Academicize for Whom?

    Fish calls upon teachers to do their job which is limited to introducing their students to a new literature base and to develop the skills that are related to their discipline--nothing more, nothing less. Teachers should only conduct class in pursuit of (what Fish believes to be) the only virtue within the academy: the pursuit of Truth. In pursuit of Truth, professors can entertain any subject as long as it is academic in nature. "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" (p. 27). This pedagogy begins from the perspective that the academy should be a neutral space from partisanship and that academics should save the world on their time but only within the bounds of their external qualifications.

    The purpose of this blog post is to refute Fish's pedagogy and to identify its philosophy as a technology of Settler Colonialism. I attempt this through an analysis of my own experience navigating the academy as a student and teacher to showcase how it is not a neutral site. The insular tendencies and the calling for the apoliticization of the academy therefore function as modes of colonial knowledge production. 

    To begin, I think that the creation of a class and the maintenance of the academy is political and its denial perpetuates settler colonialism. For instance, we've learned about the process of creating a class from Civikly and the ways that the teacher curates and plans for the instruction of their curriculum. The process of diving into the literature, selecting what histories are worth being told and analyzed, and the method of instruction, are all political acts. The denial of these actions as political is steeped in privilege and enables the erasure of indigenous knowledge that is often deemed irrational by Western epistemologies. I can't really explain how powerful it was for me to read decolonial literature from Chamoru scholars because it was the first time that I felt like I was represented in the academy. Fish explains in the introduction that he doesn't think that students are fit to judge the quality of the curriculum or lesson due to their inexperience and lack of expertise, but I argue that this is colonial because indigenous peoples are often excluded from the academy and structurally told that their knowledge is not legitimate. Fish, on page 168, explains that the duties of teaching extend outside of the classroom into areas like office hours but office hours tend to be one of the best sites for students to gain mentors and allies. The idea that office hours should only be used for intellectual pursuits while prohibiting the student to be a person as well as a scholar would lead to the academy only being accessible to those that are the most privileged.  Fish assumes that students and people in general can check their identity at the door which is akin to the way that racial minorities are told to leave their race at the door in order to assimilate into the professionalism of whiteness. 

    Beyond the denial of teaching as a political act, Fish perpetuates settler colonialism by calling for administrators and the university to remain neutral regardless of the political battles that take place within society. Fish applauds universities, such as the University of Wyoming, when, in response to calls by their students to condemn the Iraq war, the university released a statement saying that it does not have a foreign policy. I don't think we can understate the power that, for better or worse, the university has to transform society. Agents of the state are recruited from the academy to conduct foreign and domestic policy, graduates assimilate into capitalism by innovating technology for the the US and its military, and the vast majority of people, in one way or another, structurally benefit from structural oppression. The denial of the political potency of the university given these observations, in addition to the university's location on stolen land, mean that the university is part and parcel to settler colonialism. Moreover, I argue that the mobility and social prominence in American society is predicated off of mass exploitation and settler colonialism. That being stated, the university can be a site of liberation. One of the most common examples of the university influencing politics would be the student protests against the Vietnam War. But that's not as important as this central tenant: silence in the face of adversity is morally abhorrent when one has the ability to speak out. Universities, like privileged individuals, benefit from structures of oppression and have the ability to speak out against injustice. The rejection of this reality and the university's obligations, is complicit in and condones oppression. 

    If the academy hopes to be a site of liberation we must reject this pedagogy. To those who would rush to Fish's defense and espouse the value of academicizing, I would ask one question: academicize for whom? #DecolonizeEducation