It's good to see Stanley Fish taking a stand on the AAUP's warped "Freedom in the Classroom" statement. He takes the thing apart--and in the process, casts a quiet raised eyebrow at those who have endorsed the statement as reasonable and fair.

An excerpt:

... the report takes a wrong turn when the contextual criterion of "professional standards" is replaced by the abstract criterion of "connectedness" (the left's version of "balance"). In response to the Students for Academic Freedom's insistence that professors "should not be making statements ... about George Bush if the class is not on contemporary American presidents," the subcommittee offers this grand, and empty, pronouncement: "[A]ll knowledge can be connected to all other knowledge." But if the test for bringing a piece of "knowledge" into the classroom is the possibility of connecting it to the course's ostensible subject, nothing will ever fail it, and the only limitation on the topics that can be introduced will be the instructor's ingenuity.

My point is made for me by the subcommittee when it proposes a hypothetical as a counterexample to the stricture laid down by the Students for Academic Freedom: "Might not a teacher of nineteenth-century American literature, taking up 'Moby Dick,' a subject having nothing to do with the presidency, ask the class to consider whether any parallel between President George W. Bush and Captain Ahab could be pursued for insight into Melville's novel?"

But with what motive would the teacher initiate such a discussion? If you look at commentaries on "Moby Dick," you will find Ahab characterized as inflexible, monomaniacal, demonic, rigid, obsessed and dictatorial. What you don't find are words like generous, kind, caring, cosmopolitan, tolerant, far-seeing and wise. Thus the invitation to consider parallels between Ahab and Bush is really an invitation to introduce into the classroom (and by the back door) the negative views of George Bush held by many academics.

If the intention were, as claimed, to produce insight into Melville's character, there are plenty of candidates in literature for possible parallels--Milton's Satan, Marlowe's Faust, Byron's Cain, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Shakespeare's Iago, Jack London's Wolf Larsen, to name a few. Nor would it have been any better if an instructor had invited students to find parallels between George Bush and Aeneas, or Henry the Fifth, or Atticus Finch, for then the effect would have been to politicize teaching from the other (pro-Bush) direction.

By offering this example, the report's authors validate the very accusation they are trying to fend off, the accusation that the academy's leftward tilt spills over into the classroom. No longer writing for the American Association of University Professors, the subcommittee is instead writing for the American Association of University Professors Who Hate George Bush (admittedly a large group). Why do its members not see that? Because once again they reason from an abstract theoretical formulation to a conclusion about what instructors can properly do.

I wrote about the AAUP statement here; Peter Wood did so here; and the NAS has posted a long and useful annotation of the document here.