human behavior, and no activity escapes it. If I contribute money to the campaign of a candidate for public office, I have acted politically under anyone’s understanding. Under the expanded understanding of the political, I have acted politically if I enter teaching rather than advertising. And I have also acted politically if I teach and write about Milton rather than Hemingway or Toni Morrison. Merely to put it that way, however, should alert us to the fact that by stretching the notion of the political to include everything, we have fudged distinctions that will return in force the moment some simple questions are posed. Is the political act (if you want to think of it that way) of teaching one author rather than another really the same as the political act of campaigning for one candidate rather than another? Is the political act (at least by this expanded definition of the political) of teaching a theological Milton (as I do) rather than a feminist Milton or a psychoanalytic Milton really the same as the political act of using Milton as a lens through which to view the depredations or glories of the Bush administration? The answer to both questions is no. These may all be political acts if the category of the political is taken to be all-inclusive, but that only means that unless you want to equate the choice of a text to teach with the choice of whether or not to support a war – and if you want to do that, there is nothing I could say to you and no reason for you to read me – at some point you’re going to have to recover the common-sense differences you have sacrificed to a slogan. (Otherwise it’s all forest and no trees.)

One way to do that and still keep the slogan is to say yes, everything is political, but the politics appropriate to the academy – the politics that involve deciding what readings will serve to introduce students to the field – is different from the politics of the ballot box – the politics that involve deciding when or whether security should trump civil liberties. In each case the politics will follow from the distinctive imperatives of the enterprise – in one case the imperative of being responsive to the present state of scholarship, in the other the imperative of determining what’s good for the country. Partisanship will be a feature of both contexts – fights over the next department chair can be just as vicious as fights over the next Supreme Court justice – but it will not be the same partisanship, and to pretend that it is so that you can justify using the classroom to introduce an ideological agenda is to trivialize what is at stake in either venue. And if you do decide to say the sensible thing – yes it’s all politics, but the politics, and the decorums they bring with them, are not everywhere alike – there will be no longer any point to insisting that everything is political; that mantra will not be doing any work, and you might as well stop intoning it, a directive I would write into law if I could.

But isn’t my own position – that ballot-box politics has no place in the politics of the classroom – itself political? This is the question raised by Cikarmak, who asks me to realize that what I advocate “is itself eminently political and susceptible to the very criticisms” I aim at others. Francois Comilliat is even more direct: “The kind of teaching ethics you defend is indeed an ethics, assuming principles, an active determination of what is good.” Once again, this is absolutely correct, but it does not challenge or contradict my argument. I acknowledge that my position is an ethical one replete with values. And because it is a position contested by others, it is, by definition, political. But the politics it participates in will be the politics of the academy, where one debates approaches to knowledge (Should we teach quantitative or qualitative methods in the social sciences?) rather than the politics of election campaigns where one debates courses of action (Should we be isolationist or Wilsonian in our foreign policy?) The two kinds of politics are not only distinct; they can come apart in the behavior of a single person. Someone might disagree with me about what should and should not be done in the classroom and yet share my views about the environment or the deficit or the Iraq war. And conversely, an ally of mine in the curricular wars might part company with me when it comes to the question of the minimum wage.

In short, academic political allegiances and “real world” political allegiances are logically independent of one another, a point made inadvertently by William H. Payne when he declares that “Dr. Fish is a right wing apologist” (echoing others who accuse me of wanting to uphold the current power structure or promote a conservative political position or undo the advances of the 60’s.) In the context of academic disputes, “right wing” might be a plausible description of where I am, for whether the issue is the curriculum, the scope of academic freedom, the constraints on interpretation, the requirement for tenure, or the form of university governance, I tend to be on the conservative side. But out in the world I almost always vote Democratic and support the initiatives associated with the liberal left. And I am not the only one who displays one political profile in the precincts of the university where the issues are professional, and quite another when the school day is over and the conversation turns to what the next Congress should do. The point, again, is that the “everything-is-political” argument, even if it is true at some very high level of generality, in no way undermines the distinction between what is appropriate when you are speaking at a political rally and what is appropriate when you are speaking to students in front of a class.

The mistake of thinking that politics and political options are always the same no matter what the context or situation is a variant of the mistake of thinking that one’s responsibility to truth is always the same no matter what the context or situation. L.A. Marland declares that “unlike Fish I believed and continue to believe in the truth.” The reasoning, as I take it, is that because I urge an analysis of political controversies and inveigh against coming down on one side or the other in the classroom, I must be a postmodern relativist who disdains notions of truth and objectivity. (This is the burden of several posts put up by Christian Haesemeyer.) In fact, the heart of my position (as it has been elaborated in many writings) is that determining the truth of something – whether it be the meaning of a poem or the causes of an event or the neural mechanisms of the reading process – is the prime academic activity. It’s the business we’re in, and I reject the arguments of those who think we are in some other business like the fashioning of moral character or the production of democratic citizens or the inculcation of tolerance and respect for others. These may all be worthwhile endeavors (although I have my doubts about the last one), but they are not academic endeavors, and it would be wrong, I contend, to give the classroom over to them and take precious time away from the search for truth.

But (and here’s the rub) the truth you are in search of as a teacher must be an academic truth, not truth generally, or the truth about anything and everything. There are many who believe, with St. Augustine, that the truth and meaning of any matter – scientific, literary, historical – is to be found in the fact that Christ died for our sins and redeemed us on the condition that we accept him as the foundation of our lives. For such believers, Jesus Christ is the answer to every question. But unless you teach in a sectarian college where that answer is to some extent mandated, you are committed to giving answers in the terms provided by the academic history of the question. You may be fully persuaded that it was the hand of God that gave victory to the Allies in World War II, but if you’re teaching a history class on World War II, you are obliged to talk about military strategies, troop levels, supply lines, weather conditions, weaponry and the like. Or to take an example always in the news, you may be fully persuaded that God created the world and everything in it, but if you’re teaching biology, that proposition cannot be seriously advanced; not because it isn’t true – and how would an academic inquiry settle that question anyway? – but because either affirming or denying its truth would contribute nothing to the programs of research and experimentation engaged in by biologists. Just as the inevitable presence of politics in every realm of human activity does not mean that you are always being political in the same way, so does the centrality of truth to every human inquiry not mean that every truth you hold to is everywhere relevant or to the point. A commitment to truth, rather than telling against my insistence that academic work has its own integrity, provides the strongest support for it.

The last resort of those who are reluctant to leave their political positions at the classroom door is to reveal them up front in the belief that by doing so they insulate their students from any undue influence. The students, says Natika Newton, will be “reassured of a balanced presentation if the professor states her viewpoint at the beginning, and says that she will take pains to present both sides equally.” Viewpoint about what? If the professor has a viewpoint about an academic question – is string theory a powerful conceptual tool or a speculative fiction which proves nothing because it can prove anything? – she should not merely state it at the beginning; she should argue for it, and work hard to persuade students of its truth. If the professor has a viewpoint about a political question – should illegal immigrants be given amnesty? – she should not state it at all because coming to political conclusions, as opposed to academic conclusions, is not what either she or her students are there for. Announcing your political views at the outset as a way of alerting students to your possible bias makes sense only if it is the business of the class to approve some or other political view at the end of the day; and if you do announce your political views, even in the spirit of full disclosure, you will be sending the message that approving a political view is indeed the business of the class. If, on the other (and better) hand, you start right out subjecting the topic to an academic interrogation – inquiring into matters of structure, history, influence, etc. – the nakedly political questions will never emerge and there will be nothing to insulate the students from. The rule is (or should be) that with respect to academic disputes, the instructor, rather than taking pains to present both sides equally, should steer students in the direction of the side she considers right; but with respect to political disputes the instructor should bring opposing sides into the discussion only as objects of analysis and never as objects of choice. Being biased toward an academic position is a good thing. (It shows that you care.) Entering into a relationship of any affective kind with a political position is not. That has been my message from the beginning, and I declare it once again in the hope that you will keep those cards and letters coming.