Chicago

WE are at that time of year when millions of American college and high school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence. How is this possible? The answer is simple and even obvious: Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.

Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.

On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English enables us to make.

You can imagine the reaction of students who think that "syntax" is something cigarette smokers pay, guess that "lexicon" is the name of a rebel tribe inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the slightest idea of what words like "tense," "manner" and "mood" mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet 14 weeks later - and this happens every time - each group has produced a language of incredible sophistication and precision.

How is this near miracle accomplished? The short answer is that over the semester the students come to understand a single proposition: A sentence is a structure of logical relationships. In its bare form, this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why I immediately supplement it with a simple exercise. "Here," I say, "are five words randomly chosen; turn them into a sentence." (The first time I did this the words were coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly.) In no time at all I am presented with 20 sentences, all perfectly coherent and all quite different. Then comes the hard part. "What is it," I ask, "that you did? What did it take to turn a random list of words into a sentence?" A lot of fumbling and stumbling and false starts follow, but finally someone says, "I put the words into a relationship with one another."

Once the notion of relationship is on the table, the next question almost asks itself: what exactly are the relationships? And working with the sentences they have created the students quickly realize two things: first, that the possible relationships form a limited set; and second, that it all comes down to an interaction of some kind between actors, the actions they perform and the objects of those actions.

The next step (and this one takes weeks) is to explore the devices by which English indicates and distinguishes between the various components of these interactions. If in every sentence someone is doing something to someone or something else, how does English allow you to tell who is the doer and whom (or what) is the doee; and how do you know whether there is one doer or many; and what tells you that the doer is doing what he or she does in this way and at this time rather than another?

Notice that these are not questions about how a particular sentence works, but questions about how any sentence works, and the answers will point to something very general and abstract. They will point, in fact, to the forms that, while they are themselves without content, are necessary to the conveying of any content whatsoever, at least in English.

Once the students tumble to this point, they are more than halfway to understanding the semester-long task: they can now construct a language whose forms do the same work English does, but do it differently.

In English, for example, most plurals are formed by adding an "s" to nouns. Is that the only way to indicate the difference between singular and plural? Obviously not. But the language you create, I tell them, must have some regular and abstract way of conveying that distinction; and so it is with all the other distinctions - between time, manner, spatial relationships, relationships of hierarchy and subordination, relationships of equivalence and difference - languages permit you to signal.

In the languages my students devise, the requisite distinctions are signaled by any number of formal devices - word order, word endings, prefixes, suffixes, numbers, brackets, fonts, colors, you name it. Exactly how they do it is not the point; the point is that they know what it is they are trying to do; the moment they know that, they have succeeded, even if much of the detailed work remains to be done.

AT this stage last semester, the representative of one group asked me, "Is it all right if we use the same root form for adjectives and adverbs, but distinguish between them by their order in the sentence?" I could barely disguise my elation. If they could formulate a question like that one, they had already learned the lesson I was trying to teach them.

In the course of learning that lesson, the students will naturally and effortlessly conform to the restriction I announce on the first day: "We don't do content in this class. By that I mean we are not interested in ideas - yours, mine or anyone else's. We don't have an anthology of readings. We don't discuss current events. We don't exchange views on hot-button issues. We don't tell each other what we think about anything - except about how prepositions or participles or relative pronouns function." The reason we don't do any of these things is that once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show.

Students who take so-called courses in writing where such topics are the staples of discussion may believe, as their instructors surely do, that they are learning how to marshal arguments in ways that will improve their compositional skills. In fact, they will be learning nothing they couldn't have learned better by sitting around in a dorm room or a coffee shop. They will certainly not be learning anything about how language works; and without a knowledge of how language works they will be unable either to spot the formal breakdown of someone else's language or to prevent the formal breakdown of their own.

In my classes, the temptation of content is felt only fleetingly; for as soon as students bend to the task of understanding the structure of language - a task with a content deeper than any they have been asked to forgo - they become completely absorbed in it and spontaneously enact the discipline I have imposed. And when there is the occasional and inevitable lapse, and some student voices his or her "opinion" about something, I don't have to do anything; for immediately some other student will turn and say, "No, that's content." When that happens, I experience pure pedagogical bliss.

Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Stanley Fish, dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently discussed Ward Churchill (and other matters) in the Chronicle of Higher Education (dated May 13, 2005). He observed, correctly, “Political persuasion is just not what is supposed to go on in the college classroom, even though it may be going on—and going on legitimately—at the noontime rally or in dormitory bull sessions.” He further noted, correctly, but not going far enough, “It is not the job of a senior administrator either to approve or disapprove of what a faculty member writes in a nonuniversity publication.” Indeed, as public opinion turns against the politicization of academic life, Fish has taken to the pages of The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education to write of the desired divorce between academic inquiry and political activism. In the New York Times of June 1, 2004, Fish wrote, “In short, don’t cross the boundary between academic work and partisan advocacy, whether the advocacy is yours or someone else’s.”
 
Stanley Fish provides an ongoing education in hypocrisy and double standards. The School of Fish has two organizing policies: change your opinions to suit the moment; and never apply your principles to yourself. As chairman of the Department of English at Duke University during the late ’80s and early ’90s, he created the most politicized English department of any major university of the time—no minor accomplishment—and he called for the official ostracism and professional punishment of campus critics of political correctness. In 1990, James David Barber—a liberal and the former head of Amnesty International—founded a chapter at Duke of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the nation’s most prominent organizational critic of the kind of curricular politicization that Fish was then promoting. The Duke chapter attracted many distinguished members (among them the late brilliant, black, female literary critic Kenny Williams, one of FIRE’s original Board members). Fish wrote privately and despicably to the provost of Duke, urging that no one who belonged to the Duke NAS should sit on hiring, personnel, or curricular committees, because the organization, by his lights, “is widely known to be racist, sexist, and homophobic.” Someone in the provost’s office was so appalled that the letter was leaked to the student newspaper. When the paper called Fish to ask him about its views, he denied writing it. When the paper said it had a signed copy of the letter in its possession, Fish termed his letter parody. The fact that Fish went on to a deanship at a major university is full testament to the degradation of American academic life.
 
When speech codes were popular, Fish wrote There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech...And It’s a Good Thing Too (1994). Now, he defends Ward Churchill’s free speech outside a classroom; then, Fish wrote the following about an undergraduate journalist who complained that the University of Wisconsin’s speech code (soon found unconstitutional) chilled free speech and First Amendment rights: “To the student reporter who complains that in the wake of the promulgation of a speech code at the University of Wisconsin there is now something in the back of his mind as he writes, one could reply, ‘There was always something in the back of your mind, and perhaps it might be better to have this code in the back of your mind than whatever was in there before.’” Why bother with principle? As Fish wrote in The Trouble With Principle (1999), “Politics is all there is.” Sad stuff. Once he became an administrator, the careerist Fish simply ended the embarrassment of defending partisan speech codes, fending off issues of principle with denials that the issue was relevant to current academic practice, for which he was skewered factually and morally by FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff two years ago.
 

FIRE’s motto always has been the dictum of Justice Louis Brandeis, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” The proper response of free men and women to speech that they abhor is more speech, reason, evidence, truth, moral outrage, and moral witness. Stanley Fish sees things differently. In an interview with the Australian Humanities Review (February 1998), discussing and defending There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish offered the following advice to the radical Critical Race Theorists of academic life: “The correct response to a vision or a morality that you despise is not to try and cure it or to make its adherents sit down and read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, that’s not going to do the job. The only way to fight hate speech or racist speech is to recognize it as the speech of your enemy and what you do in response to the speech of your enemy is not prescribe a medication for it but attempt to stamp it out. So long as Critical Race Theory and others fall into the liberal universalist assumption of regarding hate speech as some kind of anomaly which could be recognized as such by everyone, they’re going to lose the game. They will win the game only if they really try to win it, rather than falling in with Justice Brandeis’ pronouncement that ‘Sunshine is the best disinfectant.’” (Emphasis added.) I, for one, prefer preserved Brandeis to rotting Fish. The University of Illinois at Chicago will have an annual Stanley Fish lecture in his honor. To do justice to Fish, it should shed darkness over moral issues, promote careerism and politics over substance and the search for knowledge, and be reserved for unprincipled chameleons.