At the risk of looking like a dweeb who spends all day reading The New York Times online (a friend recently told me that "someone needs to take away your Times membership"), I'd like to spend another 750 words critiquing the opinions of one Stanley Fish.

I know, I know; doesn't this dowdy sophomore have any thoughts of his own? It's possible that a year-and-counting of college education hasn't made me anything but more pompous and even less original than I was before. You might think that, and the good Professor Fish would probably nod in agreement.

This past week, Fish received enough hate mail, what he called "attacks on me and attacks on my ideas," that he couldn't resist addressing the objections with a second edition of "What Should Colleges Teach?".

He began by rebuking doubting readers who were incredulous at Fish's own supposed experience teaching in the trenches of composition programs. Apparently, Fish actually does have extensive background in teaching basic writing, and good for him. It is from this tour of duty that Fish draws his conclusion that writing is best taught as "forms and forms alone." Fish proposes that while the content of a sentence is malleable, there are certain forms (i.e., a "neither/nor" sentence, etc.) which one must study in the abstract and have a basically mathematical understanding of before one can claim to have any grasp of the art of writing. I'll use one of my malleable sentences to respectfully disagree.

Fish grounds his justification of teaching grammar out of context by agreeing with one commenter that "good writing instills good thinking." So, as soon as we college students begin to be taught to write by diagramming sentences and the like, our actual ability to think skyrockets! I had no clue that my Writing 20 class had robbed me of such a wonderful Socratic opportunity.

Of course, it's much more likely that Writing 20 didn't rob me at all. Writing 20, or any composition course, can't make Platos just as it can't be avoided in a freshman schedule. It's one class, one period of instruction, and it does its job perfectly well.

I still disagree with Fish, rebuttal or no, but there's a more troubling problem with his arguments that supersedes his disaffection with interesting writing classes. Specifically, Fish has a set of hidebound and disappointingly stereotypical complaints about university curriculums.

Fish has long held that universities should respect the humanities. "I have argued," he begins one column, "that higher education, properly understood, is defined by the absence of a direct and assigned relationship between its activities and its measurable effects in the world." Fish, then, does not believe in clear-cut cause and effect in education. He generally recognizes that failing to learn "x" in "y" manner-say, learning writing through endless drilling in grammatical structures-doesn't inherently hamper a liberal arts education or, more crucially, impoverish the mind of any given student. We might just as productively learn "x" in "n" manner, and still go on to do "a."

Given this stance, it seems as if Fish and I agree wholeheartedly: There are many paths in a liberal arts education. They may not lead to the Buddha, but they might actually lead to an education, "proper" instruction in writing or history notwithstanding. Considering that Fish is such a vociferous defender of the abstract and diverse tradition of the liberal arts, his peevishness about writing classes rings hypocritical.

Fish is in the grand tradition of those who argue that it's "OK" to major in intellectual and not provably "practical" subjects like classics and English. Everyone familiar with the history of higher education knows that it's about just that: education, not job qualifications. Time and again, humanities professors like Fish are forced to defend their trade against ironically vague attacks of "impracticality" and "uselessness." I can't respect Fish's argument about teaching writing not only because it makes a mistaken assumption about the value of something as didactic and petty as a manual or repeated diagramming of sentences, but also because it runs counter to a truth that he, and I, claim to accept about education.

Simply put, I'm not here just to get a job, nor am I here to diagram sentences. I'm here to be educated. If that means watching "The Wire" one day and writing an essay on James Joyce the next, I don't see any conflict there except the problems inherent in trying to decipher two wildly different systems of profanity.

Connor Southard is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every Monday.