add after the end
This commit is contained in:
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
@@ -0,0 +1,748 @@
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<!doctype html>
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<html lang="en">
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<head>
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<meta charset="utf-8">
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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
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<title>After the End</title>
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<meta name="description" content="The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.">
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<link rel="alternate" href="feed/feed.xml" type="application/atom+xml" title="kfitz">
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<script async="" src="https://talk.hyvor.com/embed/embed.js" type="module"></script>
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<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/kfitz.info/webmention">
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<link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/kfitz.info/xmlrpc">
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<style>/**
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* okaidia theme for JavaScript, CSS and HTML
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* Loosely based on Monokai textmate theme by http://www.monokai.nl/
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* @author ocodia
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*/
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||||||
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code[class*="language-"],
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||||||
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pre[class*="language-"] {
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||||||
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color: #f8f8f2;
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||||||
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background: none;
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||||||
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text-shadow: 0 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
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font-family: Consolas, Monaco, 'Andale Mono', 'Ubuntu Mono', monospace;
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font-size: 1em;
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||||||
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text-align: left;
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||||||
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white-space: pre;
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word-spacing: normal;
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word-break: normal;
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word-wrap: normal;
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line-height: 1.5;
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-moz-tab-size: 4;
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-o-tab-size: 4;
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tab-size: 4;
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||||||
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||||||
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-webkit-hyphens: none;
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||||||
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-moz-hyphens: none;
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||||||
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-ms-hyphens: none;
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||||||
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hyphens: none;
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}
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||||||
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/* Code blocks */
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pre[class*="language-"] {
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padding: 1em;
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margin: .5em 0;
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overflow: auto;
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border-radius: 0.3em;
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}
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:not(pre) > code[class*="language-"],
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pre[class*="language-"] {
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background: #272822;
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}
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/* Inline code */
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:not(pre) > code[class*="language-"] {
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padding: .1em;
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border-radius: .3em;
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white-space: normal;
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}
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.token.comment,
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.token.prolog,
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.token.doctype,
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.token.cdata {
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color: #8292a2;
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}
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.token.punctuation {
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color: #f8f8f2;
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}
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.token.namespace {
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opacity: .7;
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}
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.token.property,
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.token.tag,
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.token.constant,
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.token.symbol,
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.token.deleted {
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color: #f92672;
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}
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.token.boolean,
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.token.number {
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color: #ae81ff;
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}
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.token.selector,
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.token.attr-name,
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.token.string,
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.token.char,
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.token.builtin,
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.token.inserted {
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color: #a6e22e;
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}
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.token.operator,
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.token.entity,
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.token.url,
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.language-css .token.string,
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.style .token.string,
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.token.variable {
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color: #f8f8f2;
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}
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.token.atrule,
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.token.attr-value,
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.token.function,
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.token.class-name {
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color: #e6db74;
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}
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.token.keyword {
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color: #66d9ef;
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}
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.token.regex,
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.token.important {
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color: #fd971f;
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}
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.token.important,
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.token.bold {
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font-weight: bold;
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}
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.token.italic {
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font-style: italic;
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}
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.token.entity {
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cursor: help;
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}
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/*
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* New diff- syntax
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*/
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pre[class*="language-diff-"] {
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--eleventy-code-padding: 1.25em;
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padding-left: var(--eleventy-code-padding);
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padding-right: var(--eleventy-code-padding);
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}
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.token.deleted {
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background-color: hsl(0, 51%, 37%);
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color: inherit;
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}
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.token.inserted {
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background-color: hsl(126, 31%, 39%);
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color: inherit;
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}
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/* Make the + and - characters unselectable for copy/paste */
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.token.prefix.unchanged,
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.token.prefix.inserted,
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.token.prefix.deleted {
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-webkit-user-select: none;
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user-select: none;
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display: inline-flex;
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align-items: center;
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justify-content: center;
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padding-top: 2px;
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padding-bottom: 2px;
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}
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.token.prefix.inserted,
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.token.prefix.deleted {
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width: var(--eleventy-code-padding);
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background-color: rgba(0,0,0,.2);
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}
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||||||
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/* Optional: full-width background color */
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.token.inserted:not(.prefix),
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.token.deleted:not(.prefix) {
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display: block;
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margin-left: calc(-1 * var(--eleventy-code-padding));
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margin-right: calc(-1 * var(--eleventy-code-padding));
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text-decoration: none; /* override del, ins, mark defaults */
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color: inherit; /* override del, ins, mark defaults */
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}
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/* This is an arbitrary CSS string added to the bundle */
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/* Defaults */
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@font-face {
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font-family: "Atkinson Hyperlegible";
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src: url('/css/files/atkinson-hyperlegible-latin-400-normal.woff2') format('woff2');
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font-display: swap;
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}
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@font-face {
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font-family: "Atkinson Hyperlegible";
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font-weight: bold;
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src: url('/css/files/atkinson-hyperlegible-latin-700-normal.woff2') format('woff2');
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font-display: swap;
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}
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@font-face {
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font-family: "Atkinson Hyperlegible";
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font-style: italic
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src: url('/css/files/atkinson-hyperlegible-latin-400-italic.woff2') format('woff2');
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font-display: swap;
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}
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:root {
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--font-family: "Atkinson Hyperlegible", -apple-system, system-ui, sans-serif;
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--font-family-monospace: Consolas, Menlo, Monaco, Andale Mono WT, Andale Mono, Lucida Console, Lucida Sans Typewriter, DejaVu Sans Mono, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Liberation Mono, Nimbus Mono L, Courier New, Courier, monospace;
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font-size: 18px;
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}
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/* Theme colors */
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:root {
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--color-gray-20: #e0e0e0;
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--color-gray-50: #C0C0C0;
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--color-gray-90: #333;
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--background-color: #fff;
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--text-color: var(--color-gray-90);
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--text-color-link: #d61d4a;
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--text-color-link-active: #853439;
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--text-color-link-visited: #e8325e;
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--syntax-tab-size: 2;
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}
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@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
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:root {
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--color-gray-20: #e0e0e0;
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--color-gray-50: #C0C0C0;
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--color-gray-90: #dad8d8;
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/* --text-color is assigned to --color-gray-_ above */
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--text-color-link: #1493fb;
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--text-color-link-active: #6969f7;
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--text-color-link-visited: #a6a6f8;
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||||||
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--background-color: #15202b;
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}
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||||||
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}
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||||||
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||||||
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||||||
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/* Global stylesheet */
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||||||
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* {
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box-sizing: border-box;
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||||||
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}
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||||||
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||||||
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@view-transition {
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navigation: auto;
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}
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html,
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body {
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padding: 0;
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margin: 0 auto;
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font-family: var(--font-family);
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color: var(--text-color);
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background-color: var(--background-color);
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||||||
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}
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html {
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overflow-y: scroll;
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||||||
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}
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body {
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||||||
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max-width: 40em;
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||||||
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}
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||||||
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||||||
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/* https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/how-to-hide-content/ */
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||||||
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.visually-hidden {
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clip: rect(0 0 0 0);
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clip-path: inset(50%);
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height: 1px;
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||||||
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overflow: hidden;
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||||||
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position: absolute;
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||||||
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white-space: nowrap;
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width: 1px;
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}
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p:last-child {
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margin-bottom: 0;
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}
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p {
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||||||
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line-height: 1.5;
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||||||
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}
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||||||
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||||||
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li {
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||||||
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line-height: 1.5;
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||||||
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}
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||||||
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||||||
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a[href] {
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||||||
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color: var(--text-color-link);
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||||||
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}
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||||||
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a[href]:visited {
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||||||
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color: var(--text-color-link-visited);
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||||||
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}
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a[href]:hover,
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a[href]:active {
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color: var(--text-color-link-active);
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}
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main,
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footer {
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padding: 1rem;
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}
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main :first-child {
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margin-top: 0;
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}
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header {
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border-bottom: 1px dashed var(--color-gray-20);
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}
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header:after {
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content: "";
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display: table;
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||||||
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clear: both;
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}
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||||||
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footer {
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||||||
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border-top: 1px dashed var(--color-gray-50);
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||||||
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}
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||||||
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.links-nextprev {
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display: flex;
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justify-content: space-between;
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||||||
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gap: .5em 1em;
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||||||
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list-style: "";
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||||||
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border-top: 1px dashed var(--color-gray-20);
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||||||
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padding: 1em 0;
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||||||
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}
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||||||
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.links-nextprev > * {
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||||||
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flex-grow: 1;
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||||||
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}
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||||||
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.links-nextprev-next {
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||||||
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text-align: right;
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||||||
|
}
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||||||
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||||||
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table {
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||||||
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margin: 1em 0;
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||||||
|
}
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||||||
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table td,
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table th {
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padding-right: 1em;
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||||||
|
}
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||||||
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||||||
|
pre,
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||||||
|
code {
|
||||||
|
font-family: var(--font-family-monospace);
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
pre:not([class*="language-"]) {
|
||||||
|
margin: .5em 0;
|
||||||
|
line-height: 1.375; /* 22px /16 */
|
||||||
|
-moz-tab-size: var(--syntax-tab-size);
|
||||||
|
-o-tab-size: var(--syntax-tab-size);
|
||||||
|
tab-size: var(--syntax-tab-size);
|
||||||
|
-webkit-hyphens: none;
|
||||||
|
-ms-hyphens: none;
|
||||||
|
hyphens: none;
|
||||||
|
direction: ltr;
|
||||||
|
text-align: left;
|
||||||
|
white-space: pre;
|
||||||
|
word-spacing: normal;
|
||||||
|
word-break: normal;
|
||||||
|
overflow-x: auto;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
code {
|
||||||
|
word-break: break-all;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
/* Header */
|
||||||
|
header {
|
||||||
|
display: flex;
|
||||||
|
gap: 1em .5em;
|
||||||
|
flex-wrap: wrap;
|
||||||
|
align-items: center;
|
||||||
|
padding: 1em;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
.home-link {
|
||||||
|
font-size: 1.5em; /* 16px /16 */
|
||||||
|
font-weight: 700;
|
||||||
|
margin-right: 2em;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
.home-link:link:not(:hover) {
|
||||||
|
text-decoration: none;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
/* Nav */
|
||||||
|
.nav {
|
||||||
|
display: flex;
|
||||||
|
padding: 0;
|
||||||
|
margin: 0;
|
||||||
|
list-style: none;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
.nav-item {
|
||||||
|
display: inline-block;
|
||||||
|
margin-right: 1em;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
.nav-item a[href]:not(:hover) {
|
||||||
|
text-decoration: none;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
.nav a[href][aria-current="page"] {
|
||||||
|
text-decoration: underline;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
/* Posts list */
|
||||||
|
.postlist {
|
||||||
|
list-style: none;
|
||||||
|
padding: 0;
|
||||||
|
padding-left: 1.5rem;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
.postlist-item {
|
||||||
|
display: flex;
|
||||||
|
flex-wrap: wrap;
|
||||||
|
align-items: baseline;
|
||||||
|
counter-increment: start-from -1;
|
||||||
|
margin-bottom: 1em;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
.postlist-item:before {
|
||||||
|
display: inline-block;
|
||||||
|
pointer-events: none;
|
||||||
|
content: "" counter(start-from, decimal-leading-zero) ". ";
|
||||||
|
line-height: 100%;
|
||||||
|
text-align: right;
|
||||||
|
margin-left: -1.5rem;
|
||||||
|
}
|
||||||
|
.postlist-date,
|
||||||
|
.postlist-item:before {
|
||||||
|
font-size: 0.8125em; /* 13px /16 */
|
||||||
|
color: var(--color-gray-90);
|
||||||
|
}
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<h1 id="after-the-end">After the End</h1>
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<ul class="post-metadata">
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<li><time datetime="2026-05-18">18 May 2026</time></li>
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<li><a href="/tags/writing/" class="post-tag">writing</a></li>
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<p><em>I wrote the paper below for an ACLA panel on re-theorizing the university, delivered in Montreal in late February. Afterward, I shared it with a colleague who suggested that I pitch it to a well-known academic trade paper for their section dedicated to op/eds and features. It took me a bit, but I did... and am just going to note that "if you don't hear from us in a couple of weeks, consider yourself rejected" is not my favorite editorial policy. Now back in Montreal for a bit of vacation, I finally have time to share this essay, with a note that this is the first piece of writing toward something larger, and so comments are most welcome.</em></p>
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<blockquote>
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<p><em>The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.<br>
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—Kingsnorth and Hine, “Uncivilization”</em></p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I have to start by acknowledging that this paper has taken a very different direction than the one I’d projected in my abstract. How different, exactly, might be guessed not just from the change in title<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup> but from the fact that I am beginning by asking you to consider fire ants.</p>
|
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<p>I’m imagining that at some point or another you are likely to have heard about “rafting” behavior in fire ants: in extreme flooding situations, fire ant colonies can survive for protracted periods of time by self-assembling into floating structures, clinging together until the danger has passed and their nest can be rebuilt on solid ground (Mlot et al. 2011).</p>
|
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<p>It’s a compelling metaphor for our political moment, as calls for mutual aid and other commons-building actions spread through social media, and as we watch the practices of collective resistance in Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and other cities as they face the flooding events created not by water but by ICE.</p>
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<p>But while that rafting behavior in fire ants does have something to teach us about collective survival, there are a few key pieces of the lesson that are missing – and it’s those pieces that I think have most to share about the call for collective, collaborative, coalition-oriented behavior that I would like to cultivate in institutions of higher education, as we seek to survive the extinction events we’re now facing.</p>
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<p>I’m going to fill in that missing piece, but I want to set a little bit of context first. Thanks to a recommendation from Greg Britton at JHUP, I’ve recently finished reading Dougald Hine’s <em>At Work in the Ruins</em>. Hine is co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and has spent decades working in and around environmental movements, attempting to awaken the world and its leaders to the realities of climate change. Beginning with the "Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto," written in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe and the subsequent Great Recession, that work took a turn that many did not want to hear, arguing that rather than using more technology and more corporate ingenuity in a quest to make our way of life in the global north sustainable, that we need instead to face the possibility that our way of life may be “passing into history,” exposing the ways in which our collective faith in “progress” as the thing that might save us has been mythological all along.</p>
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<p>In <em>At Work in the Ruins</em>, Hine explores the events leading up to and away from the moment he heard himself say “I have to stop talking about climate change” out loud. His exploration leads him to recognize that all of the “solutions” being projected fail to actually solve the larger problem: by moving to electric cars, for instance, we might lessen our reliance on fossil fuels but the need to mine the earth for rare elements to make batteries increases – and worse, we remain dependent on the corporations that structure nearly every aspect of our lives. Hine asks us to consider not how to save our way of life, but what we should do if it’s too late for it to be saved. His answer is that rather than thinking of destroying or preserving the structures of our way of life, we might instead consider “the possibility of <em>composting</em> the traditions that matter to us: tending to their decay in such a way as to contribute to the possibility of life going on.” He further cites Federico Campagna as saying one’s work, when living at the end of a world, should be to “leave good ruins,” to find ways of preserving starting points from which future survivors can learn from our mistakes and build something entirely new.</p>
|
||||||
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<p>This is the mindset that I have found myself increasingly entrenched in since the 2024 election. My last several books have focused on what we need to do if we are to ensure the sustainability of higher education as we have known and benefited from it – first, in <em>Planned Obsolescence</em>, arguing that our modes of communication need to become more open, more attuned to and embedded in the ways of knowing of the internet age, in order to stave off mainstream culture’s growing conviction of our irrelevance; then, in <em>Generous Thinking</em>, arguing that rebuilding trust between the academy and the communities we are meant to serve requires us to work in more connected, engaged ways that value not just the kinds of expertise we develop on campus but the lived expertises cultivated in, by, and for the publics with which we work; and then finally, in <em>Leading Generously</em>, arguing that doing such open, collective, engaged work on campus requires us to rethink the structures of academic leadership and the values that it inevitably encodes throughout our institutional structures.</p>
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||||||
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<p>And now, with Hine, I find myself asking what we should do if it’s too late. I want to be clear about what I’m saying here. I don’t actually think it’s too late. I don’t think the fight is over, and in fact I think we owe it to the world to keep fighting, for a better university, a better culture, a better world. But fighting requires prioritizing, and protecting what’s most important. And as Hine notes, “giving up can be a necessary step, a precondition for becoming able to see the world otherwise and find the moves that are called for now,” and so: What if it were too late? What would we do if even our most persuasive arguments for culture change within the academy turned out to be nothing but more deck-chair rearranging, with no power to stave off the inevitable given the economic interests that over-determine so much of what we can do? What would we do if higher education as we know it is heading for catastrophe, if our culture and our ways of working cannot be made sustainable?</p>
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<p>We need to learn how to make good ruins.</p>
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<p>But what would those ruins look like? How might they function? Who will build them? And what use could they possibly be if our institutions do not survive, at least not in the shape we recognize today?</p>
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||||||
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<p>So back to those rafting fire ants. Any of you who have ever lived in an area infested with fire ants know that they are <em>ferocious</em> when disturbed: they swarm and bite with abandon, and their bites are hellishly painful. I still have residual trauma from having accidentally stepped in a fire ant mound as a kid.</p>
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<p>But that ferociousness, while one key aspect of fire ants’ survival, is not the bit I want to focus on. Instead it’s the missing pieces in their collective rafting behavior that I mentioned earlier. A 2015 study of fire ant survival in extreme flooding events determined that while “large workers and matriarchs” can survive flooding events by swimming independently or joining up with others, “small workers” more often drown whether they go it alone or raft together (Cassill et al. 2015). However, the chances of survival among those small workers increases significantly when the rafts they create also contain larger workers and matriarchs. Which is to say that the key lesson in such rafting behavior is not that the collective can survive in ways that the individual cannot; it’s that the collective’s survival requires the participation of those <em>who might survive on their own anyway</em>.</p>
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<p>We sink or float together, but the odds of our floating go up when the largest and most privileged among us help build the raft.</p>
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<p>This, of course, is what real solidarity looks like: not just creating connections for survival among those who are threatened with drowning – though that is foundational – but commitment from those who could swim on their own to work with the rest to create that raft. The gap between this truly collective strategy for survival and too many calls for solidarity is what led Mikki Kendall to create the Twitter hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen in 2013. Kendall notes in <em>Hood Feminism</em> that the hashtag was meant to highlight the ways in which “mainstream feminist calls for solidarity centered on not only the concerns but the comfort of white middle-class women at the expense of other women” (Kendall 2020). Real solidarity can never ask the small workers to band together with the aim of supporting the larger workers and the matriarch; rather, as those fire ant researchers conclude, “a queen’s survival during a natural catastrophe depends on workers who help themselves first and help others when the opportunity presents itself” (Cassill et al. 2015). This sounds like the opposite of the kinds of collaborative behavior that I’m hoping our fire ant rafts will guide us toward, except that we’ve all heard this a million times in the form of “put your own mask on first”; putting your own survival aside to help the queen helps no one. Instead, those small workers must focus on their own connections, with large workers whose job is to protect the queen joining in to form the edges of the raft, using their size and their reach to work toward bringing the entire structure to safety.</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>Translating this extended metaphor to our own context in higher education: a similar form of bottom-up solidarity is necessary both at the local, individual, person-to-person and unit-to-unit level within our institutions as well as at the larger institution-to-institution level across the higher education sector – but we need the large workers and the matriarchs to join in, to use their size and reach to support the whole. On our campuses, this means that faculty need to stand with staff, that tenure-system faculty need to stand with contract faculty, and that administrators need to stand with and for their colleagues at every level. Across our campuses, this means that the elite privates need to stand with the publics, the R1s need to stand with the regional comprehensives and the community colleges, and that all of our leaders need to recognize that we have more to gain or lose collectively as a sector than we do as rankings-driven competitors.</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>But it’s important to note – another lesson from our fire ant rafts – that not all forms of connection are the same. The fire ants in a raft hold onto one another using their mandibles, so it turns out that their jaws are good for biting things other than oblivious children. It also demonstrates that the ants have the discretion and control to calibrate the force of their bites to keep them from injuring the others that they’re cooperating with. And, as those researchers note from their observations, “cooperative rafters survived; aggressive rafters died.” Both as individuals and as institutions, we need to learn how to build the kind of cooperative structures in which each person or unit or campus is able to move fluidly from putting their own mask on first to supporting the others in the raft <em>without prioritizing self-interest</em>, without taking advantage – and this is no small task.</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>What I want to argue – and this feels like a bit of a leap, but bear with me – is that one of the rafts that we need to focus on building is <em>shared infrastructure</em> for the collective survival of our work. And that last bit is key: it’s the work that is most important to save at this hour of the world, not our individual jobs, our individual programs and departments, our individual institutions – though those stand the best chances of survival if we raft together. It’s important to acknowledge the deep sense of loss that this produces for many of us, and especially for those of us who were privileged enough to enjoy the academy that flourished in the second half of the 20th century. But while the structures we have had the opportunity to work within have felt eternal in some ways, they are comparatively recent inventions – and they have never been as good as we might want them to be, where “good” could stand in for “equitable,” or “democratic,” or “supportive of the common good.”</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>As Robert Lynd argued in “Who Calls the Tune?”, a 1948 essay in the <em>Journal of Higher Education</em>,</p>
|
||||||
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<blockquote>
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||||||
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<p>“Our general confidence about education in America stems from the fact that we assume the dominant characteristic of our society to be that it is a political democracy; that is, that the front door is open to Americans to do anything with our common life that the majority of us elect. But we must face the further question as to whether political democracy is, in fact, master in its own house” (167).</p>
|
||||||
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</blockquote>
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||||||
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<p>That master, rather, is and has always been capitalism, which as Lynd goes on to explore is ruthless and unstoppable in its quest not just for profit but for self-protection. And the damage that American capitalism has done worldwide in that quest leaves Lynd to admit that “the prospect ahead, as the reader will have gathered, seems to me more than a little dark and threatening. I see no ready solution to the dilemma of American education, caught, as I believe it is, ever more firmly in the vise of big-business power” (174). Big-business power constrains not just what gets taught on our campuses, and why, but also the structures of those campuses and our work together on them – and it has been so since the beginnings of what now feels to many of us like the golden age of American public higher education. And now that we find ourselves in what cannot help but feel like the waning days of political democracy, the dark and threatening prospects that Lynd saw for American higher education appear to be coming to pass. Had it not been for our institutions’ service to capitalism, we and our institutions might have done and been a lot more good – but if it’s too late to fix it, there is still time to preserve and protect the good that we did create.</p>
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<p>What Hine describes as “making good ruins” for an academy facing the possibility of extinction might well consist of building the shared systems and platforms that can ensure that the knowledge our institutions have long cultivated and shared is preserved for the world, such that the survivors of our present disaster can rebuild once they reach solid ground.</p>
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<p>But building that shared infrastructure will have to be led by the institutions that need it least, and the infrastructure must support and work for those that need it most. And this is an extremely heavy lift for an academy whose entire ethos, top to bottom, has long been driven by competition rather than cooperation, by meritocracy rather than commonality. This is the work that I’ve been embarked on with the <a href="https://hcommons.org">Knowledge Commons</a> team over the last ten years. Our goal is to create a shared, community-governed platform on and through which knowledge creators wherever they are – whether securely employed at a prestigious institution or working without institutional support, whether their knowledge has been created through academic practices or through lived experience, wherever on the planet they might be, working in whatever language they might use – can make their work available for the world to learn from and build upon.</p>
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<p>Our platform is and will always be free and open to any such knowledge creator, but making that so requires support from those individuals and institutions that can afford to help. Making that infrastructure as resilient as it can be, and ensuring that the knowledge shared through it will not disappear due to funding shortages, technical disruptions, or political intervention further requires massive collaboration, and especially as these cataclysms reach our shore. We must work together to build a global infrastructure for the preservation of our collective knowledge, but we cannot do so without the support of those institutions whose survival least depends on the success of our shared infrastructure, the “good ruins” that might allow everyone someday to rebuild.</p>
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<p>And as Hine notes, making good ruins must mean not just preserving the knowledge of northern, western modernity, but far more importantly preserving the knowledge of those that modernity has excluded, those whose ways of life modernity sought to enclose. Those ways of life may well have been sustainable had they not had been confronted by the damage that our way of life created.</p>
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<p>Recognizing this demands that we look at one very uncomfortable truth with icy clarity: even as those of us in American higher education are suffering deep losses in the midst of the cataclysm we face, we must account for the ways that our various privileges, however attenuated they may feel to us – especially those of us who are tenured faculty amidst growing numbers of contingent and underemployed coworkers, but all of us who are scholars in institutions to which the vast majority of the world may never have access, able to whatever degree to pursue “the life of the mind” in a world with little space for such rarified practices – that these privileges may well have come to us <em>at the expense</em> of others – others on our campuses, others kept off of our campuses, others who never asked for us to show them the way.</p>
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<p>We may hear the story of the rafting fire ants and recognize ourselves in the small workers, needing to band together to float through the deadly circumstances by which we are beset, and recognize our need for the participation of the large workers and their queen in our rafts to survive. But this narrative is a relative one. We also need to consider the scenarios in which we are in fact the large workers, the ones who must join and support the collectives built by others so that <em>they</em> may survive.</p>
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<p><strong>Works Cited</strong></p>
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<p>Cassill, Deby Lee, Alexander Casella, Jaeson Clayborn, Matthew Perry, and Michael Lagarde. “What Can Ants Tell Us about Collective Behavior during a Natural Catastrophe?” <em>Journal of Bioeconomics</em> 17, no. 3 (2015): 255–70. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-015-9195-2">https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-015-9195-2</a>.</p>
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<p>Hine, Dougald. <em>At Work in the Ruins</em>. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023.</p>
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<p>Kendall, Mikki. <em>Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot</em>. Viking, 2020.</p>
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<p>Kingsnorth, Paul, and Dougald Hine. “Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto.” Dark Mountain, 2009. <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/">https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/</a>.</p>
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<p>Knowledge Commons. <a href="https://hcommons.org">https://hcommons.org</a>.</p>
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<p>Lynd, Robert S. “Who Calls the Tune?” <em>The Journal of Higher Education</em> 19, no. 4 (1948): 163-174+217.</p>
|
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<p>Mlot, Nathan J., Craig A. Tovey, and David L. Hu. “Fire Ants Self-Assemble into Waterproof Rafts to Survive Floods.” <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America</em> 108, no. 19 (2011): 7669–73. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016658108">https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016658108</a>.</p>
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<p>Solnit, Rebecca. <em>The Beginning Comes after the End: Notes on a World of Change</em>. Haymarket Books, 2026.</p>
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<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p>To be honest, I now don't remember what my originally planned title had been, but I do remember finding out the day before I delivered "After the End" that Rebecca Solnit's <em>The Beginning Comes After the End</em> was going to be released the day after the panel. As always, Solnit provide hope in a dark time, something I'll return to as the larger piece develops. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p>
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<ul class="links-nextprev"><li class="links-nextprev-prev">← Previous<br> <a href="/humanities-philanthropy-good-life/">The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life</a></li>
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<a href="/after-the-end/" class="archivelist-link">After the End</a><br>
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<time class="archivelist-date" datetime="2026-05-18">18 May 2026</time>
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<a href="/humanities-philanthropy-good-life/" class="archivelist-link">The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life</a><br>
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<a href="/humanities-philanthropy-good-life/" class="archivelist-link">The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life</a><br>
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<time class="archivelist-date" datetime="2026-04-12">12 April 2026</time>
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<content type="html"><p><em>I wrote the paper below for an ACLA panel on re-theorizing the university, delivered in Montreal in late February. Afterward, I shared it with a colleague who suggested that I pitch it to a well-known academic trade paper for their section dedicated to op/eds and features. It took me a bit, but I did... and am just going to note that &quot;if you don't hear from us in a couple of weeks, consider yourself rejected&quot; is not my favorite editorial policy. Now back in Montreal for a bit of vacation, I finally have time to share this essay, with a note that this is the first piece of writing toward something larger, and so comments are most welcome.</em></p>
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<p><em>The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.<br>
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—Kingsnorth and Hine, “Uncivilization”</em></p>
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<p>I have to start by acknowledging that this paper has taken a very different direction than the one I’d projected in my abstract. How different, exactly, might be guessed not just from the change in title<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://kfitz.info/after-the-end/#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup> but from the fact that I am beginning by asking you to consider fire ants.</p>
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<p>I’m imagining that at some point or another you are likely to have heard about “rafting” behavior in fire ants: in extreme flooding situations, fire ant colonies can survive for protracted periods of time by self-assembling into floating structures, clinging together until the danger has passed and their nest can be rebuilt on solid ground (Mlot et al. 2011).</p>
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<p>It’s a compelling metaphor for our political moment, as calls for mutual aid and other commons-building actions spread through social media, and as we watch the practices of collective resistance in Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and other cities as they face the flooding events created not by water but by ICE.</p>
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<p>But while that rafting behavior in fire ants does have something to teach us about collective survival, there are a few key pieces of the lesson that are missing – and it’s those pieces that I think have most to share about the call for collective, collaborative, coalition-oriented behavior that I would like to cultivate in institutions of higher education, as we seek to survive the extinction events we’re now facing.</p>
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<p>I’m going to fill in that missing piece, but I want to set a little bit of context first. Thanks to a recommendation from Greg Britton at JHUP, I’ve recently finished reading Dougald Hine’s <em>At Work in the Ruins</em>. Hine is co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and has spent decades working in and around environmental movements, attempting to awaken the world and its leaders to the realities of climate change. Beginning with the &quot;Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto,&quot; written in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe and the subsequent Great Recession, that work took a turn that many did not want to hear, arguing that rather than using more technology and more corporate ingenuity in a quest to make our way of life in the global north sustainable, that we need instead to face the possibility that our way of life may be “passing into history,” exposing the ways in which our collective faith in “progress” as the thing that might save us has been mythological all along.</p>
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<p>In <em>At Work in the Ruins</em>, Hine explores the events leading up to and away from the moment he heard himself say “I have to stop talking about climate change” out loud. His exploration leads him to recognize that all of the “solutions” being projected fail to actually solve the larger problem: by moving to electric cars, for instance, we might lessen our reliance on fossil fuels but the need to mine the earth for rare elements to make batteries increases – and worse, we remain dependent on the corporations that structure nearly every aspect of our lives. Hine asks us to consider not how to save our way of life, but what we should do if it’s too late for it to be saved. His answer is that rather than thinking of destroying or preserving the structures of our way of life, we might instead consider “the possibility of <em>composting</em> the traditions that matter to us: tending to their decay in such a way as to contribute to the possibility of life going on.” He further cites Federico Campagna as saying one’s work, when living at the end of a world, should be to “leave good ruins,” to find ways of preserving starting points from which future survivors can learn from our mistakes and build something entirely new.</p>
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<p>This is the mindset that I have found myself increasingly entrenched in since the 2024 election. My last several books have focused on what we need to do if we are to ensure the sustainability of higher education as we have known and benefited from it – first, in <em>Planned Obsolescence</em>, arguing that our modes of communication need to become more open, more attuned to and embedded in the ways of knowing of the internet age, in order to stave off mainstream culture’s growing conviction of our irrelevance; then, in <em>Generous Thinking</em>, arguing that rebuilding trust between the academy and the communities we are meant to serve requires us to work in more connected, engaged ways that value not just the kinds of expertise we develop on campus but the lived expertises cultivated in, by, and for the publics with which we work; and then finally, in <em>Leading Generously</em>, arguing that doing such open, collective, engaged work on campus requires us to rethink the structures of academic leadership and the values that it inevitably encodes throughout our institutional structures.</p>
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<p>And now, with Hine, I find myself asking what we should do if it’s too late. I want to be clear about what I’m saying here. I don’t actually think it’s too late. I don’t think the fight is over, and in fact I think we owe it to the world to keep fighting, for a better university, a better culture, a better world. But fighting requires prioritizing, and protecting what’s most important. And as Hine notes, “giving up can be a necessary step, a precondition for becoming able to see the world otherwise and find the moves that are called for now,” and so: What if it were too late? What would we do if even our most persuasive arguments for culture change within the academy turned out to be nothing but more deck-chair rearranging, with no power to stave off the inevitable given the economic interests that over-determine so much of what we can do? What would we do if higher education as we know it is heading for catastrophe, if our culture and our ways of working cannot be made sustainable?</p>
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<p>We need to learn how to make good ruins.</p>
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<p>But what would those ruins look like? How might they function? Who will build them? And what use could they possibly be if our institutions do not survive, at least not in the shape we recognize today?</p>
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<p>So back to those rafting fire ants. Any of you who have ever lived in an area infested with fire ants know that they are <em>ferocious</em> when disturbed: they swarm and bite with abandon, and their bites are hellishly painful. I still have residual trauma from having accidentally stepped in a fire ant mound as a kid.</p>
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<p>But that ferociousness, while one key aspect of fire ants’ survival, is not the bit I want to focus on. Instead it’s the missing pieces in their collective rafting behavior that I mentioned earlier. A 2015 study of fire ant survival in extreme flooding events determined that while “large workers and matriarchs” can survive flooding events by swimming independently or joining up with others, “small workers” more often drown whether they go it alone or raft together (Cassill et al. 2015). However, the chances of survival among those small workers increases significantly when the rafts they create also contain larger workers and matriarchs. Which is to say that the key lesson in such rafting behavior is not that the collective can survive in ways that the individual cannot; it’s that the collective’s survival requires the participation of those <em>who might survive on their own anyway</em>.</p>
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<p>We sink or float together, but the odds of our floating go up when the largest and most privileged among us help build the raft.</p>
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<p>This, of course, is what real solidarity looks like: not just creating connections for survival among those who are threatened with drowning – though that is foundational – but commitment from those who could swim on their own to work with the rest to create that raft. The gap between this truly collective strategy for survival and too many calls for solidarity is what led Mikki Kendall to create the Twitter hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen in 2013. Kendall notes in <em>Hood Feminism</em> that the hashtag was meant to highlight the ways in which “mainstream feminist calls for solidarity centered on not only the concerns but the comfort of white middle-class women at the expense of other women” (Kendall 2020). Real solidarity can never ask the small workers to band together with the aim of supporting the larger workers and the matriarch; rather, as those fire ant researchers conclude, “a queen’s survival during a natural catastrophe depends on workers who help themselves first and help others when the opportunity presents itself” (Cassill et al. 2015). This sounds like the opposite of the kinds of collaborative behavior that I’m hoping our fire ant rafts will guide us toward, except that we’ve all heard this a million times in the form of “put your own mask on first”; putting your own survival aside to help the queen helps no one. Instead, those small workers must focus on their own connections, with large workers whose job is to protect the queen joining in to form the edges of the raft, using their size and their reach to work toward bringing the entire structure to safety.</p>
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<p>Translating this extended metaphor to our own context in higher education: a similar form of bottom-up solidarity is necessary both at the local, individual, person-to-person and unit-to-unit level within our institutions as well as at the larger institution-to-institution level across the higher education sector – but we need the large workers and the matriarchs to join in, to use their size and reach to support the whole. On our campuses, this means that faculty need to stand with staff, that tenure-system faculty need to stand with contract faculty, and that administrators need to stand with and for their colleagues at every level. Across our campuses, this means that the elite privates need to stand with the publics, the R1s need to stand with the regional comprehensives and the community colleges, and that all of our leaders need to recognize that we have more to gain or lose collectively as a sector than we do as rankings-driven competitors.</p>
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<p>But it’s important to note – another lesson from our fire ant rafts – that not all forms of connection are the same. The fire ants in a raft hold onto one another using their mandibles, so it turns out that their jaws are good for biting things other than oblivious children. It also demonstrates that the ants have the discretion and control to calibrate the force of their bites to keep them from injuring the others that they’re cooperating with. And, as those researchers note from their observations, “cooperative rafters survived; aggressive rafters died.” Both as individuals and as institutions, we need to learn how to build the kind of cooperative structures in which each person or unit or campus is able to move fluidly from putting their own mask on first to supporting the others in the raft <em>without prioritizing self-interest</em>, without taking advantage – and this is no small task.</p>
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<p>What I want to argue – and this feels like a bit of a leap, but bear with me – is that one of the rafts that we need to focus on building is <em>shared infrastructure</em> for the collective survival of our work. And that last bit is key: it’s the work that is most important to save at this hour of the world, not our individual jobs, our individual programs and departments, our individual institutions – though those stand the best chances of survival if we raft together. It’s important to acknowledge the deep sense of loss that this produces for many of us, and especially for those of us who were privileged enough to enjoy the academy that flourished in the second half of the 20th century. But while the structures we have had the opportunity to work within have felt eternal in some ways, they are comparatively recent inventions – and they have never been as good as we might want them to be, where “good” could stand in for “equitable,” or “democratic,” or “supportive of the common good.”</p>
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<p>As Robert Lynd argued in “Who Calls the Tune?”, a 1948 essay in the <em>Journal of Higher Education</em>,</p>
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<p>“Our general confidence about education in America stems from the fact that we assume the dominant characteristic of our society to be that it is a political democracy; that is, that the front door is open to Americans to do anything with our common life that the majority of us elect. But we must face the further question as to whether political democracy is, in fact, master in its own house” (167).</p>
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<p>That master, rather, is and has always been capitalism, which as Lynd goes on to explore is ruthless and unstoppable in its quest not just for profit but for self-protection. And the damage that American capitalism has done worldwide in that quest leaves Lynd to admit that “the prospect ahead, as the reader will have gathered, seems to me more than a little dark and threatening. I see no ready solution to the dilemma of American education, caught, as I believe it is, ever more firmly in the vise of big-business power” (174). Big-business power constrains not just what gets taught on our campuses, and why, but also the structures of those campuses and our work together on them – and it has been so since the beginnings of what now feels to many of us like the golden age of American public higher education. And now that we find ourselves in what cannot help but feel like the waning days of political democracy, the dark and threatening prospects that Lynd saw for American higher education appear to be coming to pass. Had it not been for our institutions’ service to capitalism, we and our institutions might have done and been a lot more good – but if it’s too late to fix it, there is still time to preserve and protect the good that we did create.</p>
|
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<p>What Hine describes as “making good ruins” for an academy facing the possibility of extinction might well consist of building the shared systems and platforms that can ensure that the knowledge our institutions have long cultivated and shared is preserved for the world, such that the survivors of our present disaster can rebuild once they reach solid ground.</p>
|
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|
<p>But building that shared infrastructure will have to be led by the institutions that need it least, and the infrastructure must support and work for those that need it most. And this is an extremely heavy lift for an academy whose entire ethos, top to bottom, has long been driven by competition rather than cooperation, by meritocracy rather than commonality. This is the work that I’ve been embarked on with the <a href="https://hcommons.org">Knowledge Commons</a> team over the last ten years. Our goal is to create a shared, community-governed platform on and through which knowledge creators wherever they are – whether securely employed at a prestigious institution or working without institutional support, whether their knowledge has been created through academic practices or through lived experience, wherever on the planet they might be, working in whatever language they might use – can make their work available for the world to learn from and build upon.</p>
|
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<p>Our platform is and will always be free and open to any such knowledge creator, but making that so requires support from those individuals and institutions that can afford to help. Making that infrastructure as resilient as it can be, and ensuring that the knowledge shared through it will not disappear due to funding shortages, technical disruptions, or political intervention further requires massive collaboration, and especially as these cataclysms reach our shore. We must work together to build a global infrastructure for the preservation of our collective knowledge, but we cannot do so without the support of those institutions whose survival least depends on the success of our shared infrastructure, the “good ruins” that might allow everyone someday to rebuild.</p>
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<p>And as Hine notes, making good ruins must mean not just preserving the knowledge of northern, western modernity, but far more importantly preserving the knowledge of those that modernity has excluded, those whose ways of life modernity sought to enclose. Those ways of life may well have been sustainable had they not had been confronted by the damage that our way of life created.</p>
|
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|
<p>Recognizing this demands that we look at one very uncomfortable truth with icy clarity: even as those of us in American higher education are suffering deep losses in the midst of the cataclysm we face, we must account for the ways that our various privileges, however attenuated they may feel to us – especially those of us who are tenured faculty amidst growing numbers of contingent and underemployed coworkers, but all of us who are scholars in institutions to which the vast majority of the world may never have access, able to whatever degree to pursue “the life of the mind” in a world with little space for such rarified practices – that these privileges may well have come to us <em>at the expense</em> of others – others on our campuses, others kept off of our campuses, others who never asked for us to show them the way.</p>
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<p>We may hear the story of the rafting fire ants and recognize ourselves in the small workers, needing to band together to float through the deadly circumstances by which we are beset, and recognize our need for the participation of the large workers and their queen in our rafts to survive. But this narrative is a relative one. We also need to consider the scenarios in which we are in fact the large workers, the ones who must join and support the collectives built by others so that <em>they</em> may survive.</p>
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<p><strong>Works Cited</strong></p>
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<p>Cassill, Deby Lee, Alexander Casella, Jaeson Clayborn, Matthew Perry, and Michael Lagarde. “What Can Ants Tell Us about Collective Behavior during a Natural Catastrophe?” <em>Journal of Bioeconomics</em> 17, no. 3 (2015): 255–70. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-015-9195-2">https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-015-9195-2</a>.</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>Hine, Dougald. <em>At Work in the Ruins</em>. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023.</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>Kendall, Mikki. <em>Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot</em>. Viking, 2020.</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>Kingsnorth, Paul, and Dougald Hine. “Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto.” Dark Mountain, 2009. <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/">https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/</a>.</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>Knowledge Commons. <a href="https://hcommons.org">https://hcommons.org</a>.</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>Lynd, Robert S. “Who Calls the Tune?” <em>The Journal of Higher Education</em> 19, no. 4 (1948): 163-174+217.</p>
|
||||||
|
<p>Mlot, Nathan J., Craig A. Tovey, and David L. Hu. “Fire Ants Self-Assemble into Waterproof Rafts to Survive Floods.” <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America</em> 108, no. 19 (2011): 7669–73. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016658108">https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016658108</a>.</p>
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<p>Solnit, Rebecca. <em>The Beginning Comes after the End: Notes on a World of Change</em>. Haymarket Books, 2026.</p>
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<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p>To be honest, I now don't remember what my originally planned title had been, but I do remember finding out the day before I delivered &quot;After the End&quot; that Rebecca Solnit's <em>The Beginning Comes After the End</em> was going to be released the day after the panel. As always, Solnit provide hope in a dark time, something I'll return to as the larger piece develops. <a href="https://kfitz.info/after-the-end/#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p>
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<title>The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life</title>
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<p>I have thought about this moment more times than I'd really like to admit over the intervening 24 years, but never more so than in the last four months. &quot;We were already facing budgetary challenges in the college — and then <em>all this</em> happened&quot; (<em>waves hand vaguely over shoulder at the still-smoking wreckage</em>). &quot;I was worried about the future of this project -- and then <em>all this</em> happened.&quot; (You get the point.)</p>
|
<p>I have thought about this moment more times than I'd really like to admit over the intervening 24 years, but never more so than in the last four months. &quot;We were already facing budgetary challenges in the college — and then <em>all this</em> happened&quot; (<em>waves hand vaguely over shoulder at the still-smoking wreckage</em>). &quot;I was worried about the future of this project -- and then <em>all this</em> happened.&quot; (You get the point.)</p>
|
||||||
<p>The <em>all-this</em>-ness of all this is utterly flippant, to be sure, but I'm beginning to understand the utility of <em>all this</em> as a container for the incomprehensible. We are facing circumstances that periodically cause me to lose my vocabulary. I don't know how to name it without breaking down, and I suspect that this is true of a lot of my colleagues. And so we talk about things like &quot;the current moment&quot; or &quot;the federal funding landscape,&quot; ways of signaling what we all know -- that we are living through a fucking horror of our country's own making, the destruction of everything that matters to us, the kidnapping and torture of members of our communities, the completion of the descent into what it no longer makes sense to call anything other than fascism -- without landing our conversation in a place in which it becomes impossible to go on.</p>
|
<p>The <em>all-this</em>-ness of all this is utterly flippant, to be sure, but I'm beginning to understand the utility of <em>all this</em> as a container for the incomprehensible. We are facing circumstances that periodically cause me to lose my vocabulary. I don't know how to name it without breaking down, and I suspect that this is true of a lot of my colleagues. And so we talk about things like &quot;the current moment&quot; or &quot;the federal funding landscape,&quot; ways of signaling what we all know -- that we are living through a fucking horror of our country's own making, the destruction of everything that matters to us, the kidnapping and torture of members of our communities, the completion of the descent into what it no longer makes sense to call anything other than fascism -- without landing our conversation in a place in which it becomes impossible to go on.</p>
|
||||||
<p>I am trying to reckon with <em>all this</em>, and with the desire to wave my hand vaguely over my shoulder without looking too closely at what it's gesturing toward. I have been doing a bit of writing around it, and am hoping that I'll be able to share some of that in the weeks and months ahead. I'm not sure where it's all headed, but it's at least an attempt to be honest with myself about my reactions to what's happening, as well as an expression of hope that we might find our way through together.</p>
|
<p>I am trying to reckon with <em>all this</em>, and with the desire to wave my hand vaguely over my shoulder without looking too closely at what it's gesturing toward. I have been doing a bit of writing around it, and am hoping that I'll be able to share some of that in the weeks and months ahead. I'm not sure where it's all headed, but it's at least an attempt to be honest with myself about my reactions to what's happening, as well as an expression of hope that we might find our way through together.</p>
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<content type="html"><p>This post is going to put my full nerdiness and my full cluelessness simultaneously on display, but I am building a home network that is going to include a server hosting much of my online presence, and I am running into some issues that are making the limitations in my knowledge all too apparent. (Also the limitations in internet search in the year of our lord 2025: I can find answers for solving issues in specific one-to-one connections within this network, but they leave out other crucial components such that I can't get the whole thing going all at the same time.) So I am here, appealing to you, to help me think this through.</p>
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<p>I have AT&amp;T fiber coming into my house, with a BGW320 modem/router combo. I have a 3-device Eero mesh wifi network, with the gateway Eero connected to the BGW320 via ethernet. I have a Synology NAS connected to the Eero gateway via ethernet, and I'm soon going to have a mini server that... will get connected to all of this somehow that I haven't yet figured out.</p>
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<p>I have turned off the wifi radios on the BGW320, so that I only have the wifi network provided by the Eeros. Right now, I have IP Passthrough turned on on the BGW320, set to DHCPS-dynamic; the WAN IP address is being picked up properly by the gateway Eero and the WAN type on the Eero is set to DHCP (Default). The bajillion devices in my house are being doled out IP addresses appropriately vis DHCP, including the NAS, and are for the most part getting good bandwidth (though the gateway Eero seems to have to reconnect to the internet periodically, so there's clearly some setting in the BGW320 that needs futzing with already).</p>
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<p>But here's where things start to get complicated: I have purchased a block of 5 static IP addresses from AT&amp;T (really 8, but one gets assigned to the router and 2 are unusable), with the intent of assigning the NAS and the forthcoming server a static IP. So in the BGW320 admin interface, I have both a private LAN subnet and DHCP range (of the <a href="http://192.168.1.XXX">192.168.1.XXX</a> variety) and a public subnet that includes my public gateway address, my public subnet mask, and the 5-address DHCP range.</p>
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<p>In passthrough mode, the BGW320 just hands off all DHCP stuff to the Eero mesh, which has the gateway address of 192.168.4.1 (the Eero default). In the Eero admin interface, I can use Reservations &amp; port forwarding to assign a static IP address to a device, like the NAS. However, my static IP addresses are outside the Eero's subnet range, so it won't accept them.</p>
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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 type="html">I wrote the paper below for an ACLA panel on re-theorizing the university, delivered in Montreal in late February. Afterward, I shared it with a colleague who suggested that I pitch it to a well-known academic trade paper for their section...</content>
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<title>The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life</title>
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|
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|||||||
<p>"Our best models for philanthropy," Schiller argues, "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" (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>
|
<p>"Our best models for philanthropy," Schiller argues, "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" (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>
|
||||||
<p>Thinking with Schiller has helped me understand a bit of my ambivalence about the increasing push for "career readiness" 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 "what can you do with a humanities degree" 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>
|
<p>Thinking with Schiller has helped me understand a bit of my ambivalence about the increasing push for "career readiness" 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 "what can you do with a humanities degree" 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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<ul class="links-nextprev"><li class="links-nextprev-prev">← Previous<br> <a href="/join-kc-coalition/">Join the KC Coalition</a></li>
|
<ul class="links-nextprev"><li class="links-nextprev-prev">← Previous<br> <a href="/join-kc-coalition/">Join the KC Coalition</a></li><li class="links-nextprev-next">Next →<br><a href="/after-the-end/">After the End</a></li>
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<a href="/after-the-end/" class="postlist-link">After the End</a>
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<a href="/humanities-philanthropy-good-life/" class="postlist-link">The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life</a>
|
<a href="/humanities-philanthropy-good-life/" class="postlist-link">The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life</a>
|
||||||
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<p>1805 more posts can be found in <a href="/blog/">the archive</a>.</p>
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<p>1806 more posts can be found in <a href="/blog/">the archive</a>.</p>
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@@ -1 +1 @@
|
|||||||
{"version":"1.5.2","languages":{"en":{"hash":"en_4696d7ba36","wasm":"en","page_count":1884}},"include_characters":["_","‿","⁀","⁔","︳","︴","﹍","﹎","﹏","＿"]}
|
{"version":"1.5.2","languages":{"en":{"hash":"en_7866461587","wasm":"en","page_count":1885}},"include_characters":["_","‿","⁀","⁔","︳","︴","﹍","﹎","﹏","＿"]}
|
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-1
@@ -9101,8 +9101,13 @@
|
|||||||
<lastmod>2026-04-12</lastmod>
|
<lastmod>2026-04-12</lastmod>
|
||||||
</url>
|
</url>
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<url>
|
||||||
|
<loc>https://kfitz.info/after-the-end/</loc>
|
||||||
|
<lastmod>2026-05-18</lastmod>
|
||||||
|
</url>
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
<url>
|
<url>
|
||||||
<loc>https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml</loc>
|
<loc>https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml</loc>
|
||||||
<lastmod>2026-04-14</lastmod>
|
<lastmod>2026-05-18</lastmod>
|
||||||
</url>
|
</url>
|
||||||
</urlset>
|
</urlset>
|
||||||
|
|||||||
@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
|
|||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
<style>.postlist { counter-reset: start-from 90 }
|
<style>.postlist { counter-reset: start-from 91 }
|
||||||
/* This is an arbitrary CSS string added to the bundle */
|
/* This is an arbitrary CSS string added to the bundle */
|
||||||
/* Defaults */
|
/* Defaults */
|
||||||
@font-face {
|
@font-face {
|
||||||
@@ -541,6 +541,11 @@ pre[class*="language-diff-"] {
|
|||||||
|
|
||||||
<ol reversed="" class="postlist">
|
<ol reversed="" class="postlist">
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<li class="postlist-item">
|
||||||
|
<a href="/after-the-end/" class="postlist-link">After the End</a>
|
||||||
|
<time class="postlist-date" datetime="2026-05-18">May 2026</time>
|
||||||
|
</li>
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
<li class="postlist-item">
|
<li class="postlist-item">
|
||||||
<a href="/writing-again/" class="postlist-link">Writing Again</a>
|
<a href="/writing-again/" class="postlist-link">Writing Again</a>
|
||||||
<time class="postlist-date" datetime="2025-03-18">March 2025</time>
|
<time class="postlist-date" datetime="2025-03-18">March 2025</time>
|
||||||
|
|||||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user