update uva

uva.md

@@ -3,10 +3,10 @@
 ### Tools for Transformation
 ---
 <br />
-<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
 <small>http://presentations.kfitz.info/uva.html</small>
 
-Note: Thank you so much for that introduction, and for the invitation to join you here in Charlottesville. It's entirely appropriate that my first talk about *Leading Generously* since its publication should take place here in Charlottesville, as the origins of this book are seeded in a protracted crisis that connects the University of Virginia with my own institution, Michigan State University. I don't want to stay too mired in that crisis in this talk, so I won't tell the whole story, but I will drop here at the outset that in the just over seven years that I've worked there, MSU has had six presidents and four provosts, one of that latter group being your own Teresa Sullivan. The institution has also experienced massive conflict with and within our board of trustees and all of us are living through a resulting melange of anger and despair and exhaustion that seriously inhibits our ability to get much done.
+Note: Thank you so much for that introduction. I'm delighted that my first talk about *Leading Generously* since its publication should take place here in Charlottesville, as the origins of this book are seeded in a protracted crisis that connects the University of Virginia with my own institution, Michigan State University. I don't want to stay too mired in that crisis in this talk, so I won't tell the whole story, but I will drop here at the outset that in the just over seven years that I've worked there, MSU has had six presidents and four provosts, one of that latter group being your own Teresa Sullivan. The institution has also experienced massive conflict with and within our board of trustees and all of us are living through a resulting melange of anger and despair and exhaustion that seriously inhibits our ability to get much done.
 
 
 ## crisis
@@ -32,8 +32,8 @@ On the other hand. There are some particularities to the situation of our instit
 
 Note: (**CLICK**) **The labor crisis**. Over the last couple of decades, we've watched as more and more good positions -- with job security, adequate salaries, full benefits, and above all academic freedom -- have been sucked into the gig economy. This ongoing adjunctification is happening across all fields on our campuses but is especially acute in humanities fields, and particularly in those fields, like writing studies, that are meant to prepare students for anything that they go on to study. The effects of this labor crisis are manifold: as fewer and fewer faculty members have access to the benefits of tenure, and thus the voice in shared governance required to have a real impact on the institution's directions, our fields continue to weaken, allowing our departments to appear decreasingly vibrant, drawing in diminishing numbers of students, and thus making the case for our apparent obsolescence.
 - (**CLICK**) This of course works hand-in-hand with **the economic crisis** that our institutions are mired in. As public funding provides a smaller and smaller portion of university budgets, the costs of higher education have shifted radically from the state to individual students and their families. As those costs escalate, the pressure on students to think of higher education as a market exchange grows. If they're going to sink tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars into the purchase of a four-year degree, it's not the least bit surprising that students would also face increasing pressure (whether internal, or from their families or communities or the media) to select a degree program that seems to promise an obvious career outcome. And thus majors that are named after jobs or industries grow, and those that aren't -- like the vast majority of our programs in the humanities -- shrink, providing further evidence that new investments in humanities departments are a luxury that our institutions, like our students, cannot afford.
-- (**CLICK**) And in the midst of all that, there is of course **the political crisis**, which has been brewing for decades but has taken a particularly acute turn in the last few years. The attacks that we've seen on critical race theory, the moves to ban books from libraries, the attempts to eradicate tenure, the growing interference in the curriculum -- all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that work in the humanities and social sciences bring to bear.
-In all of this, Reitter and Wellmon's sense that "modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity" may well be "a circular story" of the "salvation" project that rests at the heart of the humanities' mission, but neither the threat nor the work we have ahead are rhetorical. They are instead very material, and they demand material responses.
+- (**CLICK**) And in the midst of all that, there is of course **the political crisis** -- and I wrote a whole paragraph  about that crisis well before yesterday, but cannot bring myself to read it today. You can imagine what it might say if I were able to stomach saying it now.
+I point to all of this in order to suggest that neither the threats we face nor the work we have ahead are rhetorical. They are instead very material, and they demand material responses.
 
 
 ![Yellow background with a drawing of a lightbulb whose filament is shaped like a brain](images/generosity.jpg)
@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ Note: But embracing these ways of working requires deep institutional change, in
 
 ## how
 
-Note: By the time *Generous Thinking* came out, it had already become clear to me that I had some follow-up work to do, that I needed to dig a bit deeper into the process of and the conditions for transformation. And then after a talk I gave just down the road at Virginia Tech in October 2019, an attendee asked me an utterly prescient question that's been stuck in the back of my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that it's relatively easy to embrace when we're flush, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to be generous when we're facing significant budget cuts, for instance, or is it inevitable that we fall back into analytics-driven competition with every unit -- much less every worker -- out to protect their own resources and their own privileges?
+Note: By the time *Generous Thinking* came out, it had already become clear to me that I had some follow-up work to do, that I needed to dig far deeper into the process of and the conditions for transformation. And then after a talk I gave just down the road at Virginia Tech in October 2019, an attendee asked me an utterly prescient question that's been stuck in the back of my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that it's relatively easy to embrace when we're flush, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to be generous when we're facing significant budget cuts, for instance, or is it inevitable that we fall back into analytics-driven competition with every unit -- much less every worker -- out to protect their own resources and their own privileges?
 
 I don't remember exactly how I answered then. I suspect that it was some combination of "you're completely right; that's the real question" and "the difficulties involved in being generous in hard times are precisely why we need to practice generosity in a determined way in good times." And I may have said some things about the importance of transparency in priority-setting and decision-making, and of involving the collective in that process.
 
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow,
 ![Protester in mask](images/protest.jpg)
 <smaller>https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry</smaller>
 
-Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the last two years of the horrifying inequities on our campuses, and have had proven to us that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. These institutions have long been dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category the choice to prioritize the flow of tuition dollars over the safety of students and staff by returning too hastily to in-person instruction; the choice to prioritize institutional reputation over individual safety and dignity by suppressing, ignoring, and dismissing complaints of sexual harassment and assault; the choice to respond to calls for racial justice with superficial statements and underfunded add-on measures; and the choice to deploy an increasingly militarized police presence in response to civil protest. All of these choices share the conviction that the institution and its ways of being are far more important than the people for whom it exists. And all of them have led me to ask what would be required for us to remake the university as an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all its members, rather than seeking in a moment of crisis to minimize its obligations and ensure that all of its relationships remain forever contingent?
+Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence in recent years of the horrifying inequities on our campuses, and have had proven to us that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. These institutions have long been dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category the choice to prioritize the flow of tuition dollars over the safety of students and staff by returning too hastily to in-person instruction; the choice to prioritize institutional reputation over individual safety and dignity by suppressing, ignoring, and dismissing complaints of sexual harassment and assault; the choice to respond to calls for racial justice with superficial statements and underfunded add-on measures; and the choice to respond to civil protest with an increasingly militarized police presence. All of these choices share the conviction that the institution and its ways of being are far more important than the people for whom it exists. And all of them have led me to ask what would be required for us to remake the university as an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all its members, rather than seeking in a moment of crisis to minimize its obligations and ensure that all of its relationships remain forever contingent?
 
 
 ## collective action
@@ -68,12 +68,17 @@ Note: One key thing that transforming the neoliberal university would require is
 
 ## structures
 
-Note: The only way to prevent anything, including something as metaphoric as sacrifice, from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. So my focus right now is on those structures, on what is required for us collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. I'm far less interested in radicalizing individual leaders who can rise through the administrative ranks than I am in building cohorts of leaders who can work together to transform those ranks. This is true not least because, as Dianne Harris told me, "the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working." That heroic model of individual leadership is damaging not just to the institution, whose welfare lies at the mercy of such an executive's successful navigation of an increasingly complex economic, cultural, and political landscape, but also to the well-being of that executive, who must convincingly appear omniscient and invulnerable and who will inevitably fail at pulling that off. We need a new framework for understanding academic leadership as collective and collaborative rather than as individual, and therefore as a mode of connection that can be centered anywhere within the org chart where people have ideas about how to make things better. If we can come to appreciate and authorize the collective potential that exists within our institutions, we can begin to make them not only more generous but more resilient.
+Note: The only way to prevent anything, including something as metaphoric as sacrifice, from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. So my focus right now is on those structures, on what is required for us collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. I'm far less interested in radicalizing individual leaders who can rise through the administrative ranks than I am in building cohorts of leaders who can work together to transform those ranks. 
+
+
+>  "the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working." (Interview with Dianne Harris)
+
+This is true not least because, as Dianne Harris told me, "the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working." That heroic model of individual leadership is damaging not just to the institution, whose welfare lies at the mercy of such an executive's successful navigation of an increasingly complex economic, cultural, and political landscape, but also to the well-being of that executive, who must convincingly appear omniscient and invulnerable and who will inevitably fail at pulling that off. We need a new framework for academic leadership that is collective and collaborative rather than individual, enabling leadership to become a mode of connection that can be centered anywhere within the org chart where people have ideas about how to make things better. If we can come to appreciate and authorize the collective potential that exists within our institutions, we can begin to make them not only more generous but more resilient.
 
 
 ## agency
 
-Note: In addition to the notion that leadership must of necessity be an individual quality, there's a second bit of conventional wisdom that *Leading Generously* is working against, that seems to stand in opposition to the first. This idea posits the relative powerlessness of individuals in their encounters with the structures and systems of contemporary life. Our sense of powerlessness derives both from some highly problematic sources — those who benefit from existing structures and systems and would prefer everyone else just let them do their thing — and from some misunderstandings of recent critical theories regarding the ways that power operates in contemporary culture. Those theories — including arguments about race and racism; about sex, gender, and misogyny; about class and wealth — describe the issues they explore as _systemic_ rather than _individual_. That is to say, they argue that real change requires social transformation. It requires building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, reshaping economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. All of that demands something much larger, and much harder, than personal transformation — but we misunderstand the import of those theories if we assume they mean that individual action doesn't matter, that each of us is powerless. The individual matters, deeply: just perhaps not the way we think.
+Note: In addition to the notion that leadership must of necessity be an individual quality, there's a second bit of conventional wisdom that *Leading Generously* is working against, that is, the relative powerlessness of individuals in their encounters with the structures and systems of contemporary life. This sense of powerlessness derives both from some highly problematic sources — those who benefit from existing structures and systems and would prefer everyone else just let them do their thing — and from some misunderstandings of critical theories of power in contemporary culture. Those theories describe the issues they explore as _systemic_ rather than _individual_, arguing that real change must be structural, building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, reshaping economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. All of that demands something much larger, and much harder, than personal transformation — but we misunderstand the import of those theories if we assume they mean that individual action doesn't matter, that each of us is powerless. The individual matters, deeply: just perhaps not the way we think.
 
 When I argue that the complicated process of culture change can begin anywhere in the org chart, that any person (and not just the uniquely heroic leader) can be a change agent, I don't mean to suggest that the problems we face originate with individual behavior, or that any given person's change of heart can change the world. But if our goals include building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world, individuals have to find ways to become empowered, because the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
 
@@ -82,12 +87,12 @@ It's a matter of where we locate agency, of who has the ability to make signific
 
 ## resistance
 
-Note: That decision is a big one, and it often requires overcoming a great deal of resistance, both internal and external. Many so-called "permanent faculty" on campus don't particularly consider themselves to be responsible for their institutions, in no small part because the institution isn't our primary point of identification. We're more inclined to think of ourselves as free agents of a sort, more accountable to our colleagues within our fields than to colleagues down the hall (much less the next building over). Worse, the growing percentage of contingent faculty rarely have the chance to feel any sort of connection to their institutions, precisely because those institutions are structured to offer them no toe-holds whatsoever. And staff members rarely have the kinds of job security and other privilege that faculty receive, and so work in a coerced silence, either fearing for their jobs if they speak out or, worse yet, all to aware that their voices will be ignored. All the while those of us who can speak out in relative safety don't, often due to our sense that fixing the institution isn't our job, that it should be left to the folks who are paid the big bucks to run things. But retreating into the work for which we are rewarded, and willingly handing off the running of our universities to an ever-thickening rank of upper administrators, has contributed mightily to getting us into this mess. The longer I stare at it, the more I believe that we, collectively -- faculty, staff, and students as well -- not only have the agency but also the responsibility to step forward, to take action, and to demonstrate that not only do we belong to the institution, but it also belongs to us.
+Note: That decision is a big one, and it often requires overcoming a great deal of resistance, both internal and external. Many so-called "permanent faculty" on campus don't particularly consider themselves to be responsible for their institutions, in no small part because the institution isn't our primary point of identification. We're more inclined to think of ourselves as free agents of a sort, more accountable to our colleagues within our fields than to colleagues down the hall (much less the next building over). Worse, the growing percentage of contingent faculty rarely have the chance to feel any sort of connection to their institutions, precisely because those institutions are structured to offer them no toe-holds whatsoever. And staff members rarely have the kinds of job security and other privilege that faculty receive, and so work in a coerced silence, either fearing for their jobs if they speak out or, worse yet, all to aware that their voices will be ignored. All the while those of us who can speak out in relative safety don't, often due to our sense that fixing the institution isn't our job, that it should be left to the folks who are paid the big bucks to run things. But retreating into the work for which we are rewarded, and willingly handing off the running of our universities to an ever-thickening rank of upper administrators, has contributed mightily to getting us into this mess. The longer I stare at it, the more I believe that we, collectively -- faculty, staff, and students as well -- not only have the ability but also the responsibility to step forward, to take action, and to demonstrate that not only do we belong to the institution, but it also belongs to us.
 
 
 ## leadership
 
-Note:  We need a new collective model for academic leadership not least because the crises in which our institutions are mired demonstrate that the model under which we currently labor is irreparably broken. I want to be clear in what I'm saying here: there are some very good people doing the best work they possibly can in many of our campus leadership roles. It's not the people that need replacing, or at least not *all* of the people, and in fact the exercise of replacing them with new leaders with new visions has become a form of institutional deck-chair-rearranging. The problem lies not with the people, but with the structures within and through which they work. That's the model of academic leadership we need to contend with, a model with its boards and its presidents and its innumerable vice-presidents that comes to us directly from the hierarchical structures of corporate governance. Those structures are ill-suited to the operation of non-profit entities in general, as can be seen in the extensive recent literature on reimagining non-profit leadership. And those structures are doing grave damage to the purposes of higher education.
+Note:  We need a new *collective* model for academic leadership not least because the crises in which our institutions are mired demonstrate that the model under which we currently labor is irreparably broken. I want to be clear in what I'm saying here: there are some very good people doing the best work they possibly can in many of our campus leadership roles. It's not the people that need replacing, or at least not *all* of the people, and in fact the exercise of replacing them with new leaders with new visions has become a form of institutional deck-chair-rearranging. The problem lies not with the people, but with the structures within and through which they work. That's the model of academic leadership we need to contend with, a model with its boards and its presidents and its innumerable vice-presidents that comes to us directly from the hierarchical structures of corporate governance. Those structures are ill-suited to the operation of non-profit entities in general, as can be seen in the extensive recent literature on reimagining non-profit leadership. And those structures are doing grave damage to the purposes of higher education.
 
 
 ## "like a business"
@@ -109,12 +114,12 @@ Note: Dean Spade defines mutual aid as "collective coordination to meet each oth
 
 > <smaller>the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his <span style="color:red">arts, knowledge, and intelligence</span>; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in <span style="color:red">arts, industry, and science.</span> (Kropotkin 296)</smaller>
 
-Note: (**READ SLIDE**) The development, then, not just of the softer, more aesthetic subjects that we in the humanities study, but of all of the forms of knowledge studied across our campuses, required mutual aid. And they still require mutual aid in order to continue developing. And that need should press us to consider that the ideal model for the university is perhaps not the corporation but the cooperative, in which every member has a stake in the successful outcome of the whole, and is as a result committed to full participation in its processes.
+Note: (**READ SLIDE**) The development, then, all of the forms of knowledge studied across our campuses, required mutual aid. And they still require mutual aid in order to continue developing. And that need should press us to consider that the ideal model for the university is perhaps not the corporation but the cooperative, in which every member has a stake in the successful outcome of the whole, and is as a result committed to full participation in its processes.
 
 
 ## coalition / leadership
 
-Note: In collective models such as that of the co-op, leadership is of necessity coalition-based rather than hierarchical. It is both built from relationships and built in order to sustain relationships. And this is a model that I would like to see us espouse for the future of academic leadership. I'll acknowledge, though, that "coalition" and "leadership" may not seem to go together terrifically well, at least in the conventional individualist model. I tend to think, however, that referring to the individuals at the top of an org chart as "leadership" is a misleading euphemism.
+Note: In collective models such as that of the co-op, leadership is of necessity coalition-based rather than hierarchical. It is both built from relationships and built in order to sustain relationships. And this is a model that I would like to see us espouse for the future of academic leadership. I'll acknowledge, though, that "coalition" and "leadership" may not seem to go together terrifically well, at least in the conventional model. I tend to think, however, that referring to the individuals at the top of an org chart as "leadership" is a misleading euphemism.
 
 
 ## management
@@ -124,18 +129,17 @@ Note: In fact, most of what comes down to us from above is management rather tha
 
 ## "over-managed and under-led"
 
-Note: "over-managed and under-led." Even more, Adrienne Kezar notes the extent to which many positional leaders in higher education fail to understand the nature of change, either treating it as a formulaic, top-down process or, worse, ignoring it as it happens around them. At every level of our institutions, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with -- much less create -- change. A transformed conception of leadership might include a commitment to bringing people together to create change, and a willingness to model and to create the conditions for more thoughtful, more inclusive, more just ways of working. Leadership ought to demonstrate a desire to bring out the best in others, and to help them become leaders too. Leadership ought to be about building the relationships necessary for collective action. It should be connective, and compassionate, and generative. And it could emerge anywhere in an institution, if cultivated.
+Note: "over-managed and under-led." Adrienne Kezar's research further demonstrates the degree to which many positional leaders in higher education fail to understand the nature of change. At every level of our institutions, we have been  disciplined into an inability to cope with -- much less create -- change. Transforming our ideas about campus leadership could allow us to people together to create change, to model and to create the conditions for more thoughtful, more inclusive, more just ways of working. Leadership, in other words, ought to be about building the relationships necessary for collective action. It should be connective, and compassionate, and generative. And it could emerge anywhere in an institution, if cultivated.
 
 
-# cultivation
+## cultivation
 
 Note: I choose the metaphor of cultivation pointedly, with deep thanks to my colleague Beronda Montgomery, whose brilliant book _Learning from Plants_ explores the ways that an understanding of botanical life can help us develop more productive, more supportive, more collectively attuned ways of working in human communities. As Montgomery argues, such an understanding encourages us to focus on remediating the environments within which we work together rather than attributing the difficulties some individuals experience in taking root and growing in those environments to internal deficits. This approach also calls upon us to develop a new kind of leadership "vision," one that can
 
 
-> <smallish>adapt to changing circumstances, and … enable leaders to see the potential collaborations and benefits in diverse communities. This approach contrasts with the traditional <span style="color:red">gatekeeping</span> approach, in which leaders determine who gains access via conceptualizations and assumptions about who can function and thrive in a particular context. Instead, this distinct form of leadership is sense driven and environmentally adaptive; it attends to individuals while at the same time tending the ecosystems in which these individuals exist. I call this form of leadership <span style="color:red"> groundskeeping</span>, in recognition of what we know about the conditions that plants need to successfully thrive.</smallish>
-<p style= "text-align:right"><smallish>——Beronda Montgomery</smallish></p>
+> <smaller>adapt to changing circumstances, and … enable leaders to see the potential collaborations and benefits in diverse communities. This approach contrasts with the traditional <span style="color:red">gatekeeping</span> approach, in which leaders determine who gains access via conceptualizations and assumptions about who can function and thrive in a particular context. Instead, this distinct form of leadership is sense driven and environmentally adaptive; it attends to individuals while at the same time tending the ecosystems in which these individuals exist. I call this form of leadership <span style="color:red"> groundskeeping</span>, in recognition of what we know about the conditions that plants need to successfully thrive. (Montgomery 149)</smaller> 
 
-Note: (READ SLIDE.) Groundskeeping rather than gatekeeping. Cultivation rather than control. These organic metaphors allow us to think about leadership as something that is grown rather than something that is built or inhabited, something that requires an awareness that our institutions and organization are more akin to ecosystems than they are to the org charts we draw to represent them. Leaders must work in concert with their ecosystems, rather than operating from the top-down management perspective to which we have become accustomed.
+Note: **(READ SLIDE.)** Groundskeeping rather than gatekeeping. Cultivation rather than control. These organic metaphors allow us to think about leadership as something that is grown rather than something that is built or inhabited, something that requires an awareness that our institutions and organization are more akin to ecosystems than they are to the org charts we draw to represent them. Leaders must work in concert with their ecosystems, rather than operating from the top-down management perspective to which we have become accustomed.
 
 
 ## re-organize
@@ -145,38 +149,37 @@ Note: So how do we re-organize ourselves in ways that will enable us to create t
 
 ## <span style="color:red">politics</span>
 
-Note: When I talk about politics in this context, I do not mean to point to any of the politician-driven shenanigans taking place across the country and on many of our campuses. Rather, I mean to point to Iris Marion Young's definition of politics in _Justice and the Politics of Difference_, which she uses to describe
+Note: When I talk about politics in this context, I do not mean to point to any of the politician-driven horror taking place across the country and on many of our campuses. Rather, I mean to point to Iris Marion Young's definition of politics in _Justice and the Politics of Difference_:
 
 
 > “all aspects of <span style="color:red">institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings</span> insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decisionmaking" (Young 9)
 
-Note: (**READ SLIDE**) and in particular the ways that she suggests “the concept of justice coincides with the concept of the political,” arguing that every effort must be made to enhance collective evaluation and decision-making if we are to create the possibility for just institutions. And just institutions must be our goal.
+Note: (**READ SLIDE**) and in particular the ways that she suggests “the concept of justice coincides with the concept of the political,” arguing that every effort must be made to enhance collective evaluation and decision-making if we are to create the possibility for just institutions.
 
 
 ## "shared governance"
 
-Note: In most colleges and universities in the US, the potential for "collective evaluation and decision-making" is contained within the structures of shared governance on campus. Those bodies, including a wide range of working groups, committees, and senates, serve to gather faculty and (in some cases) staff opinions and perspectives on many questions concerning the operation of our institutions. On a few such questions — for instance, the curriculum — those bodies exercise a kind of ownership, and the decisions issuing from them have the mark of authority. On many campuses, however, and on many issues, faculty and staff governance is advisory at best: votes are taken, decisions are made and communicated to the administration, and that's it. The administration has the freedom to take those resolutions up and act upon them, or to ignore them at will.
+Note: In most colleges and universities in the US, the potential for "collective evaluation and decision-making" is contained within the structures of shared governance. Those bodies, including a wide range of working groups, committees, and senates, serve to gather faculty and (in some cases) staff opinions and perspectives on many questions concerning the operation of our institutions. On a few such questions — such as the curriculum — those bodies exercise a kind of ownership, and the decisions issuing from them have the mark of authority. On many campuses, however, and on many issues, faculty and staff governance is advisory at best: votes are taken, decisions are made and communicated to the administration, and that's it. The administration has the freedom to take those resolutions up and act upon them, or to ignore them at will.
 
 
 ## bureaucratic
 
-Note: As a result, the collective deliberation and decision-making bodies that form the core of shared governance on many campuses have become less political, in Young's sense, than bureaucratic, functioning in order to function rather than bearing the potential for change. "Bureaucracies," Young notes, "are distinguished from other forms of social organization in operating according to impersonal rules that apply in the same way to all cases." The importance of these rules and the processes and functions through which they are applied should of course not be dismissed; as Young goes on to note, bureaucracy as we experience it at the level of the state developed in order to replace individual sovereignty and its less rational whims with the rule of law. Similarly, the principles and processes of shared governance on campus serve to mitigate the unjust imposition of a top administrator's opinions on faculty and staff functions. But an over-reliance on and even subjugation to those principles and processes runs the risk of making the bureaucracies through which we operate seem politically neutral and eternal and unchangeable.
+Note: As a result, the collective deliberation and decision-making bodies on many campuses have become less political, in Young's sense, than bureaucratic, functioning in order to function rather than bearing the potential for change. "Bureaucracies," Young notes, "are distinguished from other forms of social organization in operating according to impersonal rules that apply in the same way to all cases." The importance of these rules and the processes and functions through which they are applied should of course not be dismissed; as Young goes on to note, bureaucracy as we experience it at the level of the state developed in order to replace individual sovereignty and its less rational whims with the rule of law. Similarly, the principles and processes of shared governance on campus serve to mitigate the unjust imposition of an administrator's opinions on faculty and staff functions. But an over-reliance on and even subjugation to those principles and processes runs the risk of making the bureaucracies through which we operate seem politically neutral and eternal and unchangeable.
 
 
 ## merit
 
-As Young points out, "the values of bureaucratic organization" indicate that decisions should be made "according to merit." And the reliance on merit in bureaucracy is, she notes, among "the important positive developments in the history of social organization." What is missing, however, is a deep engagement with and debate concerning the meaning and determination of _merit itself_. Our institutions have devised metrics and measures and processes that allow us to believe that merit is a quantifiable thing we can assess outside the realm of the political. But merit as a category is always and inevitably ideological, in the sense that it provides a common-sense explanation that transforms highly contingent relations of domination into something natural or neutral. Says Young:
+Note: As Young points out, "the values of bureaucratic organization" indicate that decisions should be made "according to merit." And the reliance on merit in bureaucracy is, she notes, among "the important positive developments in the history of social organization." What is missing, however, is a deep engagement with and debate concerning the meaning and determination of _merit itself_. Our institutions have devised metrics and measures and processes that allow us to believe that merit is a quantifiable thing we can assess outside the realm of the political. But merit as a category is always and inevitably ideological, in the sense that it provides a common-sense explanation that transforms highly contingent relations of domination into something natural or neutral. And so:
 
 
-> <smallish>The rules and policies of any institution serve particular ends, embody particular values and meanings, and have identifiable consequences for the actions and situation of the persons within or related to these institutions. All of these things are open to challenge, and politics is the process of struggle and deliberation about such rules and policies, the ends they serve, and the values they embody. The ideology of <span style="color:red">merit</span> seeks to <span style="color:red">depoliticize</span> the establishment of criteria and standards for allocating positions and awarding benefits.</smallish>
-<p style= "text-align:right"><smallish>——Iris Marion Young</smallish></p>
+> <smaller>The rules and policies of any institution serve particular ends, embody particular values and meanings, and have identifiable consequences for the actions and situation of the persons within or related to these institutions. All of these things are open to challenge, and politics is the process of struggle and deliberation about such rules and policies, the ends they serve, and the values they embody. The ideology of <span style="color:red">merit</span> seeks to <span style="color:red">depoliticize</span> the establishment of criteria and standards for allocating positions and awarding benefits. (Young 211)</smaller>
 
 Note: **(READ SLIDE.)** That depoliticization sounds like a good thing — making the awarding of benefits as objective a process as possible — up until we remember that the individual people involved in defining and implementing these processes are not and can never be objective. We are all inescapably subjective, bringing our own experiences and perspectives to everything we judge. What depoliticization means in the bureaucratic, and particularly in the meritocratic, is a closing-off of the opportunities for debating the criteria, the processes, and the objectives through which we might keep notions like merit from becoming forms of oppression. As it becomes depoliticized, bureaucracy errs in treating the rules as the _ends_ that it seeks, rather than a _means_ to those ends.
 
 
 ## peer review
 
-Note: Take, for example, peer review. I've written extensively elsewhere about the problems endemic to today's conventional processes of peer review, and I won't rehash all of that argumentation here. But one key point has to do with the role that anonymity plays in the process. As is frequently noted, the process of anonymizing the submissions that undergo peer review for publication in journals and by university presses was established in order to mitigate the influence of reviewer bias based on the gender, race, or institution of the author. Similarly, reviewer anonymity was designed to permit reviewers of lower career status to address the work of higher-status scholars without fear. These goals were admirable — placing the focus on the quality of the work and allowing that quality to be assessed without reserve — and its success was appreciable. Author anonymity arguably permitted the work of scholars of color and women to gain purchase in the highest levels of academic discourse, and reviewer anonymity allowed new perspectives to counter established orthodoxies. What anonymity did not do, however, and cannot do, is _eliminate_ bias, which will always find ways to creep back in around the edges as, for instance, critiques of subject matter, methodology, and cited sources become proxies for status based on identity and serve as arguably neutral means of reinforcing hierarchies within fields. Again, my intent here is not to discount the importance of establishing and following the rules and procedures that have developed around scholarly work and its communication. Rather, I want to note that those rules and procedures can never provide for the fullness of justice, precisely because the rules and procedures are treated as if they are sources of objectivity, when they have inevitably been designed and are always implemented by individuals with specific subjectivities.
+Note: Take, for example, peer review. I've written extensively about this, and I won't rehash all of that argumentation here. But one key point has to do with the role that anonymity plays in the process. Anonymizing the submissions that undergo peer review for publication began as a means of mitigating the influence of reviewer bias based on the gender, race, or institution of the author. The goal was admirable — placing the focus on the quality of the work — and its success has been appreciable, permitting the work of marginalized scholars to gain purchase in the highest levels of academic discourse, and allowing new perspectives to counter established orthodoxies. What anonymity did not do, however, and cannot do, is _eliminate_ bias, which will always find ways to creep back in around the edges as, for instance, critiques of subject matter, methodology, and cited sources become proxies for status based on identity and serve as ostensibly neutral means of reinforcing hierarchies within fields. Again, the intent of these rules and procedures is admirable, but they can never provide for the fullness of justice, precisely because they are treated as if they are sources of objectivity, when they have inevitably been designed and are always implemented by individuals with specific subjectivities.
 
 
 ## values
@@ -186,27 +189,27 @@ Note: Moreover, trying to change the rules and procedures to make them _more_ ob
 
 ## processes and policies
 
-Note: Similarly, we might think of the ways that tenure and promotion processes and policies are implemented. These bureaucratic formations have been designed to protect candidates from the personal whims or animus of administrators as cases move through the approval hierarchy. And yet that bureaucracy has the potential to interfere with justice in its requirement that all cases be treated identically. As Young notes of the gap between bureaucracy and truly democratic collective action, "Decisions and actions will be evaluated less according to whether they are right or just than according to their legal validity, that is, whether they are consistent with the rules and follow the appropriate procedures." This is encoded in the appeals process for promotion and tenure denials at many institutions, where the acceptable range of inquiry is restricted to whether the process was properly conducted, rather than whether the final determination was just, much less whether the process as constituted was capable of producing a just result. 
+Note: Similarly, we might think of the ways that tenure and promotion processes and policies are implemented. These bureaucratic formations have been designed to protect candidates from the personal whims or animus of administrators as cases move through the approval hierarchy. And yet that bureaucracy has the potential to interfere with justice in its requirement that all cases be treated identically. As Young notes of the gap between bureaucracy and truly democratic collective action, "Decisions and actions will be evaluated less according to whether they are right or just than according to their legal validity, that is, whether they are consistent with the rules and follow the appropriate procedures." This is encoded in the appeals process for promotion and tenure denials at many institutions, where the acceptable range of inquiry is restricted to whether the process was conducted in accordance with the rules, rather than whether the final determination was just, much less whether the process as constituted was capable of producing a just result. 
 
-Changing the ways that peer review is conducted in order to surface rather than avoid reviewer bias, one might reasonably argue, would make peer review political. And similarly changing the grounds for appeal of tenure decisions to include the justice of their outcomes — or even better, changing the criteria for promotion and tenure such that they surface and embrace their subjectivity, treating each case on its own terms rather than assuming an unearned neutrality — would likewise make those decisions political. And yet it's clear to just about everyone who has ever been through such a process, especially from a non-dominant position within the academy, that those decisions and processes _have always been political_, and will always remain political. And that's not in and of itself a bad thing. We should not want to remove politics from the ways that we engage with one another on campus, but rather to create an environment in which we can embrace politics, rendering all of us able to participate wholly, fully, with the most open and honest intent in the processes through which our lives are inevitably structured.
+Changing peer review in order to surface rather than avoid reviewer bias, one might reasonably argue, would make peer review political. And similarly changing the criteria for promotion and tenure such that they surface and embrace the subjectivity of the process, treating each case on its own terms rather than assuming an unearned neutrality, would likewise make those decisions political. And yet it's clear to just about everyone who has ever been through such a process, especially from a non-dominant position within the academy, that those decisions and processes _have always been political_, and will always remain political. And that's not in and of itself a bad thing. We should not want to remove politics from the ways that we engage with one another on campus, but rather to create an environment in which we can embrace politics, rendering all of us able to participate wholly, fully, with the most open and honest intent in the processes through which our lives are inevitably structured.
 
 
-## politics : leadership :: bureaucracy : management
+### politics : leadership :: bureaucracy : management
 
-Note: So what does all of this have to do with leadership? If management, as Kotter argued, is focused on "coping with complexity," on ensuring the optimal functioning of entangled structures and organizations, we might begin to intuit a relationship between management and bureaucracy. Establishing rules and processes, ensuring that they're followed, remediating them when they fail, all require careful management. In associating management with bureaucracy I do not at all mean to dismiss the importance of good management, as anyone who has ever worked with a poor manager can attest; as one leader I talked with reminded me, there's a real value in keeping the trains running on time. But if management is about ensuring that things get done with maximum efficiency, it's also about eliminating or at least minimizing everything that can interfere with that efficiency, including — and perhaps especially — dissent. Management is in this sense necessarily depoliticizing; it requires foreclosing debate and smoothing the way for prescribed action. This is one reason why the good management needed for making the status quo function often cannot contend with change: when an organization tries to manage change, it too often ends up with a manufactured consent that squelches the political and moves decision-making outside the realm of debate.
+Note: So what does all of this have to do with leadership? If management, as Kotter argued, is focused on "coping with complexity," on ensuring the optimal functioning of entangled structures and organizations, we might begin to intuit a relationship between management and bureaucracy. Establishing rules and processes, ensuring that they're followed, remediating them when they fail, all require careful management. And again, good management remains important, as anyone who has ever worked with a poor manager can attest. But if management is about ensuring that things get done with maximum efficiency, it's also about eliminating or at least minimizing everything that can interfere with that efficiency, including — and perhaps especially — dissent. Management is in this sense necessarily depoliticizing; it requires foreclosing debate and smoothing the way for prescribed action. This is one reason why the good management needed for making the status quo function often cannot contend with change: when an organization tries to manage change, it too often ends up with a manufactured consent that squelches the political and moves decision-making outside the realm of debate.
 
 
 ## leading generously
 
 Note: If leadership, as Kotter contrasts it with management, focuses on "coping with change," good leadership must of necessity be political at heart. Leadership does not just require accepting but in fact embracing and facilitating the kinds of open debate, dissent, and even struggle necessary for making the best possible decisions about what an organization should do and how it should do it. Leadership requires making room for the broadest possible participation in decision-making, and it requires developing the relationships and coalitions necessary to ensure that the resulting decisions are understood and embraced. Leadership is about creating the conditions necessary for the many people within an organization to contribute to and feel ownership of the organization's future.
 
-The path to developing more generous forms of academic leadership, then, leads directly through politics, through political organizing, through coalition-building, through solidarity. Our institutions, our fields, and our colleagues have suffered enormously under the competitive corporate regimes to which we've been subjected. And if there's going to be change, it has to be led by us. This is not to say that we need more academic leaders to rise out of the faculty, but rather that the faculty might begin to model a new structure of cooperation that can serve as a starting point for the radical restructuring of academic hierarchies. We have the greatest opportunities -- because of our training, because of our ways of working, because of our understanding of the always-already political, and in some ways because of our outsider status -- to create an alternative to the failed model of individualist academic leadership and its basis in the principles of the corporate economy. We can work together to develop properly politicized cultures of mutual aid based on collective action within our departments. We can ensure that our departments similarly interact with one another based on principles of mutual support. And we can create a model that the rest of the institution might be persuaded by.
+The path to developing more generous forms of academic leadership, then, leads directly through politics, through political organizing, through coalition-building, through solidarity. Our institutions, our fields, and our colleagues have suffered enormously under the competitive corporate regimes to which we've been subjected. And if there's going to be change, it's not going to come from above; it has to be led by us. This is not to say that we need more administrators to rise out of the faculty, but rather that the faculty might begin to model new structures of cooperation that can serve as starting points for the radical restructuring of academic hierarchies. If we can work collectively, we have the potential to create alternatives to the failed model of individualist academic leadership and its basis in the principles of the corporate economy. We can work together to develop properly politicized cultures of mutual aid based on collective action within our departments. We can ensure that our departments similarly interact with one another based on principles of mutual support. And we can demonstrate what it would mean for an institution to live out the values espoused in its mission statement.
 
-This all sounds super pie-in-the-sky, I recognize, and I'm willing to admit that my inner Pollyanna is having a field day right now, but I hope that you'll consider Dean Spade's conviction that "crisis conditions require bold tactics" and that the boldest of these is mutual aid. True cooperation and collective action might provide a path out of the crises by which we're beset, and in fact toward a liberal arts that works toward strengthening higher education as a whole.
+This all sounds super pie-in-the-sky, I recognize, and I have to admit that my usual commitment to hope as a discipline, in Mariame Kaba's phrase, is struggling a bit today, but I nevertheless hope that you'll consider Dean Spade's conviction that "crisis conditions require bold tactics" and that the boldest of these is mutual aid. True cooperation and collective action might provide a path out of the crises by which we're beset, and in fact toward a future in which higher education can genuinely serve the public good.
 
 
 ## thank you
 ---
-<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social</smaller>
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller>
 
 Note: Many thanks.