"For much of its history the American academy has been fending off the attempts of various forces to hijack the enterprise for foreign ends. Now the invading force resides on the inside in the form of students who want colleges and universities to be the vehicle of their preferred causes. The fossil fuel divestment campaign is one of their fronts [and] must be resisted, as must any effort to make the academy an instrument of some political goal."
This is the last para of a blog by Stanley Fish which I came across on the NAS website as I read their report on sustainability in universities which i commented on last week.
Fish quotes student activist Chloe Maxmin:
"The divestment movement ... aims to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry by rebranding it as a social pariah and a rogue political force that preys on our future. We want to make it socially unacceptable for politicians and institutions to support a reckless industry that manipulates the political system and values short term profits over humanity's survival."
... and then writes:
"Now, shaming the fossil fuel industry might very well be a good thing to do (I am not going to pronounce on the substantive question), but it is not an academically good thing to do. The category "good things to do" is practice specific: There are no generally good things to do, only things that are good to do given the aims and values of the particular enterprise in which they're being done. If the enterprise is the academy, then the list of good things to do is limited to things that contribute to pedagogical goals narrowly conceived – the goal of introducing students to materials with which they were previously unfamiliar and the goal of equipping students with analytical skills. Saving the world from fossil fuels is not a pedagogical goal and doesn't belong either in the classroom or in the mission statement of a university."
Fish also comments on the the demand for "trigger warnings" about course materials (and ideas) that might cause offence or discomfort – now increasingly seen in the UK with student groups demanding not to be upset by ideas they don't like very much, something AC Grayling has recently written about.
Had the NAS writers bothered to look outside the USA, they'd have found that this activism as pedagogy / pedagogy as activism approach to be alive and well in the UK in what, for example, champions of ESD proclaim, in what the NUS routinely does, and much more widely – calls for better dog training, for example. Because I keep remembering that I'm supposed to be a liberal educator, my sympathies lie with Stanley Fish – even though I can also be found singing the praises of the NUS and the wholly admirable Jamie Agombar. Umm.
More to think about ...
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