In conclusion, let me summarize my argument and the entailments it implies. The grounding proposition is that both the coherence and the value of a task depend on its being distinctive. Beginning with that proposition, I ask: What is the distinctive task college and university professors are trained and paid to perform? What can they legitimately (as opposed to presumptuously) claim to be able to do? My answer is that college and university professors can introduce students to bodies of material new to them and equip those same students with the appropriate (to the discipline) analytical and research skills. From this professional competence follow both obligations and prohibitions. The obligations are the usual pedagogical ones—setting up a course, preparing a syllabus, devising exams, assigning papers or experiments, giving feedback, holding office hours, etc. The prohibitions are that an instructor should do neither less nor more. Doing less would mean not showing up to class or showing up unprepared, not being alert to the newest approaches and models in the field, failing to give back papers or to comment on them in helpful ways, etc. Doing more would be to take on tasks that belong properly to other agents—to preachers, political leaders, therapists, and gurus. The lure of these other (some would say larger or more noble) tasks is that they enhance, or at least seem to enhance, the significance of what a teacher does. But in fact, I argue, agendas imported into the classroom from foreign venues do not enrich the pedagogical task, but overwhelm it and erode its constitutive distinctiveness. Once you start preaching or urging a political agenda or engaging your students in discussions designed to produce action in the world, you are surely doing something, but it is not academic, even if you give it that name.
