kfitz

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.

Networking

2025-05-11T12:39:42Z

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.

I have AT&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.

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).

But here's where things start to get complicated: I have purchased a block of 5 static IP addresses from AT&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 192.168.1.XXX variety) and a public subnet that includes my public gateway address, my public subnet mask, and the 5-address DHCP range.

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 & 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.

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.

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&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 "advanced features" that Eero tells me I'll lose if I go the bridge mode route, are there other drawbacks?

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.

Gitea

2025-04-20T14:56:45Z

This site is running in 11ty and is built locally, after which the live site (which gets built into the _site folder) is pushed to my Reclaim Hosting account, where it's served up as kfitz.info. As an intermediate step, I have been pushing the code and content that builds the site to a GitHub repository, and then the _site folder to another GitHub repository, kfitz-site, mostly for preservation/backup purposes; if something happens to the server or to my local repo, there's another version-controlled pile of code out there from which things can be rebuilt. (Technically, I pull kfitz-site from GitHub to Reclaim. Similarly, presentations.kfitz.info, which runs in revealjs, is built locally, pushed to GitHub, and then pulled to Reclaim.)

I've had in my head for a while, though, that GitHub is in and of itself a point of failure, partially because of its ownership structure. On top of which, I haven't been delighted knowing that everything I push there is part of the greater Copilot feeding frenzy.

I'd been thinking for a while about migrating my repos to Codeberg, a community-governed alternative that -- a key consideration at this hour of the world -- is not hosted in the US. But it turns out that the terms of service on Codeberg highly discourage private repositories, and both kfitz.info and kfitz-site are private, even though the eventual published site is obviously very public and CC BY 4.0 licensed. I've kept those repositories private because they're not the product I'm trying to share -- the website is -- and I want a little freedom to make mistakes without everything being quite that out there. I totally get why Codeberg's TOS is structured the way it is; they're really focused on building open-source communities around FLOSS development, which is a huge part of why I wanted to support them. It's just not the work I'm doing.

So I spent a chunk of yesterday exploring the possibility of self-hosting GitLab, but holy cats is it resource-intensive. The instance I spun up on a Digital Ocean droplet would have cost me $32/month to keep in operation, and even so it was pegging 100% memory usage, with just one user. So... no, not unless I were really hosting the service for a bunch of friends who wanted to kick in a little.

This morning, though, I spun up a Gitea instance on a much smaller Digital Ocean droplet, which will run $14/month. It's super zippy and very lightweight, and has allowed me to migrate my repositories from GitHub quite seamlessly. And there's lots of room to grow, resource-wise, so if those friends decide they want to test things out I can invite them to join me.

The next thing I want to investigate in whether I can run that Gitea instance on a shared server, using one droplet to host multiple applications and sites...

On the NEH and Our Path Forward

2025-04-17T13:23:01Z

Crossposted from the Knowledge Commons team blog.

Over the last several weeks, we've seen colleagues of ours across the country posting about the direct impacts they're experiencing of the current attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities, including sudden and extensive terminations of previously awarded grants. We hurt for everyone who's trying to figure out how to carry on, not least because we're in that same space with you right now.

On April 2, 2025, we received notification that our NEH Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grant, awarded in 2020, was terminated effective immediately. We had just celebrated in a January post the completion of our fundraising match; the NEH grant offered us $500,000 to be released as we certified a 3:1 fundraising match. That combined $2 million in funding was to provide us with the runway necessary to bring the Commons to sustainability.

Insofar as there is good news here, it's that we'd been certifying gifts annually, and so most of the NEH funds had already been "obligated" (for whatever meaning that term now holds), and we'd been spending the receipts as needed over the last several years, with an expectation that the combined fund would be fully spent down in early 2027. In real numbers, the termination of the grant resulted in something less than $100,000 in losses for our budget – a significant amount for a small team operating on a shoestring, but not an insurmountable figure.

However, on April 10, 2025, we received further -- if not yet formal -- notification that our contract to provide the NEH's Designated Public-Access Repository was also being terminated, effective on that date. This loss is devastating for us, both for the financial impact it represents (another $200,000 loss over the same two years) but also for the unceremonious end to a goal we'd set for ourselves years ago. There’s also a real, human impact involved: we’d just completed an extensive search to hire a developer to work with us on that project, and were deep in the process of putting together an offer letter to an amazing candidate when the funds disappeared.

Not to mention the bigger picture here: that designated public-access repository is no longer needed, because it is assumed that the NEH will no longer be funding research, and thus there will be no results of research to make publicly accessible.

And worse: a huge percentage of our friends and colleagues at the NEH, whose work on our behalf has helped shape knowledge production across our fields, have lost their jobs, and are seeing the decimation of everything that they built and maintained with such care and professionalism.

Back here on the Commons team, we're mourning our losses, but also trying to carve out a path forward, one that will allow us to keep doing the key work of supporting open-access scholarly collaboration, communication, and preservation. We'll be sharing pieces of this plan with you over the coming weeks, which will include seeking institutions who want to join us (hint: KC Works is ready to host repositories for colleges, universities, and other organizations), and as you might expect, we'll be asking for community support as well. We’re more determined than ever to ensure that we can continue to provide a community-governed, non-profit alternative to the corporate platforms that threaten to capture, or even silence, so much of the work that we care about.

Please be in touch as you carve your own paths forward, and let us know how we might help.

Writing Again

2025-03-18T13:22:43Z

It happened this weekend.

In the aftermath of turning in the final manuscript for Leading Generously, I promised myself that I would not start working on a new writing project until I had some idea that absolutely would not leave me alone, that I'd instead spend at least a year reading as omnivorously as I could through the ideas of others and see whether anything worth saying surfaced. Almost exactly a year later, I was still delighting in the reading, but feeling the first glimmerings of an urge to write, if not with the focus of a project.

Right after the second blog post linked above, though, I ended up in my new position and my program of intensive reading and diffuse writing got utterly derailed. I figured it would be at least another year before things started to coalesce into a project.

But it happened this weekend. I'm not at all sure that the way I'm framing the idea is right, whether the idea itself will have legs, but I'm starting to do some noodling in a more purposeful fashion.

And I'm excited about the possibilities, for the first time in quite a while. The whole thing may yet fizzle, of course, but in a conversation yesterday I jokingly said something about quitting my day job and there was this immediate thought bubble that popped up saying "and then you would have time to work on That New Project!" And I felt a rush of excitement in the wake.

On the one hand, I take this as an encouraging sign: I really do want to work on this thing!

On the other, I recognize the temptations posed by the alluring project you don't have time for, and the ways that turning that project into your primary point of focus can take a lot of the shine off.

But right here, right now, I long for a writing project to really wrestle with. And so I'm looking forward to carving out the moments here and there to work on it, even if I don't quit my day job to do it.

Leading Generously, the Audiobook!

2025-02-18T13:39:29Z

I am delighted this morning to share the news that Leading Generously is now available as an audiobook,^[1] in addition to its print and e-book formats! The audiobook is narrated by the amazing Kristin Aikin Salada, who has posted a more enticing excerpt on her LinkedIn announcement than the opening pages that Audible shares.^[2]

If you listen to the audiobook, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm thinking hard about the form that I might want my next project to take, and I'm wondering how thinking about that project as audio-first (whether audiobook or podcast) might affect my approach.

The audiobook is also available in the UK, and I assume elsewhere, though the link doesn't localize on its own. ↩︎
My friends at Raw Signal Group might find the opening lines of her excerpt a bit familiar! Which raises an interesting question about citations in audiobooks. I know how that would be handled in an audio-first project, but the translation from print to audio isn't quite as conducive to sharing your sources. ↩︎

Equality and Justice

2025-02-17T21:45:22Z

Independence and Neutrality

2025-02-17T13:12:13Z

Back in December, my university's top administrators announced an official position of "thoughtful restraint," attempting to stake out a commitment to institutional neutrality on contentious political issues by not making statements or taking sides. "As an educational institution, our goal is to serve as a forum for debates, not proponents within them," the website describing this non-position says, "with the highest value being the pursuit of truth."

Even as I understood the administration’s desire to avoid making a misstep on an issue that had already resulted in the downfall of several prominent university presidents, this statement bothered me. Is "the pursuit of truth" best served by turning the institution into "a forum for debates" — mere platform without judgment? And are all debates the same? I wondered whether there were issues — however “contentious” — on which the pursuit of truth would require the university to take a stand, to maintain its commitment to the fact that there are areas of settled knowledge in which the call to “debate” is always issued in bad faith. And though I didn’t quite have the words to say so at the time, I wondered whether the institution might find itself hoist on its own neutral petard, whether the university's self-protective position could wind up being the very thing that could do it in.

I've been reading Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth's It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom this weekend, though, and just ran across a passage, summarizing the impact of Felix Frankfurter's opinion in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), which tied the necessary freedoms of the university to its responsibility to remain neutral on the issues of the day. Bérubé and Ruth read this opinion through Adam Sitze's essay, "Academic Unfreedom, Unacademic Freedom," in which Sitze shows that Frankfurter's opinion derives in part from a misreading of an argument about the open universities in South Africa issued just before. The South African argument tied academic freedom to the universities’ independence from the state -- and in the South African context, independence was grounded in resistance to the apartheid regime.

Here’s Bérubé and Ruth’s concluding move in that discussion:

“Independence” and “neutrality” are not the same thing. In the South African context, neutrality would have meant acceding to academic apartheid. Once the backstory is supplied (and history returned to theory, as in the work of Charles Mills), the lesson then is that the university must remain independent from the government but cannot remain neutral. Faculty must make judgment calls on the university's behalf that take into consideration the historical and political circumstances in which their universities find themselves. (211)

Two months later, it is clear to me that “thoughtful restraint” will not only not protect the university from those who wish to do it harm, but will erode the very independence that the institution needs in order to survive right now: the ability to bring the faculty’s best judgment to bear in declaring that there are truths that cannot be ordered away. Our institutions cannot live out their most basic reason for being without a willingness to point out and reject outright lies, and without the ability to say that there are issues — like the basic humanity of each and every person on campus, and that they deserve respect, safety, and opportunity — that should never be up for debate.

Holding Space

2025-01-31T20:00:18Z

Here I was, super happy with my return to blogging in 2024. I wasn't crazy prolific or anything, but I did manage to post something every month except for April. What happened in April? Kind of a lot. But nothing compared with January. Someday I hope to have the time and space necessary to write about at least part of it, but that day is not today. Today, all I can do is close out January by trying to hold a bit of space toward a better moment. May that better moment come soon, for all of us.