You know you are getting somewhere when even the people who make a point of disagreeing with you have to agree with you. And so it is with the debate about college curricula. Today, Stanley Fish devotes his New York Times blog to ACTA's new report and accompanying website, WhatWillTheyLearn.com, and finds himself in grudging agreement with much of what ACTA has to say:

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college's composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues--racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.

As I learned more about the world of composition studies I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research. Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which last week issued its latest white paper, "What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation's Leading Colleges and Universities."

Where he disagrees: He argues with ACTA's criteria on literature and history, suggesting that ACTA's wish to see schools require surveys in these subjects is a "political" move that differs substantively from its more neutral recommendations about other subject areas. While I think you can certainly debate whether broad survey courses are the only way to get a proper grounding in literature or history, I do think Fish presses too hard to make ACTA's position into an ideological one--and so to indicate that there is something vaguely sinister and threatening about it. But he pretty much has to do that, since earlier in his column he characterizes ACTA as an organization that, by virtue of its longstanding efforts to raise awareness and spark debate about what gets taught in college, supports "external regulation of classroom practices."

In this, Fish plays into one of academe's uglier contemporary solecisms, the assumption that criticizing academia, having opinions about it, publicly urging colleges and universities to make good on the social compact that underwrites their autonomy--that all these things are fundamentally threatening to academic freedom, and might even be reasonably described as "McCarthyist." Fish doesn't use that term--but he's absolutely skulking around the borders of that line of thought when he paints ACTA as a group that wants to see outside powers regulate universities and accuses ACTA of using "accountability" as a "code word for reconfiguring the academy according to conservative ideas and agendas." He also shows he has not done his homework, as ACTA not only endlessly and repeatedly makes it clear that it wants to see colleges and universities regulate themselves and do it well; it also endlessly and repeatedly makes it clear that it is not an advocate of installing a conservative agenda in academe. (ACTA president Anne Neal's recent debate with Penn State English professor Michael Berube airs both points very thoroughly--and might be instructive listening for Fish.)

Anyway. Having cast ACTA in a dubious political light (itself a dubious political move), Fish has an obligation to cast some of ACTA's study in a dubious political light, too. And so he does when he discusses ACTA's analysis of history and lit requirements. Still, he's engaged. He's willing to talk about what colleges and universities should ensure that students know. He's willing to agree that in many, many instances, they fall shamefully short of their duty to educate. And that's good stuff.