Politics & Power Quote by Stanley Fish

Fish is drawing a bright line that sounds procedural but is really moral: the classroom is a place for analysis, not enlistment. The first sentence opens the gates wide - "Any idea" - then immediately narrows the terms of entry. Ideas are admissible when treated as objects with "structure, history, influence": the vocabulary of dissection. That list matters. It frames teaching as a craft of method, not a performance of virtue, and it quietly flatters the professoriate as technicians of understanding rather than brokers of righteousness.

Then comes the hard pivot: "But no idea belongs..". The absolute phrasing isn't accidental. Fish knows how easily a seminar can slide from interpretation into conversion, especially when a text arrives preloaded with contemporary urgency. His target is less any specific ideology than the classroom's temptation to treat students as future foot soldiers. "Recruit" is the key verb; it imports the language of campaigns and movements into a space supposedly dedicated to inquiry. It's also a jab at a certain romantic image of teaching-as-activism, where persuasion masquerades as education because the cause feels self-evidently correct.

The subtext is Fish's long-running skepticism about claims that universities can be politically neutral while also pursuing justice as an institutional mission. He offers a narrower, sturdier legitimacy: you can teach Marx, nationalism, abolitionism, Zionism, anti-Zionism - whatever - if you are willing to make them answerable to questions rather than usable as tools. The context, of course, is the culture-war churn around "indoctrination" versus "critical thinking". Fish concedes the fear without endorsing the paranoia, insisting the sin isn't having politics; it's turning pedagogy into a turnout operation.