Education Quote by Stanley Fish

Fish’s line is a provocation dressed up as plain talk: universities, he insists, should stop pretending they’re miniature democracies or democracy factories and remember they’re schools. The snap in “not in the democracy business” is deliberate. It borrows the language of commerce to mock the managerial, mission-statement habit of selling higher education as civic salvation. In that framing, “democracy” becomes a brand promise, and Fish is calling the bluff.

The subtext is a turf war over what counts as legitimate academic work. By reducing the university’s purpose to “teach and learn,” Fish isn’t being naive about politics; he’s trying to quarantine it. He’s pushing back against the idea that campuses should actively train citizens, correct inequity, model participatory governance, or produce particular moral outcomes. The repetition and self-correction in “what we do, when we’re doing it” is the tell: he’s conceding the obvious messiness (universities often fail even at instruction) while narrowing the job description to something defensible and measurable.

Context matters: Fish has long argued against turning classrooms into stages for political righteousness, whether progressive or conservative. This quote lands as both a critique of activist expectations and a warning about institutional overreach. It works rhetorically because it reframes a heated ideological debate as an issue of professional competence: if universities claim to be democracy’s engine, they invite scrutiny and capture. If they claim to be places of disciplined inquiry, they can justify unpopular speech, uncomfortable texts, and the freedom to teach without doubling as a civic church.