kfitz

After the End

2026-05-18T14:33:39Z

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.

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.
—Kingsnorth and Hine, “Uncivilization”

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^[1] but from the fact that I am beginning by asking you to consider fire ants.

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).

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.

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.

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 At Work in the Ruins. 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.

In At Work in the Ruins, 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 composting 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.

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 Planned Obsolescence, 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 Generous Thinking, 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 Leading Generously, 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.

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?

We need to learn how to make good ruins.

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?

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 ferocious 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.

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 who might survive on their own anyway.

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.

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 Hood Feminism 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.

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.

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 without prioritizing self-interest, without taking advantage – and this is no small task.

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 shared infrastructure 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.”

As Robert Lynd argued in “Who Calls the Tune?”, a 1948 essay in the Journal of Higher Education,

“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).

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.

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.

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 Knowledge Commons 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.

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.

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.

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 at the expense of others – others on our campuses, others kept off of our campuses, others who never asked for us to show them the way.

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 they may survive.

Works Cited

Cassill, Deby Lee, Alexander Casella, Jaeson Clayborn, Matthew Perry, and Michael Lagarde. “What Can Ants Tell Us about Collective Behavior during a Natural Catastrophe?” Journal of Bioeconomics 17, no. 3 (2015): 255–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-015-9195-2.

Hine, Dougald. At Work in the Ruins. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023.

Kendall, Mikki. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot. Viking, 2020.

Kingsnorth, Paul, and Dougald Hine. “Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto.” Dark Mountain, 2009. https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/.

Knowledge Commons. https://hcommons.org.

Lynd, Robert S. “Who Calls the Tune?” The Journal of Higher Education 19, no. 4 (1948): 163-174+217.

Mlot, Nathan J., Craig A. Tovey, and David L. Hu. “Fire Ants Self-Assemble into Waterproof Rafts to Survive Floods.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108, no. 19 (2011): 7669–73. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016658108.

Solnit, Rebecca. The Beginning Comes after the End: Notes on a World of Change. Haymarket Books, 2026.

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 The Beginning Comes After the End 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. ↩︎

The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life

2026-04-12T19:40:21Z

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 significant nonprofit project that is dependent on donor generosity for its very survival, 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.

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 Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon -- 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 it's those issues that most surfaced for me as I read The Price of Humanity, and in particular Schiller's unpacking of so-called "Effective Altruism."

The Effective Altruist mode of understanding the "good" 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 "value" 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.

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 a commercial product designed to deliver an individual benefit. As I've argued elsewhere, 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.

And now we find ourselves at a moment at which some of the benefactors of higher education -- I'm looking at you, state legislatures -- 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.

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 & Sciences' Humanities Indicators project has demonstrated, humanities majors may earn less after graduation than their counterparts in STEM fields, but the gap narrows with work experience. They have also demonstrated that only 5.2% of terminal humanities bachelors' degree holders were unemployed 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 median annual income of $64,000, not that far below the median income of all terminal bachelors' degree holders, which was $72,000.

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, "[t]he utilitarianism of Effective Altruism has infected even legacy institutions, leading their decision-makers to prioritize visible numbers over holistic interventions" (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, "we quantify and price human life based on productivity and labor" (Schiller 59), and we quantify and price learning based on its immediate economic benefits.

"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 students themselves valuable is their future productivity rather than their capacity for thought, creativity, and care.

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.

Join the KC Coalition

2025-12-18T14:16:04Z

Cross-posted from the Knowledge Commons team blog.

Knowledge Commons is not just a platform — we’re a coalition. And that coalition needs you.

The tl;dr: We need to raise a significant amount of money in order to keep the project moving forward. If you, the individual human reading this, can contribute, we’d be enormously grateful. Any amount will help us reach our goal. But if you can’t, there’s still a lot you can do!

Email your university librarian, the director of your teaching and learning center, and the leadership of your IT unit to tell them how Knowledge Commons supports your work and encourage them to support us in return.
Reach out to the leaders of your professional organization to encourage them to join and support Knowledge Commons.
Post about our campaign on social media and encourage others to contribute.
Raise awareness of the platform by linking to your KCWorks deposits, your group discussions, and your Commons websites, letting your colleagues know that they can join us as well.

Now, the reasons we hope you and your institutions will join us:

Our coalition brings together individuals and institutions who want to preserve and protect the knowledge they create and the communities that rely on it at a moment when both are under threat. Those threats include corporate enclosure and governmental overreach, each of which works to restrict access to the knowledge necessary to a free and functioning society.

Knowledge Commons is a non-profit, academic-run project that provides both the space and the tools for building solidarity among knowledge creators. Knowledge Commons also works to support the institutions and organizations whose missions include research, teaching, and community-building. We provide that space and those tools free of charge to all users, because we believe that knowledge should be a public good, and that all should be able to participate in developing it and learning from it.

But we cannot do that work without support. Today, the Commons is facing threats of its own, from federal grant terminations, from ravenous and destructive corporate information scrapers, from shrinking academic budgets, and more.

We are a tiny team, with one half-time and four full-time employees, plus a few members of the MSU faculty and staff who donate a small percentage of their time to the project. We operate on a very lean budget; in fiscal year 2025, our expenditures totaled less than $750,000. Just over two-thirds of those expenditures were covered through grants, both public and private. Fiscal year 2026 is thus far shaping up very similarly.

That leaves us, however, with $250,000 that we need to raise to keep the project moving forward. And that’s where you come in: we need your help building the Knowledge Commons coalition.

We’re seeking new institutional and organizational members who want to be part of building a model for collective support for shared infrastructure. We offer three tiers of membership — supporting, sustaining, and participating — with suggested contributions determined by organization type and size.

With your contribution, your organization or institution becomes something far more important than a customer; you become a member of our coalition, an investor in our future success. And you get a range of benefits, of course, including the ability to create private collections in KCWorks, access to members-only town halls and webinars, and a voice in Commons governance. (We’ll even throw in a tote bag!)

We are committed to remaining open and free in perpetuity, and we are committed to building and supporting the communities that use our tools. With your help, we will continue our work toward a transformation in global knowledge ecosystems.

Trust in Science: Accessibility, Persistence, and the Public Good

2025-10-27T12:10:03Z

I had the privilege last week of speaking at the International Association of Universities conference, held at the University of Rwanda. It was a long and at moments difficult journey, but well worth it for the conversations that took place there. The conference theme was "Building Trust in Higher Education" -- a goal that has formed the basis for my last two books -- and I was invited to speak as part of a plenary panel focused on "Trust in Science," which enabled me to talk a bit about the work that we're doing at Knowledge Commons to make our platform a trusted, nonprofit, community-governed partner for institutions of higher education around the world. My presentation is below; I'll look forward to continuing this discussion.

I’m delighted to be here and to have this opportunity to talk a bit about trust in science. I want to start out by noting that "trust" is an awfully big word, especially as applied to higher education. For us to cultivate trust in the work we do in universities, we first have to demonstrate ourselves and our institutions worthy of that trust. It’s not necessary for me to detail all of the ways that trust is being challenged today, but I’ll note that some of these challenges derive from ongoing issues in the world around us, as misunderstandings of the motivations of scientists and ideological conflicts surrounding inconvenient research combine to produce widespread dismissals of the knowledge produced through scientific research, as well as growing concerns world-wide that politicians might interfere with scientific research or censor its results in highly damaging ways.

However, some of the challenges we face are of our institutions' own making. We might immediately think of the ongoing reproducibility crisis, or varying kinds of researcher malpractice that have created understandable concerns about the integrity of scientific work. But we must also consider the ways that many of our institutions have excluded the vast majority of the world’s populations from participating in the knowledge creation processes that form the heart of research. In the United States, I frequently hear scholars and administrators lament the fact that the general public does not understand the good that our faculty and our institutions do – but it’s hardly surprising, when the public cannot see the work that we do, and therefore cannot understand our motivations for doing it or the ways that our work creates knowledge that supports healthy, sustainable communities. Restricting our work to exchanges among experts breeds distrust by keeping our reasoning and our results hidden from view.

I want to argue today that building trust in science today has two major prerequisites: accessibility and persistence. When I talk about accessibility, I mean in part to point to open access, which attempts to ensure that the results of research can be found by anyone. But I also mean that research needs to be accessible in another sense, in adopting a register of communication that can be broadly understood, ensuring that the work can not just be downloaded but read and engaged with. There are of course valid reasons that researchers use a professional vocabulary with one another, but that vocabulary often prohibits real engagement on the part of many of the publics that our institutions serve, publics who might be interested in what our institutions do if they were invited in. Many of our institutions and our funding bodies strongly encourage researchers to engage with broader audiences, but we need to ensure that doing so is integrated into our institutional reward structures, and that the work of translating advanced research for broad consumption is recognized as real work. If universities encourage and reward broader impacts by supporting researchers in making more of their work – its processes as well as its results – fully accessible, we will have the opportunity to cultivate public trust by building a richer understanding of what it is that researchers do, and why they do it.

At the same time, we need to think about the persistence of the work that researchers do: not only does research need to be made accessible, but it needs to remain accessible, even in the face of the significant challenges to science that many of our institutions are facing in the current political moment. Researchers on our campuses are investigating all manner of inconvenient questions – about climate change, about global inequities, about the history of colonialism and the forms of oppression that it has created – and much of this research is at risk of disappearing. Some of this risk comes from direct censorship, as we have seen governments demanding the removal of work that it doesn’t like from journals, websites, and databases and defunding the research that makes that work possible. Some of the risk comes from shifting corporate priorities, as the for-profit companies that still control most of the scholarly communication infrastructure have goals and motivations and requirements that are often very different from those of our institutions. Ensuring that today’s research results remain available to be built on tomorrow will require all of our institutions to think seriously about the infrastructure on which their researchers’ work is hosted: who owns and operates that infrastructure, and to what ends. Is the most important goal of the infrastructure's owners sharing knowledge toward the creation of a better world, or is it returning value to shareholders?

That's a pretty crude distinction to draw. I'm sure that all of us know of nonprofit organizations that operate as extractively as many profit-driven companies, as well as corporations that operate with a clear sense of their responsibility to the public good. But it is essential -- and especially right now -- for institutions of higher education to insist that the partner organizations to which they entrust the knowledge they produce have goals and priorities that align with their own. This is true not least because of the non-reciprocal material relations between our institutions and too many of the infrastructure providers on which we rely: our researchers and our institutions freely give them the gift of our work, our labor, our time and attention, and in return they charge us, over and over again. When they can't charge us to access the work, they charge us to publish the work that we have done, and they charge us to access the data they have harvested about that work.

There are alternative models for scholarly and scientific communication that can help researchers make their work both more accessible and more persistent, however. These alternatives include publishing cooperatives, open repositories, and more. I want in the time I have remaining to tell you a bit about the project that I've had the privilege of working to build over the last ten years: Knowledge Commons.

Knowledge Commons is an open-access, community-governed, nonprofit network hosted by Michigan State University, on which knowledge creators across the disciplines and around the world can deposit and share their work, build new collaborations, and create a vibrant digital presence for themselves, their teams, and their projects. Knowledge Commons is guided by the FAIR principles for open science, ensuring that the products of research entrusted to us are made findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, and is committed to living out the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure.

The Commons brings together a next-generation repository, KCWorks, which is built on InvenioRDM, with a robust researcher profile system and a suite of WordPress-based publishing and communication tools. The Commons hosts nearly 60,000 researchers, instructors, practitioners, and students who are sharing and preserving their work. KCWorks registers DOIs via DataCite for every deposit and then versions those DOIs as works are updated, and it offers a very wide range of contributor roles, licenses, and subject headings that enable our metadata to serve nearly any purpose.

KCWorks is highly interoperable, thanks to its strong REST API that connects with all repository operations and its built-in OAI-PMH server, allowing the repository's metadata to be readily consumed by a range of open services across the web, dramatically increasing the discoverability of the work researchers deposit with us. Upon deposit, that work is automatically pushed both to the contributor's profile on the Commons and to their ORCID record, and it can also be shared to various social media platforms.

The Commons has to this point focused on creating greater accessibility for the products and processes of research, but if we are to succeed in transforming the global research ecosystem into one that is worthy of the public trust, however, we must face two key challenges. The first has to do with persistence. Though the project and its team are hosted by Michigan State University, the technical infrastructure we use to support the project is not; the university's computing and data infrastructures are not currently able to support our work. Instead, we are hosted on Amazon Web Services -- and as we found out yesterday, as robust as AWS is, it isn't immune from major technical failures. On top of which, AWS has become a massive consumer of university resources, as well as being part of a corporation that has not proven itself to have the public good as a primary driver. One might begin to wonder what could be possible if a collective of institutions were to come together and put the resources they spend in Silicon Valley toward developing academy-owned shared infrastructure, allowing higher education to take greater control of its own technological future. And what might become possible if that network of institutions were truly global, enabling the research that is developed and made available in one area of the world to be mirrored all over the world, allowing science to evade censorship wherever it might surface?

The Knowledge Commons team submitted a pre-proposal describing the first steps for such a network earlier this year to the Trust in American Institutions Challenge hosted by Lever for Change, and while we did not advance to the final round of consideration, the group of collaborating organizations that signed on to pursue this project -- including the Association of University Presses, the Association of Research Libraries, Jisc, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OAPEN, and more -- are still interested in pressing forward with it. We'll be meeting later this month to discuss our next steps.

But key among those next steps is of course finding the resources to accomplish something so enormous, especially at a time in which so many of our institutions are facing austerity measures. Which points to the second challenge for Knowledge Commons in becoming a research platform worthy of the public trust: financial sustainability. We are committed to keeping the Commons free and open for any individual user to join the network, create a profile, share their work, and participate in the collaborations we make possible. In order to do so, we need universities and other research organizations to join the Commons consortium, investing their resources in a community-governed alternative that can make open science genuinely open to all. The future of the Commons depends on the will of that collective, in more ways than one.

Learning

2025-09-07T17:28:41Z

Over the last several months, I've been engaged in a project designed to bring a bunch of the stuff I'm hosting in various places around the internet home. And I mean "home" quite literally: I not only wanted to control the data I was putting out into the world, and the software I was using to do it, but also the metal on which it's hosted. I wanted my stuff on my server in my very own house.

Why? I can't fully articulate the drive. Some of it stems from a long-standing desire to "de-google," to quit Twitter, and to focus my creative energy on formats and platforms that I can trust and over which I can exercise some level of control. But that drive got exacerbated by everything that's happened around us since January and the creeping sense that even good actors in today's technology landscape could wind up being attacked, or even weaponized. And so the question started nagging at me a bit: what would it be to really self-host? What would be required, and what would I need to learn?

I want to acknowledge the very clear ways in which the privileges of my education, my social position, and my income allow me to take a project like this on just because I feel like it. I have the disposable income to invest in a small home server and other equipment, and I live in a house that is wired for very fast fiber-based internet. I've also been an intermittent tinkerer for a couple of decades, having launched a blog on a shared hosting provider back in 2002 and having taken that blog -- uh, this blog -- through a wide variety of redesigns, platform migrations, and hosting changes over the years. Much of that tinkering is documented in the archives, including my 2023 move away from WordPress, first to Jekyll and then to Eleventy.

So I've had a long-standing desire to be more in control of my digital footprint, to ensure that I own as much of the work I do online as possible, and to live up to the values that the Knowledge Commons team has developed, including experimenting with new modes of working and supporting the open exchange of knowledge and using open-source tools to do so. And the last year has made me all the more cognizant of the ways that trusting my digital past and presence to services that I cannot fully control -- that may be highly trustworthy today but whose leadership could change and whose guiding values could shift at any time -- opened up a range of potential risks.

On top of which, each time I've learned something new in the process of my tinkering, I've found myself wanting to know more. So I decided at some point this spring that I was going to invest in the hardware and the time required for me to set up a home network capable of allowing me to self-host the various sites and services I've had scattered around elsewhere.

What I didn't recognize when I started down this path was how little I knew about networking. I'd sort of self-hosted a pretty good range of sites and services on Digital Ocean (including migrating from Github to my own Gitea instance), and I'd gotten passably good at pretty basic Linux systems administration thanks to their amazing suite of tutorials^[1]. I knew how to obtain a domain name and how to configure its DNS records to point to a particular server. I could follow the documentation provided for the installation and use of packages on that server. But several things had never occurred to me, things as basic as how you make it possible for devices on a local, private network to be selectively and securely reachable from outside that network when desired. Or what is required to set up a fully functioning webserver when you're starting with bare metal.

It took several months and a bunch of frustration for me to get everything working, but if you're reading this post it's currently working well. I'm writing in an Obsidian vault that contains the content of my Eleventy-based site. When I'm done writing I'll use npm to build and index the site and git to push it to the Gitea instance on my home server. I'll then ssh into the container hosting my website and pull the updates in from Gitea. It's super simple when it's all working.

But when it's not, finding the right search terms to track down what could be wrong -- not to mention an unbefouled engine through which to do that search -- is really, really hard. And increasingly so when the results include posts made as long as 15 years ago about obsolete versions of the software you're asking about, on forums where n00bs are routinely yelled at for asking stupid questions and/or insulted for doing it wrong. And then there's the documentation that requires significant expertise to comprehend, and the "getting started" instructions that leave out key steps.

I got enormous help in sorting out some intractable issues from two key directions, though: prior blog posts here (see in particular Networking and Networking Continued), which produced generous, thoughtful responses from several people (most notably the always amazing Taylor Jadin of Reclaim Hosting^[2]), and a series of Mastodon chats (most recently with the very kind and helpful Monospace Mentor^[3]). There's something to be said here about the ways that the human-to-human contact made possible by small networks and self-hosted open-source projects can allow for far better learning than can the aging content buried in vast piles of self-aggrandizing bloviation on major forums.

It's a point that should be obvious, except that we live at a time when a not insubstantial number of tech billionaires are trying to convince us that the future of education lies in AI rather than in human interactions and connections. Given the extent to which AI has already undermined our ability to find the information we need on the web, we would be well-served by spending more time thinking about how to reinforce the human networks that can support learning in the midst of entropic decline.

The thing I most love about these tutorials is that they're written not as though you're just there to find the answer and get out, but as though you actually want to learn. That is, they don't just provide command after command, but rather walk you through what each command does and why you want to do it. ↩︎
I so, so admire his self-description as someone who is "passionate about educating and empowering people who want to make cool stuff on the web." I wish that there were more of that around and a lot fewer Reddit bros needing to display their dominance by trashing folks with less experience. ↩︎
Self-described "greybeard geek" who offers courses, support, and mentoring for folks seeking to build their DevOps skills -- as well as generous support for random folks on Mastodon asking "but how does the VM know that I'm asking it to be a webserver?" ↩︎

Success, at Last

2025-08-31T18:34:18Z

After a whole lot of tinkering, I think I have at last managed to get my home server up and running the way I want. Doing so required a change of ISP, which I wanted to do anyway as I'm getting a much better deal (including double the network speed) from my new provider. It also required a day and a half of further frustration, as the port forwarding setup that ought to have worked wasn't working at all, but after further futzing I've managed to get it all working pretty slickly.

In my current setup, I have Nginx Proxy Manager running in a container on my Proxmox, with a DNS entry set up pointing my IP address to it. Then I have a proxy host pointing to another container in which I'm running Gitea, and I'm successfully pushing and pulling code for this site to and from it.

Next up is setting the actual hosting of this site and a few others that I've been wanting to pull in house. It's nice to see the end of the network architecture phase of this project near and to have the creative work of writing and building opening up in front of me at last!

Longevity and Sustainability

2025-08-18T15:45:25Z

I've been puzzling a bit of late about the relationship between sustainability planning for independent, nonprofit digital projects and the need to provide evidence of that sustainability even as it's being developed. The question has been pitched to me recently as being about longevity: can your project promise potential supporters that it will survive the next ten years?

It's a valid question, especially when the project is one that is in some sense about longevity, about (for instance) preserving the products of knowledge creation for the future. But it's a hard one to answer in the best of times, and goodness knows that we are not currently living through the best of times.

How much have the ways that we think about longevity and sustainability been conditioned by our experiences of working with software and platforms that, even when provided without charge, are operated by massive corporations with resources to burn? These companies can afford to move quickly, to respond to rapid growth, to develop robust user support, and to add new features with the kind of agility that very few small nonprofit or community-based groups can muster.

This is not to say that nonprofit projects should operate freed from any expectations for professionalism, including long-term planning, technical durability and security, attention to user needs, and so on; these are crucial considerations for any piece of infrastructure. But I worry that some of the metrics that we use in thinking about sustainability wind up privileging corporate solutions even when we're seeking values-aligned, non-extractive alternatives.

It will not shock anyone that I'm mostly thinking about my own project in this context.^[1] That project has been around for more than ten years, and has over that time demonstrated slow, sustainable growth, but it has been dependent on grant-based, project-oriented funding to support its work. We are now trying to break away from that model and put in place a mature revenue generation model that will allow us to recoup operating costs (and with luck to produce a small margin to support future needs) through membership fees paid by organizations and institutions that want to use our platform. As part of their membership, they get a voice in our governance processes, and thus have the ability to shape the project's future.

But for very understandable reasons, we're hearing questions about the potential longevity of the project, as folks with decision-making responsibility want to be sure that their investment will be to a good end, and that the work they subsequently entrust to the platform will be available over the long term. It's a Catch-22, though, in that without their investment (and the investment of other institutions like theirs) we absolutely will not survive -- so how can I say that our model will have succeeded before the future anterior becomes simple past?

At root: can we shift our thinking so that an investment in a non-extractive alternative is understood to be an investment in the community itself, of which the investor forms a part, in a way that doesn't ask small projects just getting underway to demonstrate all of the durability and agility of corporate alternatives? Can we begin to recognize that some aspects of the durability and agility we've been conditioned to demand have been produced precisely through an extractive economic model that is continuing to impoverish the very commons that we're trying to build? How can we turn the question about the project's longevity into a question about mutual commitment to a shared endeavor?

Though I'm posting this in my own personal pondering space rather than over there because I'm hoping that respondents will think with me about these issues rather than immediately associate them with the project, even though such an association is all but inevitable. ↩︎

Networking Continued

2025-08-09T20:38:09Z

As you may recall, I've been experimenting with setting up a home server, and several months ago had gotten stuck on an issue related to the structure of my network. Taylor hopped in and really helped me understand how everything ought to work.

But it's not working. And I'm again flummoxed.

Here's the setup:

I have my ISP's modem/router/gateway monstrosity (the BGW320) running in IP Passthrough mode, with the WAN IP address being passed to my gateway Eero.
I have my Eeros set to Automatic DHCP mode; the gateway Eero is successfully getting the WAN IP address and is handing out private IP addresses in the 192.168.4.X range.
I have a registered domain name (let's say example.net), and I have an A record at my DNS service pointing to my WAN IP address. I have also created a subdomain A record (service) pointing to the same IP address. DNS Checker gives me all green checks for both.
I have a mini server, running Proxmox.
I have installed Nginx Proxy Manager in a container on the Proxmox (an LXC), which is running and reachable at the static address 192.168.4.11.
I have installed the service I'm trying to expose in another LXC, which is running and reachable at the static address 192.168.4.12.
I have set up port forwarding on my Eero network for ports 80 and 443 to ~~198~~192.168.4.11.
I have created a proxy host in NPM, for which all the dots are green:
- Domain Name: service.example.net
- Scheme: http
- Forward Hostname/IP: 192.168.4.12
- Forward Port: port
- Block Common Exploits and Websockets Support on
- Access List: Publicly Accessible

But http://service.example.net:port refuses to connect, as does http://example.net, either from my local network or through my VPN. And traceroute to either example.net or service.example.net stalls out.

I've checked the Proxmox firewall and inbound 80 and 443 are both set to accept. I've checked to see whether my ISP's montrosity's firewall could be blocking those ports but... who's to say. The NAT/Gaming (sigh) panel of the admin interface isn't showing the gateway Eero as a device that could need anything in particular sent its way, so my assumption is that IP Passthrough passes inbound requests through for the Eero to sort out, too.

I've searched around, and the nearest thing I've found to what I'm trying to do and how I'm trying to do it is in this Reddit thread, but the problem in that case is back at the beginning with the A record, which is definitely not my issue, unless I spelled my domain name wrong at the DNS. (I didn't.) And that person was able to get to the NPM congratulations page; my connections get refused entirely.

If anybody sees anything that I should adjust, or take a look at adjusting, I'd be grateful to hear. I'm already this close to dumping my ISP anyhow due to some ongoing service issues, and getting rid of their annoying modem/router/gateway would be a bonus, but I'm not entirely certain that it's the problem, and I'd love to find a way through without taking that step.

Distinguished

2025-06-26T12:30:07Z

I'm a little astonished to be writing this, but my college has posted the news, so it must be true: MSU has named me a University Distinguished Professor. I am honored, and filled with gratitude toward the colleagues who nominated me, and frankly still a bit stunned that this recognition has come my way.

I am grateful to have received so much support for the work I've done over the years, both on campus and off, from publishers and funding agencies, from colleagues and collaborators, from administrators, from friends and family. But my work has always been on the edge of so many fields -- not really literary studies, not really media studies, not really digital humanities, not really higher education studies -- that it has perpetually felt as though it was at risk of falling through the cracks. So this is a career milestone of a sort that I never thought I'd reach.

I'll also note that my institution, like so many large public R1s, heavily favors engineering, business, medicine, and the sciences; the College of Arts & Letters has been significantly underrepresented in university honorifics in recent years. I am the third University Distinguished Professor to be named in the college since 2003 -- twenty-two years! -- and the two scholars named during that period hold joint appointments with colleges on the STEM side of campus. I collaborate with STEM-leaning folks, and I have been successful in obtaining funding from agencies that are valued in that universe, so I acknowledge that I am recognizable to a university-wide committee in ways that someone more squarely located in a humanities-based discipline might not be. I nevertheless hope that I can find ways to enable this new title to help attune the university at large to the crucial kinds of work being done across the arts and humanities.

All This

2025-05-31T11:22:25Z

There's a moment in the 2001 Michael Bay classic, Pearl Harbor (which Roger Ebert once described as "a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours"), in which Kate Beckinsale, having been reunited with Ben Affleck, is attempting to explain how she could possibly have abandoned him for Josh Hartnett. Ben, of course, had been reported to be dead, and Josh was hunky and sweet and there, so, you know. But a teary Kate says, and I quote: “I didn’t even know until the day you turned up alive — and then all this happened,” waving her hand vaguely over her shoulder at the still-smoking wreckage.

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. "We were already facing budgetary challenges in the college — and then all this happened" (waves hand vaguely over shoulder at the still-smoking wreckage). "I was worried about the future of this project -- and then all this happened." (You get the point.)

The all-this-ness of all this is utterly flippant, to be sure, but I'm beginning to understand the utility of all this 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 "the current moment" or "the federal funding landscape," 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.

I am trying to reckon with all this, 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.