the relevance of philosophy, academia

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/
"The Last Professor"
by Stanley Fish
January 18, 2009
The New York Times

In this article, Fish makes the point that academia, properly understood, has no relevance to anything beyond itself (or, perhaps better: that its purpose is nothing beyond itself). Here's a quote:

"This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself."

One of the things that I do is interview applicants to a prestigious university. This is not a straightforward task. I have forty-five minutes in which to ask whatever questions I desire. I probably want to talk about classes they've taken, subjects they're interested in, activities they've done or are involved in, their reasons for wanting to come to the university, etc - and other things. How do I break this time down? How much do I allocate to classes, how much to sports, how much to school newspaper, etc? In order to answer these questions, I'm going to need to understand how the interview figures in the overall application process. Is there some deficit it's meant to compensate for? Or is the purpose more vague? Either way, this implies an answer to the question: what are we looking for in applicants? And that's a tough question. What balance of academics vs. "roommate factor" do we want? Should we start doing statistical analyses, looking for correlations between what we know about students when they apply, and their outcomes after four years? Five years? The amount they wind up donating? To answer these questions, we need to start asking ourselves, what is the point of this University?

Another thing I do is Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art. One day, we were doing a ground fighting technique that ends in an arm break (before the break it is just very painful). We train fairly slowly, so that we don't accidentally damage our partner. A student asks, "Is this the speed we should do it at on the street?" Our instructor pauses a moment, then admits that they would probably do it very quickly, just snap the arm, because they don't think they could handle pleading and cries of pain. The instructor then goes on, and says that this is a lot like learning certain knife moves - most of which end by slitting your opponent's throat. The instructor says: at this point, you need to start asking yourselves, what do I want to be trained to do? Do I want my instinct to be to snap the arm - to slit their throat? To answer that question, we'll have to ask: what situations do we think we'll be in? Will we be attacked - where? Will we be attacking other people (e.g. getting into bar fights)? If someone attacks us, attempts to mug us - is it okay to kill them? Answers to these questions will dictate how you train - even what you focus on (e.g. defenses against chokes, bear hugs, etc vs. various sparring techniques).

The point of these two examples is to try and show how traditional philosophical / ethical questions play important roles in pretty basic activities that we engage in - e.g. what we do at work. And, I contend, it is the point of ethics, of anything that engages with moral questions (and this is far more than just philosophy) to bear on such questions.