What do Mary Kay Consultants have in common with College Professors?

For those of you that don't know this, I like to read. One opinion writer that I enjoy reading (because of his style and thought process, not necessarily because I agree with everything he says) is Stanley Fish. He recently wrote a piece about the correlation between professors in colleges and their political views. Specifically, whether or not their political views have any bearing on their job in the classroom. You can read the article I am talking about here. Although you will find that it is actually an article in response to responses he received about another article he wrote. Follow? Good!

So, what does this have to do with Mary Kay? Glad you asked!

There is a section in it that I would like to call attention to because he addresses people claiming that it is impossible for professors to separate their personal views from their role as teachers. The arguments made seem similar to the ones made on this site and on Pink Truth that it is impossible to "do" Mary Kay without lying and cheating. Because Mr. Fish has done such a great job addressing this, and because I would like to share a favorite author of mine with all of you, I present the following excerpt.

The most often voiced objection to my position is that it urges something no one could perform. R.C. declares that “faculty are indeed human and thus tend to inject their own opinions into their teaching.” Mark in A2 agrees: “People inevitably bring their personal politics (and other views) into their role as teachers” and “to say otherwise is either naïve or ignorant.”

Evidence for these assertions is largely anecdotal and is often accompanied by statements of incredulity: “It’s pretty clear that Stanley Fish has either been living under a rock for the past ten years or doesn’t know how to add 2 plus 2.” Haven’t I read about all those professors who inject their liberal biases into the classroom and insist on ideological conformity? Yes, I have. There is an entire apparatus dedicated to searching them out and making sure their sins are publicized. But this little “parade of horribles” does not stand for the whole and, as I have already noted, the responses to the column provide evidence (also anecdotal) in the other direction.

The non-anecdotal argument for the it-can’t-be-done objection is philosophical. Teachers come to their task burdened by religious and political commitments, moral philosophies and world views, and they can’t simply unburden themselves when they walk into the classroom. “It is a fallacy to think that the ‘academic’ world is or can be isolated from the political world.”

But isolation from the political world is not required. All that is required is the quite ordinary ability to distinguish between contexts and the decorums appropriate to them. When you enter an institutional setting — an office, a corporate boardroom, a cruise ship, a square dance, an athletic event — the concerns to which you are responsive belong to the setting, and you comport yourself accordingly. Rather then asking, “What do my political and religious views tell me to do?”, you ask, “What do the protocols of this particular endeavor or occasion tell me to do?”

The setting of the classroom is no different, even though the materials you encounter are often fraught with moral and political questions to which you would give very definite answers were you confronted by them in your life outside the academy. As long as you are in the classroom, and as long as you recognize the classroom as a place with its own constituitive demands, those questions will be seen as items in an intellectual landscape and not as challenges to which you directly and personally respond.

Of course, somewhere behind what you are doing will be the larger commitments and world views that make you what you are, but for the duration of your professional performance, those commitments will be on the back burner, exerting some influence to be sure (I am not insisting on purity), but not enough to blur the distinction, basic to the very rationale for higher education, between what you would do were you in the ballot box and what you are pledged to do by virtue of the contract you have signed and the salary you are paid.

That salary is provided on the assumption that in return you will carry out certain duties and refrain from others that belong to different enterprises. If you are unwilling to do so or believe that a general human infirmity prevents you from doing so — a belief that will follow from setting up an impossible standard and concluding from the general failure to live up to it that all distinctions are null and void — then in all conscience you should resign. You should not take the money while you run away from your responsibilities, and you should certainly not excuse yourself for having done so by saying, or thinking, “I couldn’t help it.” Yes you can. Hundreds of thousands do every day. As Susanne Woods put it, “Professionalism is professionalism whatever the profession, and a university professor who actively proselytizes (whatever the political beliefs) is not doing her job any more than a physician who insists on telling me about the virtues of the free market while I’m hooked to an EKG.”

Simply replace the professors with Mary Kay Consultants and the behavior of injecting personal political views with deceitful and manipulative practices and the words above amount to (for me) a resounding, "that is what I have been trying to say"!

I would like to highlight the following:

"Professionalism is professionalism whatever the profession..."

"But this little “parade of horribles” does not stand for the whole and, as I have already noted, the responses to the column provide evidence (also anecdotal) in the other direction."

What do you think?

About politics and professors.

About Stanley Fish - and this article.

About Mary Kay Consultants and ethics.