add philanthropy post; edit pagefind component
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Kathleen Fitzpatrick
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<subtitle>The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.</subtitle>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml" rel="self" />
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/" />
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<updated>2025-12-18T14:16:04Z</updated>
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<updated>2026-04-12T19:40:21Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/</id>
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<author>
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<name>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</name>
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</author>
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<entry>
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<title>The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/humanities-philanthropy-good-life/" />
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<updated>2026-04-12T19:40:21Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/humanities-philanthropy-good-life/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>I recently finished reading <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/720859/the-price-of-humanity-by-amy-schiller/">Amy Schiller's <em>The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong and How to Fix It</em></a>, and as the director of a <a href="https://hcommons.org">significant nonprofit project</a> that is <a href="https://about.hcommons.org/2026/01/30/sustainability-through-community/">dependent on donor generosity for its very survival</a>, I felt every bit of it in my bones. Schiller argues (among other things) that one of the things that went wrong with philanthropy as we know it, especially in the United States, is the ways that philanthropy has become an alibi for capitalism, picking up the slack for public funding in ways that encourage oligarchic hoarding and tax evasion, and that deepen the conviction that basic needs are a private rather than a public responsibility. And as numerous other authors have argued, expecting capitalism to provide the means of solving the problems created by capitalism is a pipe dream at best.</p>
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<p>Beyond that, however, Schiller's arguments throughout the book led me to start puzzling through some of the problems that have recently been getting under my skin in my day job. I've been working over the last two years to help support an arts and humanities college in a large public research university at what feels like the worst possible moment for our fields and institutions. We've been under attack for a long time -- from the very beginning even, if you ask <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo81816415.html">Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon</a> -- but things have recently taken several particularly dire turns, as programs and departments and colleges around the country are being shut down. Some of those closures are being forced for nakedly ideological reasons, but others are taking a more utilitarian approach to the same end, and its those issues that most surfaced for me as I read <em>The Price of Humanity</em>, and in particular Schiller's unpacking of so-called &quot;Effective Altruism.&quot;</p>
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<p>The Effective Altruist mode of understanding the &quot;good&quot; served by philanthropy relies on quantifiable metrics focusing on, for instance, the numbers of lives saved in selecting causes to be supported. This appears at first a noble notion (who wouldn't want to save lives?) but one that calculates the &quot;value&quot; of those lives in terms of their future productivity. A life saved is not saved for the pleasure of the one who lives it, or the people and communities they touch, but rather for their economic value, for their potential contributions to the capitalist production, extraction, and funneling of wealth into the hands of what coincidentally turns out to be the donor class.</p>
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<p>What I want us to take a look at is the degree to which higher education, its leaders, its benefactors, and even its publics have knowingly or unknowingly gotten interpellated into this mode of thinking about the work we do on campus and the students we do it for. Our students have long since been redirected away from understanding themselves as anything like academic citizens -- full members in a shared community of learning -- into becoming consumers of of a commercial product designed to deliver an individual benefit. <a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12787/leading-generously">As I've argued elsewhere</a>, given the shift in the funding model for higher education from the public to individual students and families, and given the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars that those students and families are required to pay for that benefit, it's little surprise that the consumer exchange involved in higher education prompts so many of them to seek a degree program that will deliver as high a return on investment as possible. As a result, academic majors that claim, by their name or their industry connections, to provide a lucrative career path have grown in recent years, while those with less obviously utilitarian purposes have come to be seen as luxuries, and have accordingly shrunk.</p>
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<p>And now we find ourselves at a moment at which some of the benefactors of higher education -- I'm looking at you, <a href="https://www.ipm.org/news/2026-02-12/indianas-targeting-of-degrees-with-low-earnings-could-eliminate-these-programs">state legislatures</a> -- are taking it upon themselves to determine what a reasonable salary expectation for a college graduate should be, and to eliminate those departments and programs that by their calculations do not immediately provide that return on investment.</p>
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<p>There's something deeply sinister in this turn of events, and it's not just the extraordinary short-sightedness of looking at earnings in a first job out of college as evidence of the value of the learning done on campus. As the American Academy of Arts &amp; Sciences' <a href="https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators">Humanities Indicators</a> project has demonstrated, humanities majors may earn less after graduation than their counterparts in STEM fields, but <a href="https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/effect-experience-earnings-college-majors">the gap narrows</a> with work experience. They have also demonstrated that only 5.2% of terminal humanities bachelors' degree holders <a href="https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/employment-status-humanities-majors">were unemployed</a> in 2021, as compared with 4.3% of all terminal bachelors' degree holders, as well as that those terminal humanities bachelors' degree holders had a <a href="https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/earnings-humanities-majors-terminal-bachelors-degree">median annual income</a> of $64,000, not that far below the median income of all terminal bachelors' degree holders, which was $72,000.</p>
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<p>But the defensive posture that makes it necessary to quote those studies points to the deeper and more troubling assumption that the sole indicator of higher education's value is the productive potential of students as they leave campus and head out into industry. Our students, in other words, have been reduced to the economic output of the campus machinery. As Schiller notes, &quot;[t]he utilitarianism of Effective Altruism has infected even legacy institutions, leading their decision-makers to prioritize visible numbers over holistic interventions&quot; (Schiller 74). This utilitarianism is everywhere in higher education today, not just in how we value our faculty (whose careers are forever measured by quantified assessments of productivity) but now, increasingly in our students, whose earning potential outstrips every other reason for their presence on campus. Colleges and universities have accepted to their detriment a role in which they are primarily providers of economic impact, at both the level of the individual student's career path and at the level of community development. If we are able to focus on supporting students in developing lives worth living or supporting communities in becoming places worth living in -- lives and places filled with creativity, intellectual engagement, and care for one another and the world -- it is only in secondary, and increasingly marginal ways. Instead, along with the Effective Altruists, &quot;we quantify and price human life based on productivity and labor&quot; (Schiller 59), and we quantify and price learning based on its immediate economic benefits.</p>
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<p>&quot;Our best models for philanthropy,&quot; Schiller argues, &quot;are people who take advantage of its non-utilitarian possibilities and turn them against capitalism, not be redistributing its spoils but by rejecting its definition for what makes human beings valuable&quot; (152). Redistributing cash is important -- don't mistake Schiller's point -- but it does little to support the redistribution of power. And higher education has been so completely subsumed in the flows of capital that today what makes not only education but <em>students themselves</em> valuable is their future productivity rather than their capacity for thought, creativity, and care.</p>
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<p>Thinking with Schiller has helped me understand a bit of my ambivalence about the increasing push for &quot;career readiness&quot; programs in the humanities. I believe in the power of these programs to help students recognize that it is possible for them to make a good living even if they graduate with a degree in English, or Philosophy, or Art History -- a necessary concession to capitalist reality that I don't want to dismiss. The world we live in demands that we demonstrate our value in monetary terms. But at the same time I want to be sure that our answers to the question &quot;what can you do with a humanities degree&quot; do not stop with the utilitarian. Because yes, you can in fact do all manner of productive things with a humanities degree, precisely because it teaches you not just how to function in a corporate role but how to learn whatever you need to know wherever you find yourself. But even more than that, it teaches you about the full richness of human flourishing, about what makes life worth living.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Join the KC Coalition</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/join-kc-coalition/" />
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<p>On the NAS, I can use the admin interface to assign the static IP address right there, and it will accept the address, but doing so breaks a bunch of connections between the NAS and the outside world, like Synology's software updaters, whose IP addresses it cannot resolve. I am guessing that this is because assigning the static IP on the device breaks the DNS connection, but it's also possible that it's got something to do with the way I've set up the NAS's firewall rules, which, ugh.</p>
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<p>Anyhow, I am wondering at this point whether going with IP Passthrough on the BGW320 is at the root of the problem. If instead I let the AT&amp;T device handle all the WAN/DHCP stuff, and put the Eeros into bridge mode, will the static IP addresses become assignable to devices via the BGW320? If so, will devices connected to the private subnet via the Eeros still be able to talk to the devices on the public subnet? And aside from the <a href="https://support.eero.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000825206-What-advanced-features-do-I-lose-access-to-if-I-put-my-eeros-into-bridge-mode">&quot;advanced features&quot; that Eero tells me I'll lose if I go the bridge mode route</a>, are there other drawbacks?</p>
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<p>I think I've talked myself into trying it and seeing what happens... but I'm going to pause for a bit to see if anyone has other suggestions.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Gitea</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/gitea/" />
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<updated>2025-04-20T14:56:45Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/gitea/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>This site is running in 11ty and is built locally, after which the live site (which gets built into the _site folder) is pushed to my Reclaim Hosting account, where it's served up as <a href="http://kfitz.info">kfitz.info</a>. As an intermediate step, I have been pushing the code and content that builds the site to a GitHub repository, and then the _site folder to another GitHub repository, kfitz-site, mostly for preservation/backup purposes; if something happens to the server or to my local repo, there's another version-controlled pile of code out there from which things can be rebuilt. (Technically, I pull kfitz-site from GitHub to Reclaim. Similarly, <a href="http://presentations.kfitz.info">presentations.kfitz.info</a>, which runs in revealjs, is built locally, pushed to GitHub, and then pulled to Reclaim.)</p>
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<p>I've had in my head for a while, though, that GitHub is in and of itself a point of failure, partially because of its ownership structure. On top of which, I haven't been delighted knowing that everything I push there is part of the greater Copilot feeding frenzy.</p>
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<p>I'd been thinking for a while about migrating my repos to <a href="https://codeberg.org">Codeberg</a>, a community-governed alternative that -- a key consideration at this hour of the world -- is not hosted in the US. But it turns out that the terms of service on Codeberg highly discourage private repositories, and both <a href="http://kfitz.info">kfitz.info</a> and kfitz-site are private, even though the eventual published site is obviously very public and CC BY 4.0 licensed. I've kept those repositories private because they're not the product I'm trying to share -- the website is -- and I want a little freedom to make mistakes without everything being quite that out there. I totally get why Codeberg's TOS is structured the way it is; they're really focused on building open-source communities around FLOSS development, which is a huge part of why I wanted to support them. It's just not the work I'm doing.</p>
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<p>So I spent a chunk of yesterday exploring the possibility of self-hosting <a href="https://about.gitlab.com">GitLab</a>, but <em>holy cats</em> is it resource-intensive. The instance I spun up on a Digital Ocean droplet would have cost me $32/month to keep in operation, and even so it was pegging 100% memory usage, with just one user. So... no, not unless I were really hosting the service for a bunch of friends who wanted to kick in a little.</p>
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<p>This morning, though, I spun up a <a href="https://about.gitea.com">Gitea</a> instance on a much smaller Digital Ocean droplet, which will run $14/month. It's super zippy and very lightweight, and has allowed me to migrate my repositories from GitHub quite seamlessly. And there's lots of room to grow, resource-wise, so if those friends decide they want to test things out I can invite them to join me.</p>
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<p>The next thing I want to investigate in whether I can run that Gitea instance on a shared server, using one droplet to host multiple applications and sites...</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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</feed>
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@@ -545,13 +545,21 @@ pre[class*="language-diff-"] {
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<subtitle>The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.</subtitle>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/feed/masto.xml" rel="self"/>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/"/>
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<updated>2025-12-18T14:16:04Z</updated>
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<updated>2026-04-12T19:40:21Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/</id>
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<author>
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<name>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</name>
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<email>kfitz@kfitz.info</email>
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</author>
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<entry>
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<title>The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/humanities-philanthropy-good-life/"/>
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<updated>2026-04-12T19:40:21Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/humanities-philanthropy-good-life/</id>
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<content type="html">I recently finished reading Amy Schiller's The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong and How to Fix It, and as the director of a...</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Join the KC Coalition</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/join-kc-coalition/"/>
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