A number of problems plagued Stanley Fish’s “Political Correctness
on Campus” article. At first glance, the text was dense, disorganized, and at
inconclusive at best. I found these
problems to be mostly accentuated in the fact that the author was attempting to
write the piece in a sort of stream-of-consciousness, as if they were standing
and verbally delivering a speech instead of creating a written analysis.
To begin with, I turned to the designated chapters of Style to diagnose the basic problems. The
overarching difficulty in the piece was that of a lack of clarity. Page 7 of
Style explains that “when we say that [a piece] is unclear, we mean that we
have a hard time understanding it; we say it is dense when we struggle to read
it.” This is true of the “Political Correctness” piece. This is so because of
the author’s continual shifts the subject of the piece. Although the main
anecdote of the piece is by a documentary, the author spins off in a number of
directions, talking about everything from guest speakers on campus to the
political stances of teachers to political correctness of bus drivers. The
author gives little concern to proper transition of ideas. However, the author
spends too much time transitioning between sentences. Here, I am speaking of
the ‘throat-clearing’ that the author continually uses. Throat clearing, as
defined by the Style book, “typically
begins with metadiscourse that connects a sentence to the previous one, with
transitions such as and, but, or therefore.” Half of the changes I made in the article were simply
taking out the metadiscourse.
Digging deeper into the article, I looked to McDonald’s “I
Agree, But…” reading. What first catches
the eye is McDonald statement that one cannot express all the different views
in a particular debate. This is what the Political Correctness article fails to
realize. The debate of political vs. objective agendas in the classroom is a
heated one, however the author tries too hard to show all the different facets
of the debate instead of focusing on a main issue.
“The rhetorical practice of accepting the key arguments of
opponents… [was] important because it allowed groups of people with conflicting
opinions to realize that although they desired different outcomes, they did
share many views, and each party had valid claims that needed to be addressed
(pg. 213).” This is another thing that Fish failed to include. Fish spends the
majority of the article lamenting how politics and political correctness have
invaded the university and rarely mentions the other side of the story. This
imbalance in the argument causes the article to be heavily one-sided, and
therefore endangers the ethos. Without considering both sides, one cannot have
a full grasp of the issue.
Lastly, I look to Kaufer’s “I Have a Plan” article to
conclude my analysis. Although Fish’s piece fulfills the third level of policy
conflict (that of conflicting local values), he overlooks one of the key parts
of addressing a stock issue: that is, he doesn’t present a solution. Kaufer immediately
jumps into the issue of dealing with whether the given solution is capable of
solving the problem and if the cause can be eliminated without changing the
entire status quo. The Political Correctness article is all about changing the entire
status quo. Fish’s article firstly ignores the necessary step of presenting a
solution, and secondly forgets that a solution should not attempt to annihilate
the present situation. Instead, the closest thing he gives to a solution is lamenting
how we were warned of politics stepping into the classroom as far back as 1915.
To conclude, Fish’s “Political Correctness” article lacks
the criteria presented in Style, “I
Have a Plan”, and “I Agree, But…”. There were three overarching issues with the
article which caused it to not meet expectations. Firstly, there were a number
of grammar fallacies, from single sentences pulled into whole paragraphs to the
excessive use of metadiscourse. Secondly, the organization of the article was
lax at best, and so a number of my corrections took the form of comment boxes
expressing where certain passages should have been placed, or questioning the
passages use in the text itself. And finally, the piece failed to give a conceivable
solution to the issue.
Hopefully, by addressing these issues, the article could
become something of note instead of something scribbled over with notes.
