Who’s the boss here?

6/7/2011: Stanley Fish – former professor, former administrator, seldom a very interesting columnist – revisits an old question in the NYT:

If you’re a college or university teacher, whom do you work for?

… Academics want to have it both ways, and sometimes do. They want, that is, to work in an organization and enjoy its benefits and at the same time be their own bosses. The way they rationalize this condition of privilege (who wouldn’t want to enjoy it?) is to say that they work for no one or for everyone: they work for the common good. …

Does this mean, then, that members of the “wider public” get to monitor or even vote on what university teachers do? Far from it. The common good academics are pledged to advance is not common, they assert in the sense of being recognizable by just anyone. Only academics highly trained in complex techniques of inquiry are capable of understanding what the enterprise requires; the public should keep its hands off the good the academy is producing for it. So while academics don’t work for the dean or the president or the board of trustees, none of whom has the right to tell them what to do or constrain their ways of doing it, the public for whom they do work is not enlightened enough to appreciate their efforts and can’t tell them what to do either. What a deal! …