The President’s View

No writer on the mission of universities has a higher profile at the moment than Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University. During the 1980s he was a tremendously influential, almost notoriously controversial literary theorist. More recently he has emerged as a frequent contributor to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times where he presents thoughtful and compelling meditations on what the role of the university should be in contemporary society. Agree with Fish or not, he is a lively and brilliant thinker, and it is a credit to the Times that they have given the subject of higher education the attention it deserves.

Now, in many respects Fish’s position on the role of the university could not be more antithetical to the views that we hold at Fairfield University. Fish, in his book Save the World on Your Own Time and in an article by the same name that ran in the Chronicle of Higher Education some years ago argues for what one might call a value-free academic setting, where universities should be exclusively dedicated to research and teaching, without getting involved in shaping their students’ moral perspective or behavior through any other means. He writes, “teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach war or peace or freedom or obedience or diversity or uniformity… Or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host.” In effect, he argues that the only advocacy that should be going on in the classroom is advocacy for intellectual thoroughness and honesty. Universities, in other words, should not take “partisan” positions.

As a Jesuit and Catholic university, we certainly agree that teachers should be primarily advocates for intellectual honesty and thoroughness. However, we also believe that it is vital that we take an active role in developing our students as whole persons — attending to their moral, spiritual, and personal development. More specifically, part of the Jesuit mission is to work in the service of faith, “of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.” So we do expect that our classrooms will often be places where the promotion of justice will be debated and advocated. This has always been the Jesuit educational philosophy. We teach values, as well as math and science and biology. So on this point, the Jesuit view and the view of Dr. Fish diverge.

However, one place in which we appear to agree is on the importance of a core curriculum of studies — a central tenet of Jesuit pedagogy and a matter of ongoing innovation at Fairfield. We also think that it is important that our students are taught, specifically, how to write. All of our undergraduate students need to take courses in composition, and they need to take many other classes, in sciences, the humanities, the arts, philosophy, and mathematics, before they can concentrate on an area of particular interest. Some may think that this core-curriculum approach is out-of-date, but in a sense a core curriculum is essential if we want to develop students with the capacity to think across disciplinary boundaries and make connections between, say, a position on the role of the individual in a civil society that has been arrived at through philosophical meditation, and the economic impact of globalization, which the student has been exposed to in economics or political science.

More importantly, the virtue of a core curriculum is that it teaches students how to think and reflect and make distinctions no matter what they are presented with after their core studies have been completed, and the writing requirement ensures that they will know how to express themselves once they have reached a conclusion.

Earlier this week in the Times, in an article entitled “What Should Colleges Teach?” Fish argues the same point. In it, he notes that at many universities students fulfill their “writing” requirement by taking classes that are not specifically focused on the art and craft of writing itself, with predictable results. He concludes that the solution is for universities to adopt a core curriculum for their students, including courses exclusively dedicated to writing in itself.

The benefit of a core curriculum he writes “is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other,” adding that a course that teaches writing “should be the real core of any curriculum.”