Kathleen Fitzpatrick
20 KiB
title, date, permalink, tags
| title | date | permalink | tags | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| After the End | 2026-05-18T10:33:39-04:00 | /after-the-end/ |
|
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 title1 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. ↩︎