Book Watch: Stanley Fish’s Save the World on Your Own Time

Stanley Fish’s forthcoming book, Save the World on Your Own Time, about the proper and improper purpose of the academy, is coming out soon.  Here’s an excerpt of a review from Amazon:

What should be the role of our institutions of higher education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce responsible citizens?
In Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues that, however laudable these goals might be, there is but one proper role for the academe in society: to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose.

Hm, I have mixed feelings about this.  After all, isn’t something of an implicit moral judgement in what scholars choose to study?