"We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn"--Stanley Fish

A little background on Stanley Fish...

Stanley Fish is a prominent literary theorist. Fish earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1962. He taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before becoming Arts and Sciences Professor of English and professor of law at Duke University from 1986 to 1998. From 1999 to 2004 he was Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Considered a leading scholar of Milton, he is best known for his work on interpretive communities, an offshoot of reader-response criticism that studies how the interpretation of a text by a reader depends on the reader's membership in one or more communities defined by acceptance of a common set of foundational assumptions or texts. This work can be viewed as an explanation of how meaning is possible in the context of a particular interpretive community ("Florida International University Faculty Biographies"). Throughout his lifetime, Fish has also become known as a public intellectual for his work in university politics and students' rights in the university.

Stanley Fish's remarks on the state of education in the United States are often met with resistance as they tend to be fraught with controversial musings on the subject. The small quotation I picked may not seem controversial to the unassuming eye, but it is the crux of what Fish's ideology stands for. It will be interesting for you to revisit this quote after you read Fish's blog on "What Should Colleges Teach."

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/?scp=2&sq=stanley%20fish&st=cse