“But everything is political, isn’t it?” The question (really a challenge) was put to me by a student as we were discussing what has come to be known as the “scholarship of engagement,” a polemical label since it fronts an effort to expand the category of scholarship to include various forms of community work. (If the scholarship of engagement hasn’t come to your town yet, just wait; it will.)
My position on the scholarship of engagement is simple: If the work in question is a logical extension of a disciplinary project -- your research focuses on the reading process and you decide to test a theory by trying it out in a third-grade classroom -- it is certainly scholarship and belongs on your CV. But if you lobby legislators in an effort to have your theory written into state law, what you’re doing is certainly engaged, but it is not scholarship even though it is motivated by a conviction arrived at in the course of your scholarly labors. Both activities are linked to a truth you have come to believe, but only the first, testing your theory by applying it in a classroom, is a stage in the establishing of that truth; the second, lobbying to have your theory written into state law, is something else altogether; it is politics; there’s no reason you shouldn’t get credit for it, but not academic credit.
“But everything is political, isn’t it?” The question is insistent, it always comes back, in part because there is more than a little truth to the assertion it presupposes. Everything is political in the sense that any action we take or decision we make or conclusion we reach rests on assumptions, norms, and values not everyone would affirm. That is, everything we do is rooted in a contestable point of origin; and since the realm of the contestable is the realm of politics, everything is political.
But this sense in which everything is political is so general (no action escapes it) that there isn’t very much that can be done with it; it doesn’t tell you anything about the entities (all entities) to which it applies. If everything is political, to say of something that it is political is not to distinguish it from anything else; and if you want to know what a particular thing is or how it works, you will have to go back to the ordinary distinctions that will still serve to mark one thing off from another even if, on a very abstract level, they are both political.
Literary criticism and partisan politics are both political in this general sense -- any style of their performance will be controversial in the field -- but the point of the one is to produce a true account of a poem, while the point of the second is to win elections. If you mix them up and try for an account of a poem that will help a favored candidate or advance a political cause (unlikely but possible scenarios), you will only be pretending to practice literary criticism, and you will be exploiting for partisan purposes the discipline in whose name you supposedly act.
This is more than a logical point; it is a point about bad academic practices and the sloppy thinking that accompanies them. Typically that thinking displays two failures: the failure to grasp the distinctiveness of tasks -- the fact that something is only what it is by not being what it is not -- and the failure to understand the irrelevance to practical performance of large theses like “everything is political.” The revelation that some well-known historians have taken credit for the words of others or falsely represented themselves as participants in the events they chronicled has on occasion elicited this response: Well, isn’t it all narrative anyway? Every historical account is someone’s story, so how can anyone be criticized for telling one story rather than another? But “everything is narrative” is just like “everything is political": It tells you what is generally true of different forms of action and discourse; it doesn’t tell you that they’re not different. The craft of history requires that you fashion your narrative according to a publicly known set of discipline-specific rules; the result may be a “story,” in the technical sense that it issues from an angled perspective and not from God or Nature, but it is a story that offers itself to the judgment and correction of the decorums relevant to its production, and it is not the methodological or moral equivalent of stories produced under the pressure of other decorums.
The question to ask, always, is “What business am I in?” It will help you identify what is, and is not, appropriate to your position. Administrators are sometimes faulted by their old friends for having forgotten that, after all, they are faculty members. But they’re not. They now belong to a different guild, are answerable to different requirements and have different objectives. A personnel case that comes to you as a dean will be a different case than it would have been had you encountered it as a faculty member; you will see it in relation to the many cases coming up in the college, and the issues central to the department’s deliberation may very well not be central to yours. Decisions about the allocation of resources will be made according to criteria your former colleagues would disdain; you may decide not to give a department a position it deserves because, in your view, another weaker department needs it more; you may decide to hold back money and hoard or “bank” lines; you may decline to appoint a popularly selected person as chair, even though you remember being indignant when one of your predecessors did the same thing. You will find yourself accused of thinking like an administrator (on the analogy of thinking like a lawyer) and of selling out, but you’ll just be doing your job, which is not the job of a faculty member.
If administrators are not faculty members, neither are students; and while students may be excused for wanting to play a role not properly theirs, administrators should know better and should always remember the differences between tasks and the capabilities necessary to perform them. I’m not saying don’t consult with students. Consult with everyone, but don’t confuse consulting with the sharing of the franchise. Student evaluation of teaching is bad enough (I lost that battle 35 years ago), but at least those forms are read with caution by those who know what they are and what they are not. No such caution, or knowledge, or competence will attend the performance of students who are allowed by some misguided administration to vote or serve on search committees. They will influence the process according to their interests (what else would you expect them to do?), but their interests are short term and only obliquely related to the interests of those who will spend much of their lives in the institution.
If students should be kept to the side of academic business because they haven’t the qualifications for the job, the same is true for trustees, donors, politicians, parents, and concerned members of the general public, all of whom have lots of ideas that should be politely listened to and then filed away under “not to the academic point.” It’s not that these people aren’t smart; they’re usually very smart in their own lines of work. It’s just that most of the time the models and examples they urge on you presuppose conditions and criteria that have nothing to do with the conditions and criteria of the academy. It may be helpful in some respects to think of the university as a commercial enterprise (teachers like workers in any field should do what they are paid to do), but the analogy has a limited usefulness and should not lead, as it sometimes has, to the importation of chancellors and presidents from government and industry, a practice that occasionally works but more often than not ends in flat-out disaster.
The bottom line, again, is don’t make the mistake of giving your franchise away to some one else, be they students, politicians, unions, aldermen, whomever; don’t let them do your job. And the corollary to the bottom line is know what your job is, and don’t do a job that isn’t yours.
This is a lesson forgotten or never learned by those administrators who have performed badly in the wake of September 11. Here the chief exhibit is the president of the University of South Florida, who agreed to the dismissal of a professor for having appeared on a television show and answered questions about statements he had made (and now pretty much backed away from) 13 years ago. The reason given by the university for its action is that the hostile response to the professor’s appearance disrupted day-to-day business (this is the “heckler’s veto” argument, firmly rejected by a succession of Supreme Court decisions and likely to be so again), but the real reason is that the president, rather than being true to her obligation to defend the academic enterprise, has given it over to the very political forces from which she should protect it. She became the agent of those forces, and by doing their job (at least as they see it), she has failed to do her own.
This is equally true of those chief executives, like the chancellor of the City University of New York system and the president of the University of Texas at Austin, who got it half right: They refused to discipline faculty members for making controversial statements in forums and op-eds, but then they played to the crowd by loudly distancing themselves from the content of what they had just defended. This is the “I hate what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it” move, which may be to the point in a context where the imperative is the defense of the First Amendment, but it is not to the point where the imperative is to stand up for the enterprise you supposedly lead. You don’t stand up for that enterprise by publicly judging (or, for that matter, approving) the constitutionally protected speech of those who look to you to be the spokesperson for, and the guarantor, of the integrity of their professional labors. If you’re not defining, safeguarding, and exemplifying that integrity, you are (once again) not doing your job and you’re probably doing a job that belongs (if it belongs to anyone) to others.
With models like these, no wonder my students think that everything is political.
Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes a monthly column for the Career Network on campus politics and academic careers. His most recent book is How Milton Works (Harvard University Press, 2001).