+
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diff --git a/OSU.md b/OSU.md
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+## No Carrots No Sticks
+---
+#### Creating a Digital Humanities Consortium on a Shoestring
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+Ohio State University Digital Humanities Network
+29 November 2021
+
+Note: Thanks so much for having me join you today, and for asking me to talk a bit about how we established DH@MSU and the kinds of work we're doing here. So much of what's possible within the academy is highly local and institutionally specific, and so while I hope that what I'm going to share is of value to your thinking about how to move digital humanities forward at OSU, the question of its effectiveness comes with a big "your mileage may vary."
+
+
+
+
+Note: Perhaps the first thing to note about DH@MSU is that while it's a relatively new structure, what's going on under the hood is far from new. The digital humanities has a very long history at Michigan State, but for most of that history, it developed in idiosyncratic, non-institutional, and often personality-driven ways. I was brought to MSU in 2017 as the first official "Director of Digital Humanities" -- at least sort of; I'll backtrack on that in a little while. In any case, what I was asked to do was to raise the profile of digital humanities both within the university and on the national scene, not least by creating a sense of structure around it. But walking into a new institution where DH work has been done the way it has been done for more than 30 years and saying "I'm here to direct things!" is risky business, to say the least -- especially when the role of director comes with neither immediately available carrots nor any apparent sticks.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Backing up a bit: I came to this role from having been the associate executive director of the Modern Language Association (the largest scholarly society in the humanities), as well as the organization's first director of scholarly communication. I was hired into that role to help the organization think about the ways it might transform its publishing practices for an increasingly digital environment. And this is I guess the first true-confessions part of this talk: I had precious little idea how to do that. I had no real experience working in publishing (which I recognize may have been a bit of a benefit, if you're being brought in to transform established practices), and perhaps more importantly, I had no real experience managing people within an organizational structure. In my prior position, I'd directed a small interdisciplinary program at a small liberal arts college, and I'd worked to elevate that program to departmental status, and to make it not just interdisciplinary but intercollegiate. And in that vein I'd led the efforts to make the intercollegiate group into a functioning unit, bringing together in a productive way the disparate goals and perspectives of highly opinionated colleagues on five campuses with radically different cultures. So, leadership, sure. But management? Actually being the boss of people? Was a very different thing indeed.
+
+It's been an enormous benefit to me in my current role to have experienced up close the difference between management and leadership, and I have a lot more to say about that if you're interested. But the key thing to note here is that while good management focuses on bringing out the best in people in order to help a team optimize its processes and achieve organizational goals, changing those processes and goals and getting people on board with moving in a new direction requires a different set of skills. Management, after all, comes with both carrots, in the form of merit raises, and sticks, in the form of disciplinary action. Transformational roles within the academy very often come with neither. And I would be willing to bet that the number of faculty members anywhere who consider themselves to have a "manager" is vanishingly small. So convincing a bunch of free agents to work together in a focused way toward some kind of vision of change requires an entirely different kind of authority, one built on trust, on relationships, and on listening.
+
+When I was in the process of making the transition to MSU, a friend and I were talking about the new role I was going to take on. I described what I knew of it -- that I'd be the director of digital humanities, and that the dean who hired me was hoping that I could help increase the visibility of our DH program both within the university and on the national level. And my friend nodded a bit, and then said, "yes, but do you know what your job is?" I had to admit that, just as when I was starting at the MLA, I had only the most tenuous grasp on what it was I was being asked to do, and how exactly I would go about it. What does it mean to increase a program's visibility? What's required to make that happen?
+
+The one thing that I knew was that I needed a much deeper understanding of the institutional and interpersonal environment that I was entering, not least because, prior to interviewing for this position, this is what I knew about MSU's DH environment:
+
+
+
+
+Note: MATRIX, one of the oldest and most successful DH centers in the US, and LEADR, a lab that I knew had some kind of relationship with MATRIX, sort of, and that was mostly student-facing. As I moved into the interview process, I did enough research to figure out that
+
+
+
+
+Note: there was also an academic program in DH, offering both an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate, but there was so much more I needed to know.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There were projects that I'd known for a long time, like H-NET, but had no idea they were housed at MSU. There were labs like the DHLC that I knew were there but didn't really understand and hadn't connected to the overall DH picture, and labs like WIDE that I hadn't known about. And there were new spaces and projects coming into being, including the Library's DSL and the College of Arts and Letters's CEDAR collaborative. And amidst this alphabet soup (which I'll unpack in a bit), the relationships among these units was not at all visible to me.
+
+My running joke for the first several months in the position was that my job consisted mostly of having coffee. I reached out to everyone that I could think of within the DH scene at MSU -- present and former directors and associate directors of these labs and centers, faculty with digital projects, administrators, and so on -- and set up time to chat. I asked each of them to tell me the story of the digital humanities at MSU -- how their center or lab or project came to be, how it fit in (or did not fit in) with the other such entities on campus, how it had evolved over time. I asked them what they felt was necessary to creating a more holistic environment for DH within the institution, and where they felt the chief roadblocks to such interconnection and collaboration lay. I also asked them who else I should be talking to, and then talked to them. And in the process worked with my brilliant assistant director, Kristen Mapes, to gather a list of everyone involved in digital humanities at MSU in order to call a meeting.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Ah, but wait! A little backtracking is again in order, as you may have noticed in that last sentence that I, as a brand new director of DH, and as in some senses at least the first director of DH, already had an assistant director. That wasn't her title yet -- she was officially "coordinator" of DH, if I recall correctly -- but Kristen Mapes had come to MSU three years earlier, in 2014, and had been working both to administer the academic program and to create community around DH. In that vein, she had been collaborating with a number of colleagues, both in the library and elsewhere on campus, to offer a wide range of workshops on digital methods and topics, and had been working with the previous directors to establish the goals and structures for the undergraduate minor and the graduate certificate program.
+
+Okay, but hang on -- if I was the first "director of DH," how were there previous directors? As it turns out, the academic program in digital humanities has its origins in early work done by Danielle DeVoss, a faculty member in (and now chair of) the department of writing, rhetoric, and American culture, and Scott Schopieray, then the director of academic technology and now the assistant dean for academic and research technology in the College of Arts & Letters. Danielle and Scott worked together beginning in 2008 to plan what was then called an undergraduate "specialization" in Humanities Technology, and Danielle brought together a larger group of faculty in 2011 to develop a graduate specialization in what was now being called Digital Humanities. An academic program needs a director, and Danielle took on that role from 2012 to 2015, creating much of the institutional structure around DH (including promoting the specializations to take on the status of an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate program, shepherding the DH course code through the various bureaucratic processes, and establishing a minimal budget to support the program). In Fall 2015, however, Danielle began a year-long distinguished visiting position away from MSU, and so was succeeded for that year by Sean Pue; in Fall 2016, Sean began a two-year fellowship leave, and so was succeeded by Stephen Rachman. Each of these three directors took on the role as a service responsibility on top of their more usual workload, and each was compensated with a small administrative salary increment. During 2016-17, however, the dean of the college determined that DH needed a more stable directorate, one with administration as its primary focus, in order to develop a vision for bringing together the academic program with the extraordinary research being done across the university, with the goal of producing something perhaps a bit larger than the sum of its parts.
+
+And so, in August 2017, I arrived on campus and starting having a lot of coffee. And I read through whatever documents I was able to get my hands on, all with an eye toward understanding and appreciating the work that had gone into making DH at MSU what it had become, as well as the institutional and interpersonal challenges involved in making it something more. Those two things -- the institutional and interpersonal -- were deeply entwined, not least because while I'd been asked to get the existing labs and centers and projects and programs at MSU to cooperate and collaborate, I'd been given neither carrots nor sticks to make that happen. I couldn't offer tantalizing new resources that would make such collaboration appealing, nor did I have any authority to force the issue. I needed to get everybody on board without them having any particular reason to do so.
+
+This work of people-wrangling reminds me of the crucial argument made by Stephen Ramsay in his essay "Centers of Attention," originally published in the volume *Hacking the Academy,* which I've recently gotten to re-read in an expanded and revised form. In this essay, Steve begins from the conclusion that "centers are people," and encourages those who are longing for a center to coordinate and facilitate their work to begin there.
+
+
+
"I don't want to say that everything magically falls into place once you have formed the basic community of people and ideas, but it's staggering how all of the decisions that so obsess people trying to build a center follow logically and inexorably from the evolving needs and expanding vision of more-or-less informal gatherings of like-minded enthusiasts."
+
——Stephen Ramsay, "Centers of Attention"
+
+Note: As Steve would readily acknowledge, there's a lot of labor hidden between the phrases in this sentence, not least in "form(ing) the basic community of people and ideas" and in elucidating their "evolving needs and expanding vision." My round of coffees was one component in that process, but that mostly created one-to-one connections between me and my new colleagues. Forming a community required something different. So in September, I invited everyone that Kristen and I could think of to a community meeting to discuss the future directions for DH and to see what we might want to do together. If I'm remembering correctly, around 25 colleagues came to that meeting and discussed paths forward. In the course of all of those conversations it became clear that while lots of prior work had been done, there wasn't yet a connective structure within which this large group of people could make the potential for collaboration a part of their ongoing institutional lives, nor was there an institutional structure that could help facilitate the process of making those potential collaborations actual. So we collectively decided that one of our first orders of business should be developing a set of bylaws to define the parameters of our work together. Four volunteers came together with me over the course of a semester to draft a set of bylaws defining DH@MSU and the structures that would support and facilitate our community.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Bylaws give every appearance of being the the least idealistic genre in which one can write, all legalese and densely numbered sections and sub-sections preparing them to be cited in an array of procedures you should hope you never have to participate in. But they have the potential to be wildly idealistic as well, defining the best possibilities for our work together. In an orientation session for new academic administrators on campus, our then VP of Academic HR said of academic misconduct that "the worst behavior you are willing to accept is the best behavior you can expect" -- meaning that if you're willing to compromise your ethics or values in one situation, those standards remain compromised for others that follow. I believe the same about bylaws: they have to be written to define us at our best, because they set the standard for a lot of ensuing activity, and they define both who we are and how we want to work together.
+
+So the first, and perhaps most important task in our bylaws was that work of definition. We had the opportunity to define our community and our work as inclusively as possible, and in the process to create the best possible sense of who and what we wanted to be. And so our bylaws open by noting that
+
+
+> DH@MSU is both a research center and a program, based in the College of Arts and Letters but working across the colleges and units of the university.
+
+Note: READ SLIDE. This clause creates the possibility for collaboration outside the usual institutional silos, a necessary possibility given the next clause, defining the participating units in DH@MSU:
+
+
+> DH@MSU brings together the many programs, centers, labs, and other units working on digital humanities related projects and curricula. These units include but may not be limited to Digital Humanities within the College of Arts & Letters (CAL-DH), which houses an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate program; the Critical Diversity in a Digital Age initiative (CEDAR); MATRIX; the Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research (LEADR); Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE); H-NET; the Digital Publishing Lab (DPL); the Cultural Heritage Informatics program (CHI); the Digital Heritage and Literary Cognition lab (DHLC); the Digital Scholarship Lab; the Museums; the Libraries; and programs and departments across the College of Arts and Letters, the College of Social Sciences, the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, the College of Education, Lyman Briggs College, and the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities. These units retain their distinctive and independent governance structures and documents and come together voluntarily as DH@MSU.
+
+Note: A few things to note here: the DH minor and certificate programs are here defined as one of the units within the larger DH@MSU superstructure, thus placing that program alongside a wide range of other initiatives. We also explicitly name the range of colleges within which something that looks like "digital humanities" might be done, as well as the wide range of entities that were at that time doing it. These entities include of course centers like MATRIX and labs like LEADR (which supports digital research among undergraduate students in history and anthropology), but also projects like H-NET and the Cultural Heritage Informatics program, institutional spaces like the Libraries and the Museums, and more. More such entities have sprung up since these bylaws were approved, including my own research and development unit, MESH, and some of these entities have dissolved or changed their names, but with minor tweaks this paragraph remains an expansive vision of what DH@MSU encompasses.
+
+Even more important, however, is *who* DH@MSU includes. In section 2.1.1, we define our "core faculty" as
+
+
+> all persons holding the rank of professor, associate professor, assistant professor, instructor, librarian, specialist, or staff at MSU who have formal assignments or academic appointments in Digital Humanities
+
+Note: READ SLIDE. and in section 2.1.2, we include
+
+
+> other persons holding the above listed ranks, who maintain a research and/or teaching focus in the area of Digital Humanities, who participate in DH@MSU activities, and who request affiliation with DH@MSU
+
+Note: All of which is to say that (1) we understand the notion of "faculty" as broadly as possible, and we include colleagues whose primary roles differ from the usual teaching-and-research structure of those with titles like "professor," and (2) we welcome both those faculty whose positions have been written to include DH and those who have come to DH through other paths.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Having defined who we are, our bylaws go on to define how we'll work together, establishing our governance structures -- including our advisory, curriculum, research, and outreach and engagement committees -- as well as the composition and election of those committees and their spheres of responsibility. We also define the appointment, role, and review of the director of DH, as well as any assistant or associate director.
+
+There are some spots in which the process of reviewing the bylaws in order to present them to you has made me realize that we're not quite living up to them. For instance, we claim within the bylaws that a formal meeting of the core faculty is to be held once per semester, and we haven't held one of those in a few years, as there hasn't seemed much of anything that the faculty needs to discuss. We do, however, hold several events annually that are intended to bring the entire community together, including our THATCamps in August and January and our end-of-semester celebrations in December and April. But this moment of return to our governing document has encouraged me to wonder what initiatives we might press forward with if we were to meet more formally as a faculty.
+
+The key problem, of course, is time: especially now, after nearly two years of COVID, we're all overstretched, and the idea of adding one. more. meeting. is just more than most of us can bear. We're already facing a bit of fray in our governance fabric, as it is: all of our core faculty have primary appointments elsewhere, and the time they give us is an extra bit of labor. That they give it demonstrates their real commitment to DH@MSU and what it can do, but that commitment of necessity comes at the end of a long list of other commitments. And if I'm being honest, something similar is true of me: though my appointment is 40% administration, that 40% can only be spread so thin. As a result, most of our initiatives have been slower to develop than I'd like, but we're inching toward them. Key among those initiatives is developing a map of sorts for DH@MSU.
+
+
+
+
+Note: When we first created the structures within which we now operate, DH@MSU looked something like this -- we'd recently added three new units to our confederation: the DSL, or Digital Scholarship Lab, a fantastic space in the main library dedicated to the support of digital scholarship across the curriculum; CEDAR, a not-quite-acronym for the Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research, a group of faculty who joined the College of Arts & Letters as part of a cluster hire and are working collaboratively on critically engaged digital research; and my own R&D unit, MESH, which is not an acronym at all but is meant instead to be a complement to MATRIX, focusing on the future of digital scholarly communication. All of these projects and spaces were created in order to fill gaps in the DH landscape at MSU, to provide more support for more kinds of work being done across the field. But there are still institutional puzzles to be solved, especially for relative newcomers. For instance, if I have a project and I want to hire a student or two to work on it with me, where might I find funding for that? And how do I hire that student? If I need a higher level of developer support, is there a group of developers somewhere that I can work with? It's these kinds of questions that often drive the desire for formal centers, but as you can see we've got a pile of centers and still can't fully meet the need. Some of these centers, like MATRIX and the DHLC, are focused on internally generated grant-funded projects and aren't able to support projects that are brought to them. Some, like the DSL, have constituencies that are so broad that they cannot go deep on many projects. And all of them face similar questions about the full lifecycle of projects: How are they incubated? How do they get past the incubation stage and into full development? How can their teams obtain not just the funding but also the training they need to be self-sufficient? How are projects hosted and maintained over the long-term? And once those projects are no longer viable, what provisions can we make for flattening and archiving them?
+
+
+
+
+Note: In order to answer these questions, and more, we're currently working on two fronts: first, to map all of the resources within MSU that the DH community should know about -- the funding sources, the training opportunities, the support services, and more. And second, we're working to pull together the research units within DH@MSU with the other units on campus -- like EDLI, the Enhanced Digital Learning Initiative -- that have some of the same questions. We're hoping to build out additional layers of consortium, first, within the humanities and social sciences via what we're currently calling the Consortium for Digital Scholarship and Practice, and second,
+
+
+
+
+Note: across the university via the Research Facilitation Network, bringing together related groups in quantitative fields, in the bench sciences, and in university-level enterprise computing.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Okay, so we've now zoomed out from the constellation that is DH@MSU to the galaxy that is the Research Facilitation Network. And I've told you a whole lot about my journey along the way. But I'm guessing you might like me to boil this down into a few actionable ideas as you move forward with your own work here. So:
+
+
+1. Remember Steve Ramsay's claim -- centers are people -- but focus on the connections among those people.
+
+Note: READ SLIDE. Getting DH@MSU to where it is, and pushing it along to where it needs to be, is all about building relationships among the different folks with a stake in the collaborations that we hope to facilitate. Along which lines:
+
+
+2. Informal relationships are a great place to begin, but formal structures for those relationships can make them institutionally durable.
+
+Note: READ SLIDE. How can you define connections among independent units and projects that allow them to maintain their independence while leveraging their combined strength? This is especially important when you're trying to do the work of creating something coherent without a substantial budget or a top-down administrative mandate. And finally:
+
+
+3. Networks might facilitate the development of new, spontaneous connections in ways that centers cannot.
+
+Note: READ SLIDE. Networks can both harness the power of informal relationships and allow their impact to extend outward, drawing strength from the combination of resources and knowledge that all of their participants bring to bear. Networks are also more flexible than centers, in that they can accommodate new developments, shifts of direction, and so on in ways that solid structures cannot.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+ Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: So: that's pretty much all the advice I've got right now, and I'm sure I've opened up way more questions than I've answered, so why don't we turn to your thoughts at this point? Thanks again for having me here.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index db584dc1..4d4952ae 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1,50 +1,2 @@
-
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-### Sponsors
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
diff --git a/aiea.md b/aiea.md
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+++ b/aiea.md
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+## Generous Education
+---
+### Critique, Community, Collaboration
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+##### http://kfitz.info/presentations/aiea.html
+
+Note: Thank you, etc.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what follows builds on the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education in the United States -- is going to require those of us who work on campus to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the many publics, from the local to the global, that it serves.
+
+
+# "radical approach"
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can readily take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated population ready to participate in public affairs from the local to the global -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be understood as evidence that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. Even worse than the conflict between these paradigms, however, is that both of them are failing, if in different ways. If our institutions are to thrive in the decades ahead we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It's going to require concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+# listening
+
+Note: So the book asks us to think about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+# reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that the critical reading practices we enact on campus might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged research, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns, as well as to transform those communities from passive recipients of the university's knowledge into active collaborators in shared projects.
+
+
+# the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and community engagement. The university must become the kind of institution that can focus less on individual achievement, on educating for individual leadership, and that instead focuses on building community, and indeed on educating for community-building. And this, perhaps needless to say, will require rethinking a lot about the ways we engage with our students.
+
+
+# students
+
+Note: Our students, after all, are our first and most important point of contact with the publics we serve. Our students come to us from an increasingly wide range of backgrounds and with a correspondingly wide range of interests. Ensuring that we connect with them, that we work with them in creating the university's future, is job one. But I want to suggest that some of our students are learning habits of mind from us that ultimately work to undermine the future that we want to build.
+
+
+# seminar
+
+Note: Here's the scene that first got me thinking in this direction, a moment in a graduate seminar I taught years ago, a moment that for me came to feel emblematic of the situation of the contemporary university. I want to preface the story by saying that I offer it not as an indictment of the kids today, but rather of the m.o. of higher education since the last decades of the 20th century. So here's the scene: the seminar is in cultural studies, and is meant to provide an overview of some current questions in critical theory. I do not now remember what article it was we'd read for that class session, but I opened our discussion by asking for first responses. And three students in a row issued withering takedowns of the article, pointing to the author's methodological flaws and ideological weaknesses. After the third, I said okay, that's all important and I definitely want to dig into it, but let's back up a bit: what is the author's argument here? What is she trying to accomplish?
+
+
+# silence
+
+Note: Nothing. "It's not a trick question," I said. "What is this article about?" Now, I was a fair bit younger and less sure of myself at that point, and I immediately began wondering whether I'd asked a stupid question, whether the sudden failure to meet my gaze was a sign that I, like the author, was now being dismissed as having pedestrian interest in neoliberal forms of meaning-making that demonstrated my complicity with the systems of oppression within which I worked. But it gradually dawned on me -- and then was confirmed over the course of the semester -- that the problem with the question wasn't its stupidity but its unfamiliarity. The students were prepared to dismantle the argument, but not to examine how it was built.
+
+
+# they say / i say
+
+Note: The students in this seminar, like so many of us, had learned all too well one of the lessons often extrapolated from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's _They Say, I Say_: that the key move in academic argumentation is from what others have previously said to one's own -- almost always contrasting, and inevitably more interesting or correct -- contribution. That is to say, that the goal of critical thinking is to expose the flawed arguments of others in order to demonstrate the inherent rightness of our own.
+
+
+# conversation
+
+Note: The larger point that Graff and Birkenstein make in _They Say, I Say_ is in fact a good and important one: that scholarship proceeds through conversation, and thus that scholarly argument begins with engaging with what others have said and then develops through one's own individual contribution to the discussion. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first part is that we are -- and when I say we, I mean human beings at this hour of the world -- we are by and large TERRIBLE at conversation. Witness any set of talking heads on television, or any Thanksgiving dinner table, or any department meeting: more often than not, we spend the time when other people are talking waiting for our own turn to speak, and we take what's being said to us mostly as a means of formulating our own response. We do not genuinely *listen*, but instead *react*. And the same is too often true of scholarly conversation: the primary purpose of engaging with what "they" have said is to get to the important bit -- what I am saying.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: That's the first problem. The second is the assumption that what I am saying, my own individual contribution to the discussion, is genuinely individual, that it is my own. In no small part this stems from the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university -- an orientation inseparable from the individualism of the surrounding culture -- in which the entire institutional reward structure, including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and every other form of merit is determined by what I individually have done. Every tub sits on its own bottom, in other words, and if I am to succeed it must be based on my own individual accomplishments -- even in those fields that most claim to prize collaboration.
+
+
+# zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. We all find ourselves in an environment in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time.
+
+
+# competitive thinking
+
+Note: As a result, the mode of conversation promoted by _They Say, I Say_ has become less about the most important forms of critical thinking on which our work focuses -- engaging with what has been said before us and adding to the discussion -- than about competitive thinking. Competitive thinking is a hyperindividualistic mode of debate that suggests that we are in an endless struggle with one another, in which there is only room for so much success, for so much attention. In competitive thinking, the pursuit of academic and professional success requires us to defend our own positions, and attack others. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+# institutions
+
+Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the institutional reward structures within which we operate privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions separate themselves from quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that we'll likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more productive.
+
+
+# teaching
+
+Note: But in the meantime, one of the places where we can begin to create a new ethics and transform the values that structure our institutions is in teaching. This is not to say that such transformation will be easy. Those of us teaching in the US are working within a system that instills these notions of competition and individual achievement earlier and earlier, of course, as students come to us from elementary and secondary institutions increasingly structured around testing. Those students aren't competing directly against one another in the moment of testing, but they are nonetheless being inculcated into at least two of competitive thinking's underpinnings: the responsibility of the individual for demonstrating mastery, and the significant consequences of being wrong.
+
+
+# wrong
+
+Note: And perhaps it's here that we see the origins of my students' tendency to freeze when asked to restate the argument of something they'd read: their answer might have been wrong. As Kathryn Schulz has explored, all of us will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid being wrong, or acknowledging our wrongness. But of course there is no real thinking without the possibility -- indeed, somewhere along the line, the inevitability -- of being wrong. Without being willing to be wrong, we can't hypothesize, we can't experiment, we can't create. We can't imagine new possibilities. We can't dream. But we are hard-wired not to admit the possibility that we might be wrong.
+
+
+# you're wrong
+
+Note: And one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong -- and again, by "we" here, I mean both to point to academics in particular and to humans living at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century in general -- again, one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong is by demonstrating the inherent wrongness in everyone else's ideas. In the academy, and perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, this takes the form of critique: if I can demonstrate what's wrong with your ideas, it must mean that my ideas are better.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: This is the upshot of our misapplication of _They Say, I Say_, and it's what leads to the situation I faced in my graduate seminar: we have armed our students with all the most important tools of critique. They are ready to unpack and dismantle. They are well-trained, that is to say, in playing what Peter Elbow once referred to as the doubting game, in which they focus on the parts of an idea that could be wrong and what it might mean if they were. But they have -- and if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we all have -- a tendency to skip the half of the game that's supposed to come first: the believing game, in which we focus on what it might mean if the idea were right. Our reading of _They Say, I Say_, in other words, encourages us to dismiss what "they say" as quickly as possible, in order to get on to the more crucial "I say," the part for which we will actually get credit.
+
+
+# critical thinking
+
+Note: I want to be clear here: there is a LOT of what "they say" that in fact should be pushed back against. There's a lot out there worth doubting. I'm not asking us not to disagree, not to push new ideas forward, not to think critically. I am, however, hoping that we might find ways to remember that critical thinking requires deep understanding and even generosity as a prerequisite. And perhaps nowhere are the generous underpinnings of critical thinking more important than in international education: as students are brought into contact with cultures that are new to them, they need to be equipped with the kind of tools that will allow them to recognize what they don't know, and allow them to be open to learning.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: So in that spirit, what I want to ask today is what we and our students might gain from slowing the process down, from emphasizing the believing game before leaping to the doubting game, from lingering a bit longer in the "they say." We might, just as a start, find that we all become better listeners. We might open up new ground for mutual understanding, even with those from whom we are most different and with whom we most disagree.
+
+
+# we say
+
+Note: And we might find ourselves moving less from "they say" to "I say" than instead to "we say," thinking additively and collaboratively about what we might build together rather than understanding our own ideas to require vanquishing everyone else's. A more generous model of education might emerge, one based on building something collective rather than tearing down our predecessors in order to promote our own ideas. This generous education might help us frame ways of thinking that focus on how our institutions might serve as means of fostering community rather than providing individual benefit.
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: And this model of generous thinking is key to the future of the university: we have to find our way back to an understanding of the university's work as grounded in service to a broadly construed public, and that requires all of us -- faculty, students, staff, administrators, trustees -- reframing the good that higher education provides as a social good, a collective and communal good, rather than a personal, private, individual one.
+
+
+# generous assessment
+
+Note: Of course, if we are really going to effect this transformation -- what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about the values that underwrite higher education -- we're going to have to think differently about how we measure our success as well. About what success means in the first place. If we're going to move away from the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom, hyper individualistic, competitive mode of achievement, in which all outcomes are understood to be individual and are therefore assessed at that level, and instead foster more collective goals, we're going to need to think carefully about what we're assessing and why. How might we instead focus our modes of assessment at all levels, and the rewards that follow, on collaboration, on process?
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: If we're going to bring this mode of generous thinking, of generous argument, of generous assessment to bear on our classrooms, of course, we'd be well served by bringing it to bear on our work together first. We need to think seriously about how all of the processes that structure professional lives within the academy -- not least our processes of hiring, of retention, of tenure and promotion -- might be transformed in order to instantiate the values we want to bring to the work we do, rather than fostering the culture of competition, of invidious distinction, that colors all of the ways that we work today, and the environment within which our students learn.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: One cautionary note, however: I do not mean this emphasis on generosity, on a supportive engagement with the work that has gone before us, to be used as a means of defusing the important work that critique actually does in helping make ideas better. In the early days of working on _Generous Thinking_, I gave an invited talk in which I tested out some of its core ideas. In the question-and-answer period that followed, one commenter pointed out what he saw as a canny move on my part in talking about generosity: no one wanted to be seen as an ungenerous jerk in disagreeing with me. It was a funny moment, but it gave me real pause; I did not at all intend to use generosity as a shield with which to fend off the possibility of critique. Generosity, in fact, requires remaining open to criticism -- in fact, it requires recognizing the generous purposes that critique can serve. So in pressing for more generous modes of education and more generous modes of assessment, I do not mean to impose a regime that is all rainbows and unicorns on us. Instead, what I'm hoping to ask is how we might all benefit from thinking *with* rather than *against* one another, *with* rather than *against* the arguments of our predecessors, and *with* rather than *against* our students in developing the knowledge that might make all of us better contributors to the social good.
+
+
+# questions
+
+Note: I've asked a lot of questions about what we might do and how it might work, and I'm not sure how many answers I have for them. In part, that's by design: the problems facing the university today are larger and more complicated than can be solved by any one mind working alone. They're going to require all of us, thinking together, building one one another's ideas, in order to create something new. And so I'm going to stop here, in the hopes that we might use the rest of this time to move from what *I say* to what *we say.* I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we might encourage more generous forms of education, and how we might use that generosity to encourage new ways of being in the world.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### and the Future of the Liberal Arts
+---
+
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start by thanking President Abernathy for inviting me to spend the day with you here. This talk draws heavily on various parts of my book, _Generous Thinking_, which was published in February by Johns Hopkins. The overall argument of the project is that the future of higher education depends on institutions, and those of us who are part of them, successfully building engaged, trusting relationships with the publics that the our institutions are intended to serve. This is perhaps especially obvious for public colleges and universities like my own, but I believe that it is no less true of private institutions, including liberal arts colleges, which depend on various kinds of public support for their success.
+
+
+
+##### http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
+
+Note: That we need to place some emphasis on building these relationships between our institutions and our publics can be seen in the results of an increasing number of reports and studies such as this one, released in 2017 by the Pew Research Center. The report documents a precipitous decline in the esteem colleges and universities are held in in the United States, primarily on the political right. It's not a surprise; we've seen this kind of shift in public opinion taking root for some time. Typically our response to this kind of report, however, has been to decry the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture and to turn inward, to spend more time talking internally with those who understand what we do. In that reaction, however, we run the risk of deepening the divide, allowing those who _want_ us to fade into irrelevance to say "see? They're out of touch. Who needs them anyway?" It's important for us to remember that this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+##### http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the problem is not just that the public fails to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. So a large part of what I'm after in _Generous Thinking_ is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions _as_ communities, as well as _in interaction with_ communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while my argument about the importance of generosity for the future of the university might appear self-indulgent, a head-in-the-sand retreat into philosophizing and a refusal of real political action, I hope, in the book, to have put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole."
-- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
+
+
+# "them"
+
+Note: So it's important to be careful about how we define "us," precisely because every "us" implies a "them," and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly in service to the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other. Granted, sometimes "they" are imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that benefits from and takes in information we provide. But what might it mean if we understood ourselves, and our institutions, as embedded in and responsible to the complex collection of communities by which we are surrounded? How might we develop a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the institution itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
+
+
+# liberal education
+
+Note: However, in building those relationships, we have to contend with the fact that what faculty members actually _do_ on our campuses is often a mystery, and indeed a site of profound misunderstanding, for people outside the academic profession, and even at times for one another. One of the key areas of misunderstanding, and one that most needs opening up, is the fundamental purpose of higher education. Public figures such as politicians increasingly discuss colleges and universities as sites of workforce preparation, making it seem as if the provision of career-enhancing credentials were the sole purpose for which our institutions exist, and as if everything else they do that does not lead directly to economic growth were a misappropriation of funds. Those of us who work on campus, by and large, understand our institutions not as credentialing agencies but as sites of broad-based education: a "liberal" education in the original sense of the term. Of course the very term "liberal education," so natural to those of us steeped in it, has itself become profoundly politicized, as if the liberal aspect of higher education were not its breadth but its ideological bent. So we see, for instance, the state of Colorado stripping the term out of official university documents. But even where the concept of liberal education isn't imagined to be a cover for some revolution we're fomenting on campus, there's a widespread misconception about it that's almost worse: it is a mode of education in which we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students' heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path.
+
+
+# humanities
+
+Note: And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities. The portrait I'm about to sketch of the humanities today could be extended to many other areas within the curriculum -- for example, the sciences' focus on "basic science," or science without direct industry applicability, is often imagined to be just as frivolous. But the humanities -- the study of literature, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of culture -- are in certain ways both the core and the limit case of the liberal arts. The humanities cultivate an inquisitive mindset, they teach key skills of reading and interpretation, and they focus on writing in ways that can prepare a student to learn absolutely anything else over the course of their lives -- and yet they are the fields around which no end of hilarious jokes about what a student might actually do with that degree have been constructed. (The answer, of course: absolutely anything. As a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes clear, not only do humanities majors wind up gainfully employed, but they also wind up happy in their choices. But I digress.) The key thing to note is that the humanities serve as a bellwether of sorts: what has been happening to them is happening to higher education in general, if a little more slowly. So while I'm focused here on the kinds of arguments that are being made about the humanities in our culture today, it doesn't take too much of a stretch to imagine them being made about sociology, or about physics, or about any other field on campus that isn't named after a specific, well-paying career.
+
+
+# marginalization
+
+Note: The humanities, in any case, have long been lauded as providing students with a rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills with which they can engage the world around them. These skills are increasingly necessary in today's hypermediated, globalized, conflict-filled world -- and yet many humanities departments find themselves increasingly marginalized within their own institutions. This marginalization is related, if not directly attributable, to the degree to which students, parents, administrators, trustees, politicians, the media, and the public at large have been led in a self-reinforcing cycle to believe that the skills these fields provide are useless in the current economic environment. Someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about all those English majors working at Starbucks; commentators reinforce the sense that humanities majors are worth less than pre-professional degrees; parents strongly encourage their students to turn toward pragmatic fields that seem somehow to describe a job; administrators note a decline in humanities majors and cut budgets and positions; the jobs crisis for humanities PhDs worsens; someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about what all those adjuncts were planning on doing with that humanities PhD anyhow; and the whole thing intensifies. In many institutions, this draining away of majors and faculty and resources has reduced the humanities to a means of ensuring that students studying to become engineers and bankers are reminded of the human ends of their work. This is not a terrible thing in and of itself, but it is not a sufficient ground on which humanities fields can do their best work for the institution, or for the world.
+
+
+# spreading
+
+Note: And while this kind of cyclical crisis has not manifested to anything like the same extent in the sciences, there are early indications that it may be spreading in that direction. Where once the world at large seemed mostly to understand that scientific research, and the kinds of study that support it, are crucial to the general advancement of knowledge, recent shifts in funder policies and priorities suggest a growing scrutiny of that work's economic rather than educational impact, as well as a growing restriction on research areas that have been heavily politicized. The humanities, again, may well be the canary in the higher education coal mine, and for that reason, it's crucial that we pay close attention to what's happened in those fields, and particularly to the things that haven't worked as the humanities have attempted to remedy the situation.
+
+
+# defense
+
+Note: One of the key things that hasn't worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defenses of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy have been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which have had the desired impact. Calls to save the humanities issued by public figures have frequently left scholars annoyed, as they often begin with a somewhat retrograde sense of what we do and why, and thus frequently give the sense of trying to save our fields from us. (One might see, for instance, a column published in 2016 by the former chairman of the NEH, Bruce Cole, entitled "What's Wrong with the Humanities?", which begins memorably:
+
+
+> "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance."
-- Bruce Cole
+
+Note: "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.") But perhaps even worse is the degree to which humanities professors themselves -- those one would think best positioned to make the case -- have failed to find traction with their arguments. As the unsuccessful defenses proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worse,
+
+
+> "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them."
-- Simon During
+
+Note: leading Simon During to grumble that "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." And maybe we like it that way, as we are often those who take issue with our own defenses, bitterly disagreeing as we frequently do about the purposes and practices of our fields.
+
+
+# definition
+
+Note: Perhaps this is a good moment for us to stop and consider what it is that the humanities do do well, what the humanities are for. I will start with a basic definition of the humanities as a cluster of fields that focus on the careful study and analysis of cultures and their many modes of thought and forms of representation -- writing, music, art, media, and so on -- as they have developed and moved through time and across geographical boundaries, growing out of and adding to our senses of who we are as individuals, as groups, and as nations. The humanities are interested, then, in the ways that representations work, in the relationships between representations and social structures, in all the ways that human ideas and their expression shape and are shaped by human culture. In this definition we might begin to see the possibility that studying literature or history or art or film or philosophy might not be solely about the object itself, but instead about a way of engaging with the world: in the process we develop the ability to read and interpret what we see and hear, the insight to understand the multiple layers of what is being communicated and why, and the capacity to put together for ourselves an appropriate, thoughtful contribution to our culture.
+
+
+# disagreement
+
+Note: Now, the first thing to note about this definition is that I am certain that many humanities scholars who hear it will disagree with it -- they will have nuances and correctives to offer -- and it is important to understand that this disagreement does not necessarily mean that my definition is wrong. Nor, however, do I mean to suggest that the nuances and correctives presented would be wrong. Rather, that form of disagreement is at the heart of how we do what we do: we hear one another's interpretations (of texts, of performances, of historical events) and we push back against them. We advance the work in our field through disagreement and revision. This agonistic approach, however, is both a strength of the humanities -- and by extension of the university in general -- and its Achilles' heel, a thought to which I'll return shortly.
+
+
+# sermonizing
+
+Note: For the moment, though, back to Simon During and his sense that the humanities are terrible at self-promotion. During's complaint, levied at the essays included in Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewitt's volume, _The Humanities and Public Life_, is largely that, in the act of self-defense, humanities scholars leave behind doing what they do and instead turn to "sermonizing" (his word) about the value of what they do. He argues that part of the problem is the assumption that the humanities as we practice them ought to have a public life in the first place. He winds up suggesting that we should continue to ensure that there is sufficient state support for the humanities so that students who do not already occupy a position of financial comfort can study our fields, but that we should not stretch beyond that point by arguing for the public importance of studying the humanities, because that importance is primarily, overwhelmingly, private.
+
+
+# privatization
+
+Note: This sense that education in the humanities is of primarily private value is increasingly in today's popular discourse extended to higher education in general: the purpose, we are told, of a college degree is some form of personal enrichment, whether financial or otherwise, rather than a social good. This privatization of higher education's benefits -- part of the general privatization that Chris Newfield has referred to as the academy's "great mistake" -- has been accompanied by a related shift in its costs from the state to individual families and students, resulting in the downward spiral in funding and other forms of public support in which our institutions and our fields are caught, as well as the astronomically increasing debt load faced by students and their families. As long as a university education is assumed to have a predominantly personal rather than social benefit, it will be argued that making such an education possible is a private rather than a public responsibility. And that mindset will of necessity lead to the devaluation of fields whose benefits are less immediately tangible, less material, less individual. If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.
+
+
+# public good
+
+Note: But what is that public good? We don't always do a terribly good job of articulating these things, of describing what we do and arguing on behalf of the values that sustain our work. That may be in part because it's hard to express our values without recourse to what feel to us like politically regressive, universalizing master narratives about the nature of the good that have long been used as means of solidifying and perpetuating the social order, with all its injustices and exclusions. And so instead of stating clearly and passionately the ethics and values and goals that we bring to our work, we critique. We protect ourselves with what Lisa Ruddick has described as "the game of academic cool": in order to avoid appearing naïve -- or worse, complicit -- we complicate; we argue; we read against the grain.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: One of the things that happens when we engage in this mode of critique is that we get accused of having primarily ideological ends; this is how our universities come to be accused of "brainwashing" their students, filling their heads with leftist rejections of the basic goodness of the dominant western culture. On campus, of course, we know that's not true; our classes in American history and in English literature may strive to teach the full range of that history and that literature, but western culture is far from being marginalized in the curriculum. And, in fact, even our most critical reading practices turn out to be perfectly compatible with the contemporary political landscape. In fact, in the larger project, I argue that our critiques of contemporary culture surface not just despite but because of the conservative-leaning systems and structures in which the university as a whole, and each of us as a result, is mired. Our tendency to read against the grain is part of our makeup precisely because of the ways that we are ourselves subject to politics rather than being able to stand outside and neutrally analyze the political. The politics we are subject to -- one that structures all institutions in the contemporary United States, and perhaps especially universities -- makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before. It is a politics structured around competition, and what historian Winfried Fluck has referred to as the race for individual distinction.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives -- on campus and off -- are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. From college admissions through the entirety of our careers, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which we are measured, and the best -- whatever that might mean in a given context -- are rewarded. In actual practice, however, our metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. We are in constant competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can't ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we're working together. Hence the danger of our agonistic modes of work: too often, that agon is turned on one another, discrediting competing theories rather than building on one another's work.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: This competitive individualism contradicts -- and in fact undermines -- all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning, but in actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from their colleagues, from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly managed by administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. This is no way to run a collective. It's also no way to build solidarity among academic units, or across categories of academic employment, or between the academy and the communities with which it engages.
+
+
+# the point
+
+Note: And perhaps that's the point. Perhaps we are locked into this endless competition with one another in order to keep us distracted from the work that we might do if we were truly joined together. The requirement that we continually compare ourselves with one another, that we take on only the work that will lead to our own individual achievement, is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social.
+
+
+# so
+
+Note: So how do we step off of this treadmill? How do we begin to insist upon living our academic lives another way? How do we return to the collective, the social, the communal potential that higher education should enable?
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: This, at last, is where I get to bring in generous thinking, a way of being that I propose as an alternative to the competitive thinking in which the academy is steeped. Generous thinking is not intended to be opposed to critical thinking -- in fact, I argue strongly that the best of our critical thinking is always steeped in generosity. Rather, generous thinking involves the whole-hearted embrace of the deepest values of the humanities -- among them, attention, care, and equity -- in order to create communities that think critically together, both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What is it I mean when I talk about generosity in this context? The book obviously spends much more time exploring this question, but for the moment: I think of generosity as a practice, something to which we have to return again and again. It's an approach to engagement that focuses first and foremost on developing a generosity of mind, an openness to possibility. That openness begins for me by trying to develop a listening presence in the world, which is to say a conversational disposition that is not merely waiting for my next opportunity to speak but instead genuinely paying attention to what is being said. It means caring about the concerns of my interlocutor as much as I care about my own. It means beginning from the assumption that in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn. Generous thinking also means working to think with rather than against the people and texts with whom I'm in dialogue. It means starting an encounter with an idea with _yes_ rather than _no_, with _and_ rather than _but_. _Yes, and_ creates the possibility for genuine dialogue, not only among academic colleagues but with our objects of study, our predecessors, and the many potential publics that surround us. _Yes, and_ asks us to step away from competition, from the race for professional distinction; when we allow ourselves to linger in _yes, and_, we create the possibility of working together to build something entirely new.
+
+
+# together
+
+Note: And it's through working together that we can begin to build the kinds of connections with the publics that might help turn the tide on the declining esteem our institutions, and higher education in general, are held in. This mode of generous thinking is already instantiated in a wide range of projects that focus on fostering public engagement in and through the work done in colleges and universities. Collaborations with the public can work to create a sense of collective ownership of and investment in the university, making the institution's relevance to contemporary communities abundantly clear.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: But this mode of working in public asks a lot of us. It asks us to stop disseminating our work solely in the venues that give us the greatest chance at the forms of individual prestige for which we're rewarded and instead start looking for ways to make our work a gift to the world. It asks us to accept the risk involved in writing for audiences with whom we're less familiar than we are with our colleagues, finding ways to draw them into our concerns and to acquaint ourselves with theirs. It asks us not just to bring our knowledge to those audiences, but to open space for them to become interlocutors, bringing us their own knowledge in response.
+
+
+# vulnerability
+
+Note: It takes a lot of work -- difficult, scary, failure-filled work -- to allow ourselves to become open to this kind of engagement. We're prone as scholars to focus on conversations with those we already know well, and in forms we already know we do well, and there are times when our attempts to address public audiences go badly. It's possible that Simon During is onto something here, when he notes that humanities professors, in the act of public professing, turn away from "doing what they do" and toward "sermonizing" about our fields' value. But the problem isn't assuming that there's a public value in what we do, it's the mode of sermonizing: too much professional public address takes the form or tone of the edifying lecture, instructing the less privileged on better ways of being. If, contra During, we do believe that there is a public value to the work of the humanities, we must find ways to engage the public as equals, without sermonizing. We have to prepare for and accept the vulnerability involved in doing away with the hierarchy of teacher and learner, and find ways to engage in open-ended, multidirectional, generous conversation.
+
+
+# possibility
+
+Note: In that conversation lies the possibility of building solidarity with the concerns of the publics we hope to reach, as well as the possibility of encouraging understanding of our own concerns. In that conversation -- and in the conversations in which you'll be engaging today -- lies the possibility of creating another mode of being for the twenty-first century university and those who care about it. In that conversation lies the possibility of developing a new understanding of how expertise is structured and how it functions. In that conversation lies the possibility of a higher education whose ends are social rather than individual, aimed at community-building rather than personal achievement. In all of those conversations -- in which we engage perspectives other than our own, in which we value the productions and manifestations of our diverse culture, in which we encounter the other in all its irreducible otherness -- lie the best of what the humanities can bring to the university, and the university to the world.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+## Digital Platforms and Possibilities
+---
+### What We've Learned from COVID-19
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to talk with you a bit today, and while I'd of course prefer to be there with you in Paris, I'm very glad that the conference organizers and the technologies they're using have made it possible for me to join you remotely.
+
+My focus today is on the things we've learned about digital communication from the pandemic, and the ways that we might continue experimenting and learning in order to better engage our students and colleagues. My original title as listed in the program calls out "digital pedagogy" in particular, but as I wrote I felt the need to bracket that a bit: I am not a scholar of teaching and learning, and those who are will no doubt have very different lessons to share from the last two years. I am, however, very much a digital scholar, focused on developing platforms and communities that might help us improve scholarly communication for both research and teaching. And so the thoughts I'm going to share with you today have to do with the ways that better use of better digital tools might help us connect with our students, with our subject matter, and with one another. I don't have easy answers or perfect solutions -- in fact, as you'll hear, I have some real concerns -- but I also have a few ideas that I hope we can carry with us as we think about what higher education might look like in the future.
+
+
+1. Digital platforms can connect and include.
+
+Note: The very existence of this talk makes evident the first of the things that we've learned since the onset of COVID-19: that we can do a lot of things at a distance that we previously had to travel for, and in the process we can include many more people in our discussions who might otherwise have been unable to participate. Platforms like Zoom, like Slack, like Miro, like GitHub, all present important possibilities for collaboration at a distance. They've made it possible for us to work closely with others not just under lockdown conditions, but in a more normal day-to-day with team members who are in different cities or countries. My own team, who are working on building and sustaining Humanities Commons, has become increasingly distributed during the pandemic; we've hired four new team members in the last two years, at least two of whom will be permanently remote, and our use of shared calendars, video conferencing, online project management tools, and team chat has enabled us to ensure that we all stay connected, informed, and engaged in our shared projects.
+
+We similarly have the potential to reach students who can't join us in person, students who are tied to a particular location but want nevertheless to study with us, students who have temporary or chronic illnesses and disabilities that restrict their movements, students whose work schedules or family circumstances impose requirements on their time. This digital engagement can be primarily synchronous, focusing on the kinds of discussions we can best have when we're all connected at once, or we can open the possibilities for students to engage in more asynchronous ways, chatting with one another and sharing their work at whatever hour they can. And these platforms can be used as an alternative to regular face-to-face classroom meetings, or they can supplement those meetings. If we deploy them well, we have the potential to use the networked platforms and systems that are proliferating around us to make connections with our students, and among our students, in ways that can enable more of them to connect and participate.
+
+
+2. Technologies can divide and exclude.
+
+Note: However, these platforms are not a panacea, and in fact they can create new barriers to our work together if we're not careful. Our students do not have equal access to computers or to high-speed internet, and they have not received equal levels of preparation for the use of the technologies their educations may require. We all also -- students and faculty alike -- have different levels of tolerance for screen time; for some of us, the video aspect of Zoom enables a sense of connection, but for others of us it's purely exhausting. We might turn away from the screen, or turn off the camera, in order to protect ourselves from that exhaustion -- and yet we might simultaneously experience a loss when others do the same, when we find ourselves talking to a bunch of black boxes. We might be relieved to have a means of making something like contact with one another, at the very same time that we feel our distance from one another all the more acutely. We might be glad to Zoom into one kind of meeting but not another. We might wish we could have more intimate conversations with one another and yet flinch every time a meeting organizer says "breakout rooms."
+
+The ways our engagements with one another are mediated by online platforms for connection are complex, and using them in ways that are more inclusive and more likely to produce connection requires an ongoing willingness to experiment. The Humanities Commons team is part of a larger lab that I direct, called MESH Research; right now we have two primary projects with two separate teams, and once a month we have a Zoom meeting with the whole lab as a means of trying to keep everyone informed about both projects and to keep a sense of connection across the team as a whole. Those calls haven't been terrifically effective, however, and I often feel as though we're having a meeting in order to have a meeting, which is just awful. So we've been experimenting with some other modes of connection in order to tease out what kinds of interaction might best support our needs. A few months ago, we decided to have an "asynchronous" meeting, asking everyone to dip in and out of a chat in Teams over the course of a few hours one afternoon. I opened us up with a few questions, and the chat just FLEW. We got more members of the lab actively involved and contributing than we've ever had in a video call. In our conversations afterward, we surfaced a couple of reasons why. One was novelty; it was an interesting experiment and everyone was eager to see how it would go. But our ostensibly asynchronous chat -- which really turned out to be pretty synchronous because everyone was there and active at the same time -- also made it possible for everyone to contribute ideas as they had them, rather than needing to wait for the floor or feeling as though the moment for that idea had passed. Everyone felt free to add thoughts, to open new questions, or to just +1 things to indicate connection. We haven't had another such chat-based meeting yet, but it's opened up some key ways of thinking about how we might better use our chat platforms, and about what video calls are best used for.
+
+
+
+https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/
+
+Note: (Incidentally, one of the best resources I've found for thinking about how to create inclusive remote workplaces is [GitLab's Guide to All-Remote](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/#). The site is a bit overwhelming at first, but dipping in a little at a time reveals several key principles that we could all bear to learn from, such as documenting everything in writing and creating a handbook-first approach to that documentation so that there's a single location in which everyone knows that the answers to questions can be found. There's a lot more in that site that I think can provide some ideas for creating better engagement using digital platforms.)
+
+
+3. Technologies can intrude.
+
+Note: Among the worst recent developments in technologies for remote work, however, is the overflow of monitoring software, which reveals a whole lot about both the worst tendencies in contemporary tech development and the worst tendencies in contemporary management. Early on in the pandemic, we saw a lot of articles that suggested that businesses might be able to let go of their expensive office space because the sudden requirement that everyone work remotely made clear that everyone *could* work remotely and still get things done. For the moment I'll bracket the challenges that many of us faced in the process -- such as the lack of sufficient, comfortable workspaces for everyone in the home and the need to handle the demands of work and home life simultaneously -- but will note that these challenges demonstrated the extent to which a techno-utopian vision of remote work relied on the kind of frictionless universe that hardly any of us experience.
+
+Following quickly on the heels of that flush of "let's just work from home forever!" came a welter of concerns, however, many of which revealed the deep insecurities of many, many managers. Because if the role of the manager in the workplace is to require accountability and make sure that their direct reports are actually working, how can they do so if they cannot *see* that you are *at your desk*? The answer from the tech industry, of course, was "you can see what your employees are doing, even at a distance!" And voila, monitoring software. In the business world, this software can spy on your every computer-based move, watching what programs you're actively using, whether you're typing or using your mouse, and more. In the virtual classroom, monitoring software can track "attention" by insisting that students keep the relevant program in focus and prevent "cheating" by observing what else students are doing during class. And we've all seen the gross violations of privacy and basic human dignity that have resulted from the use of such monitoring programs: employees who are reprimanded because their children ask them questions during the work day; students who are required to allow their cameras to scan their bodies and their surroundings and track their movements during testing.
+
+But there are hundreds of other less visible intrusions that the technologies we use for remote work inflict on us, ways that our communications and actions are tracked and consumed by the platforms we're using. One small example: Among the communication platforms provided to my team by our host institution, Michigan State University, is Microsoft Teams. Teams provides both chat-based communication like that of Slack and video-based communication like Zoom, and it integrates (mostly well) with the other Office 365 applications that MSU offers. Not long ago, my colleagues and I realized that whenever we'd hold a scheduled meeting via Teams, the meeting organizer would get an attendance report at the end of the session. Because our Teams instance has been optimized for instructors to use for holding classes, this is no doubt intended to be a benefit; you don't have to worry about the awkwardness of taking attendance each day, because we can handle it for you! But when I schedule a meeting with my colleagues, do I really need a report that includes what time each of us connected and disconnected from the call? Even more importantly, perhaps, when that report gets generated, who else has access to it? Almost certainly my colleagues in central IT. And of course it's also generated by and served from a farm of Microsoft servers. Does anyone but me care about that information? Would anyone look at it? Probably not in any detail, but in the aggregate? And how long does that information live on university and/or corporate servers? And what kinds of research is being done, or could in the future be done, with it?
+
+
+4. Big data can help us answer big questions.
+
+Note: This question takes us into the terrain of "big data," which as we've been told can enable research that can help us answer previously unanswerable questions. The potential is really exciting; within the literary studies areas of the digital humanities, for instance, we can explore questions at a never-before-possible scale. Rather than making an argument about literary genres or periods based on evidence found in reading a few dozen books, we can instead ingest and process thousands of texts to see whether our hypotheses hold. So scholars like Ted Underwood at Illinois and Richard So at McGill bring the methods of data science to bear on large-scale text corpora in order to ask big questions about genre, about culture, about race, and more.
+
+
+
+https://covidtracking.com
+
+Note: Throughout the pandemic we have seen the importance of projects that seek to gather, manage, and preserve data, like the volunteer-run [COVID Tracking Project](https://covidtracking.com), which for one year gathered, rectified, and confirmed information from across the United States on testing, patient outcomes, and more, and proved a far more reliable source of data than our own governments, such that the project's data were cited in more than 1000 journal articles, over 7000 news stories, and much more. The bigness of this big data enabled research into, for instance, the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other communities of color within the United States, as well as into racial inequities in access to treatment. But this project only worked as long as the data kept flowing; within the US context, at least, as soon as state and local authorities slowed the tracking of testing data, the public perception that the pandemic was "over" grew, and attention to the real dangers faced by some individuals and communities withered.
+
+
+5. Big data can create big problems.
+
+Note: Big data projects like this are also beset -- or should be beset -- by a host of ethical concerns, as the Johns Hopkins University's COVID Dashboard's exploration of [the ethics of digital contact tracing](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/contact-tracing/principles) indicates.
+
+
+
+https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/contact-tracing/principles
+
+Note: Their principles include statements noting that "only those data that are necessary and relevant for the stated public health purposes should be collected," that "identifiable data should be stored in a secure manner and only for the period of time that the public health purposes require," and that "adopted technologies should not be used in ways that subject communities to discrimination or surveillance for non-public health reasons." These principles indicate an awareness that big datasets are not necessarily neutral, and that where individuals or communities are identifiable within the data they can be subject to severe consequences. As Cathy O'Neil in *Weapons of Math Destruction* and Virginia Eubanks in *Automating Inequality* have demonstrated, the kinds of data that powerful tech companies and government agencies are drawn to gather and the algorithms in which those data are used work to exacerbate inequities across contemporary culture.
+
+What does this mean for the kinds of technologies that we're deploying in higher education, the platforms that we have widely adopted and used in our teaching over the last couple of years? First, we need to know much more than most of us currently do about what becomes of the data that our use of those platforms generates -- what is gathered, what is stored, who has access, and for what purposes. This is particularly true of those venture capital funded platforms that provide free access to end users: we need to ensure that the path to profit for those platforms doesn't lead to selling user data for advertising or other commercial purposes.
+
+In the case of Teams and that "attendance report," I know that my university has negotiated an enterprise agreement with Microsoft that provides for compliance with two U.S. policies, HIPAA and FERPA, that require certain protections for health care data and education data, respectively. As part of that agreement, according to our IT Services unit, Microsoft has committed not to "mine individual data and will only access that data for troubleshooting needs or malware prevention." That gives me a level of confidence that other platforms don't, or won't. But it's just one small step in developing the ethical platforms that higher education needs.
+
+
+6. Technologies aren't neutral.
+
+Note: The key is remembering that technologies are not neutral. The argument that they are neutral derives from a long history of work on digital media that swung between wild techno-optimism, in which new networks and platforms were going to revolutionize all our lives and render discrimination and injustice and even the nation-state obsolete, to deep technophobia, in which the very same networks and platforms were going to make all of us stupid and render us compliant subjects of totalitarianism. If those arguments were thesis and antithesis, the apparent synthesis was to say "hey, now, technologies in and of themselves are neither good nor bad; it's all a matter of how we use them!" Except that the development of each and every one of the networks and platforms that now connect us was conceived of and executed by humans, with human biases and human goals. And because of that, while we might not want to say that Technology with a capital T is good or bad, we nevertheless have to acknowledge that particular technologies are abusive, and intrusive, and encourage the worst in human behavior, precisely because they have been designed and operated that way.
+
+
+7. But there are alternatives.
+
+Note: Now. I imagine that the folks who invited me to give this keynote, who wanted me to talk about the exciting possibilities for real engagement with digital tools for teaching and research, have spent at least the last few minutes thinking "THIS IS NOT WHAT WE MEANT." And I'll acknowledge that the last several years have sorely challenged my usual tendency toward optimism. But this is the point at which I attempt to turn it all around, and get back to the idea I started with -- that digital networks and platforms can enable more participation by more people than ever before -- and think about how we can do that ethically.
+
+Because we can do it ethically, if we carefully consider which technologies we're using and why -- and that means both which technologies our institutions are investing scarce financial resources in, and which technologies we're investing our time, energy, and ideas in. We need to focus in on the potential for higher education to help create a better world -- but in order to do so, we need collectively to rethink the systems through which we develop and share knowledge with one another, with our students, and with the world, ensuring that we keep our eyes on the larger project of collective understanding that is at the heart of the academic mission. This mission requires us to find ways to treat knowledge not as what economists would call a club good, whose access is restricted to those on the inside, but instead as a public good, created for all, available to all.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This reclamation of higher education as a public good is at the heart of what I have called "generous thinking": using our collective knowledge and the technologies that connect us in ways that demonstrate our deep responsibility for the world around us. We are, after all, educating the "leaders of tomorrow" not just in the conventionally understood political and business realms, but in the kinds of engagement that will help their communities grow from the grassroots up. Doing that generous work demands a values-first approach to higher education, as well as an ongoing examination of how those values are instantiated in institutional structures and systems, and especially in the infrastructure that we use for our teaching and research. Our campuses have become dependent on a wide range of platforms that deliver our core services -- learning management systems, student information systems, publishing and communication systems, research information management systems -- but by and large these are platforms over which we have little control. They are vendor-owned, corporation-controlled, and as such far more responsible to their shareholders than they are to us, or to our students. These platforms appear to serve needs we cannot fill ourselves, and yet there is no sense of "service" in their relationship to our institutions. Only extraction. They take in our content, they take in our metrics, they take in our vast and growing annual fees, and they leave us dependent, privatized, beholden to economic forces that do not serve the public good.
+
+
+
+https://hcommons.org
+
+Notes: This is just one of the reasons that my colleagues and I have been working to develop an open-source, open-access, non-profit, academy-owned and governed alternative to such extractive corporate platforms. Humanities Commons instantiates several key principles. First, that higher education will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in connected ways, on open platforms that enable more people to participate, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can see the significance of what we do. And second, that those of us who work in institutions of higher education must do everything we can to resist and reverse the privatization and data extraction that has overtaken them. Where our institutions are buying into extractive technologies, we need to protest, and press for alternatives. And where we and our colleagues are using extractive and abusive platforms for collaboration, we need to find alternatives there as well. We need to move our scholarly conversations away from platforms like Facebook that we *know* are not only selling user data but actively contributing to the spread of misinformation and the rise of authoritarianism. We likewise need to move researcher profiles and datasharing away from platforms like Academia.edu that may have less global consequences but nonetheless engage in abusive email practices, tracking user behavior, and mining user-contributed content.
+
+If we instead focus our efforts and our support on platforms in which we can have some measure of confidence -- platforms with transparent financial reporting, ethical privacy policies, and open governance processes -- we have the potential to build new kinds of collaborations and new kinds of communities, and to open the work that we do on campus to more people than ever before. In this way, we can restore service to the public good not just to our institutions' mission statements, but to the work they do in the world. But doing so will require us to reserve our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And this is where Humanities Commons comes in. A bit of background, for those of you who may not be fully familiar with the platform. Humanities Commons was originally developed as a project of the Modern Language Association. The MLA is the largest scholarly society in the humanities, representing scholars across North America and around the world who teach and study a very wide range of languages, literatures, and cultures. In 2013, with support from the Mellon Foundation, the MLA launched its own social network, MLA Commons, which was intended to provide members with a platform for communication and collaboration. Within about 30 seconds of launching the platform, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with colleagues in other areas in the humanities, so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields.
+
+With further support from Mellon, we first undertook a planning process and developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons spaces developed for the members of three other scholarly societies. But beyond providing space for those partner organizations, we wanted to provide a central hub where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work. As a result, we made the decision to open the network's hub to anyone who wants to join -- across the disciplines, around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in public or private group discussions, create websites, and they can deposit and share their work in the network's open-access repository.
+
+
+
+https://engl6560.hcommons.org
+
+Note: Over the years since, several instructors have hosted classes using the Commons, engaging their students through our discussion groups and websites. And in March 2020, our colleagues at the MLA offered Commons users a new site theme called Learning Space, which was designed to allow instructors to move their courses online fast, creating course schedules, assignments, lessons, and discussions.
+
+Building open platforms and keeping them functioning is not something that any of our scholarly societies or institutions can do alone. But it is something that we can do together: we can build and share and maintain the infrastructure that will allow all of us to open education, to make the knowledge we develop for and with our students a public good. Humanities Commons is working to provide that infrastructure, encouraging organizations and institutions to invest in a shared network, to support it in an ongoing way, and to take an active role in shaping its future.
+
+
+
+https://sustaining.hcommons.org
+
+Note: In order to ensure that the platform continues to operate with academic values front and center, we have not only developed a governance model that provides both institutions and end users that ability to guide the platform's development, but we have also launched a site, [Sustaining the Commons](https://sustaining.hcommons.org), on which we regularly post our financial reports, the minutes of our governance meetings, our technical roadmap, and more. We have also created a privacy policy that is clear that the content you share within the network belongs to you, that we will not sell it under any circumstances, and that we will only study non-personally-identifiable-information in the aggregate in order to ensure that we are serving our community's needs and living up to our values of openness, equity, and transparency.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Humanities Commons today has over 30,000 members from across our fields and around the world, many of whom are actively using the network to share their work, to collaborate with their colleagues, and to engage their students. It's a learning community in the best possible sense: not only do we want our users to learn from one another, but we want to learn from them as well. We hope that Humanities Commons might demonstrate some of the possibilities for ethically developed and operated digital platforms, and we hope that you'll join us. And in particular, that you'll join me in the hands-on session to follow, in which I'll walk you through the process of setting up an account and getting started in the network.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+ Collaborative Software Communities
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+## Collaborative Software Communities
+---
+#### Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Common Good
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+Open Apereo
+15 June 2020
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Ian for inviting me to talk with you and the OpenApereo organizers for making it possible. I'm delighted to have this opportunity.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what I have to say today grows out of the work I did in _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. And a key component of that work lies in recovering the public nature of that work by rejecting the privatization that has overtaken our campuses -- not least through the information systems that we invest in and deploy.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of my book's subtitle grows out of my sense that the necessary changes in front of us are HUGE, that they can't be made incrementally, that they instead require -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+> --Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem for the university, after all, begins with politics: the institutions that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, have been utterly undone. We face today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+## the public good
+
+Note: And the impact of individualism across our culture has similarly undermined the possibilities for collective action in a wide range of fields. In _Generous Thinking_, I ask the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, by returning its attention to the publics, and the public good, that it is intended to serve. And though I'm certain I'm preaching to the choir in much of this talk, I'm focused on that same message here today. Because however committed you as individuals are to the collective project that Apereo represents, most of you still work in institutions whose priorities and reward structures may not align with your own. And those reward structures must be changed.
+
+
+
+http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
+
+Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study by Juan Alperin and his colleagues entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." If the university is going to work toward the public good, that work has got to be rewarded -- and yet the current structure of higher education, the paradigm within which it operates, leaves such collaborative, community-oriented work un- or under-rewarded.
+
+
+## the anecdote
+
+Note: This problem first became painfully clear to me at a meeting of university libraries and the university presses that reported up through them. The meeting was keynoted by the highly distinguished provost of a large state research university, and it was an extraordinary talk. He described his campus's efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty's work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university's singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our research up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-ranked venues. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising -- really, reimagining -- all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university's core service mission? The provost's response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
+
+
+# honest
+
+Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it's that there is a shadow mission -- competition -- that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
+
+
+## the worst of it
+
+Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that _Generous Thinking_ was most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered -- from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press -- to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to "compete all the time" forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while we have been trapped for the last several decades in this mode of inter-institutional competition, higher education as a sector has been facing what Inside Higher Ed described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though that is undoubtedly there. Rather, this decline in confidence in higher education should ask us to contemplate what we believe higher education is for, and why the paradigm under which our institutions largely operate -- in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge -- has been in such a protracted conflict with the paradigm under which our function is understood in the broader culture, as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. Even more -- especially at a moment such as we are experiencing today -- it should make us consider whether in fact both of those paradigms are failing, and why.
+
+
+## Thomas Kuhn
+
+Note: As Thomas Kuhn noted in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, the failure of a scientific paradigm, as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account, throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely, one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the "period of pronounced professional insecurity" that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift, the cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. There is in 2020 zero question that cataclysm is all around us. My argument is that we must rethink our purpose and functioning altogether if we are to discover that new paradigm that allows higher education as we want it to be to survive.
+
+
+
+
+Note: _Generous Thinking_ explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education -- faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more -- to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead open the gates and focus on the university's role in building community.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But my colleagues and I have also been trying to think through this problem in a more pragmatic, applied for through _Humanities Commons_, a non-profit, community-developed and governed network serving humanities scholars and organizations. Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of _Generous Thinking_: first, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation -- even among those universities that we call "private" -- can allow us to build the kind of community that can sustain them.
+
+
+## community-supported infrastructure
+
+Note: And part of resisting privatization, for both scholars and their institutions, involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. This is true of a wide range of systems and platforms on which higher education relies, but perhaps nowhere has it become more pressing than in thinking about scholarly communication, both because these are the mechanisms through which the work of the academy is made public and because these are the systems that have been most deeply privatized at the direct expense of the academy. We -- libraries, publishers, and scholars -- need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education re-engage with the public good. But developing this form of collaborative, community-supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it, and the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable.
+
+
+
+http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/
+
+Note: And we need to think about these platforms precisely because of the extent to which the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery, data gathering and analysis, through writing, submission, and publishing, to dissemination, evaluation, and reporting, is increasingly concentrated in a very limited number of corporate hands.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Though the issues that I'm discussing long predate this particular moment, the risk they posed came into stark visibility in August 2017, when bepress announced that it had been purchased by the RELX Group, the multi-national parent company of publishing behemoth Elsevier. Bepress had of course been founded in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open-access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. Bepress thus grew out of the academy, and was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at its heart.
+
+
+
+
+Note: As the bepress website notes, over 500 institutions have purchased bepress services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly-accessible ways. And in one fell swoop, these 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing behemoths such as Elsevier.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure -- built and run by academics, for the academic community -- appeared to have been turned on that community. It's not as though anyone had been unaware that bepress was a commercial service all along, but they were one of the good guys, and the costs of outsourcing infrastructural needs to them had been balanced against the often impossible task of maintaining locally hosted repository and publishing systems. Bepress provided what many saw as best-of-breed functionality at a reasonable price, and it supported libraries' desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But the acquisition of bepress by RELX not only put libraries in the position of unintentionally supporting a growing corporate control not just of scholarly publishing but of the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery through production to communication; it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely in promoting greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. As a result, serious conversations have since focused on means of supporting open-source, academy-owned and -controlled infrastructure.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is not an impossible move, by any stretch, but it's harder than it might sound. Long-standing open-access, open-infrastructure projects like arXiv might suggest some possible areas of concern.
+
+
+
+
+Note: By every reasonable measure, arXiv has been exemplary -- in its uptake, in its independence, and in the ways that it has helped to transform the fields that it serves. But in some crucial ways, arXiv has experienced what can only be called "catastrophic success" -- a crucial, paradigm-shifting project whose growing annual operating costs and mounting infrastructural requirements have demanded increasingly creative mechanisms for the platform's support.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So in 2010, the arXiv team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource. But our institutions, as we unfortunately know, are largely unaccustomed to this work of cross-institutional collaboration. For one thing, they're far more prone to understand such resources as terrain for competition, and for another, the community-building required becomes yet another form of labor added on top of maintaining the resources themselves.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I do not know the extent to which such difficulties may have played a role in arXiv's 2019 move from the Library to Cornell Computing and Information Science. It's entirely likely that the move is a matter of infrastructural pragmatics. But even so, the challenges of maintaining the kind of cross-institutional coalition necessary to sustain such a crucial resource remain.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Another example, with a different narrative, might be found in the Samvera project. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories rely, developers at a number of institutions have come together to create a collective solution. As the proverb and their website have it, if you want to go far, go together.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But this distributed developer community, like all such communities, has faced some challenges in coordination, challenges that have caused it, as the proverb also reminds us, to go more slowly than it might. It has also run the risk of fragmenting project priorities. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers involved in the project but of the institutions for which the developers actually work is not a simple matter.
+
+
+# sustainability
+
+Note: The foundation of the challenges that arXiv and Samvera have faced is the same challenge faced by any number of other projects and programs and initiatives: sustainability. This is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late, as my colleagues and I have been working to ensure that Humanities Commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And those attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point; they too would like to see the network thrive, but they cannot support it indefinitely. We need, they reasonably suggest, a plan for demonstrating that the network will, at some point in the future, be able to support itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models, in business plans, in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a non-profit entity forever tied to kinds of economic concerns that are very often divergent from, if not at odds with, the non-profit's primary mission. As a result, these non-profits remain forever precarious; one small miscalculation can make the difference between survival and collapse.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But sustainability broadly understood extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed -- or more waste produced -- than can be developed or managed in the near term.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There's technological sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects' future stability and growth.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All of these forms of sustainability are important, to varying degrees, to providing for the future of non-profit and open-source projects. But there's another form that gets a good bit less attention, and that I increasingly think precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability: social sustainability. The social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Ensuring that these commitments are sustained is, I increasingly think, a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward.
+
+
+# community
+
+Note: This notion -- of the role of "community" in community-supported software, and of the best ways of building and sustaining it -- raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. In an early chapter in _Generous Thinking_, I explore Miranda Joseph's argument that "community" is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life. In this sense, "community" becomes a relief valve of sorts for those structures, a way of mitigating the damage that they do. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network–based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises, rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education. "Community" becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: However, if we recognize that the communities that we form both on campus and off can be crucial organizing tools, ways of ensuring that our institutions meet their public obligations, we might start to think of the call to community as a form of coalition-building, of a developing solidarity. Solidarity itself is a concept that's been challenged, of course; there are important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom, and for whom. Women of color, for instance, have pointed out the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests. But I remain convinced that institutions of higher education must embrace forms of solidarity that do not demand that individuals seeking redress for institutionalized injustices drop their own issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those individuals are all of our issues too. This form of solidarity asks us to stand together in support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this form of solidarity, I am increasingly convinced, is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom was the first female Nobel laureate in economics and remained until 2019 the _only_ female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place.
+
+
+## common-pool resources
+
+Note: It's important first to focus in a bit on what is meant by the notion of common-pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" -- the overuse of shared natural resources -- can apply.
+
+
+## the "free rider" problem
+
+Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization.
+
+
+## _Governing the Commons_
+
+Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book _Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action_, this model -- like other such models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
+
+
+> What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies. -- Elinor Ostrom
+
+Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned software projects -- like arXiv, like Samvera, like Humanities Commons -- on which they should be able to rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the problem that community-developed projects were developed to evade. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So in summer 2018, Brett Bobley tweeted a question about ways of sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Cayless --
+
+
+
+
+Note: -- noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining such projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in _Generous Thinking_, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+# collaboration
+
+Note: But getting institutions to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside, is a huge part of what I've tried to do in _Generous Thinking_, and it's a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The project began its life at the Modern Language Association. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 to provide members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching the platform, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with colleagues in other areas in the humanities, so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields.
+
+
+
+
+Note: With further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons sites developed for several other society partners. But beyond these proprietary sites, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work, and so we made the decision to open the network's hub to anyone who wants to join -- across the disciplines, around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites, and they can deposit and share their work in the network's open-access repository. This fusion of a social network with a library-quality repository (adhering to commonly accepted metadata standards, employing digital object identifiers, and so on) means that not only is stuff being put into the repository, and not only can that stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used, as there's a community there with which it can be shared.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while fully opening the Humanities Commons hub to free participation by any interested scholar or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use -- three and a half years later, we have over 21,000 registered users -- it has created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms Humanities Commons from a common-pool resource into a club good, one whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the network if it were an exclusive service see the openness of the hub as diminishing the network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
+
+
+## sustainability and solidarity
+
+Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. And it's of course where your work in the various Apereo communities lies: your institutions may of course have different structures, different requirements, different needs. And yet you share the same goals: the development, distribution, and preservation of new forms of knowledge. That you are all here together, looking for ways to meet your shared goals despite your different local needs gives me hope.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: It's a key form of generosity, and one that more units on our campuses, and more institutions in their engagements with one another need to embrace. Because the bottom line is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not _other institutions of higher education_, not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather, it is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university, we're going to have to do together, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward the other units within our institutions, toward the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected, and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community-supported infrastructure, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I'm honored to have had this chance to talk with you this morning as you continue the work of building that community. Thanks so much.
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+ Sustainable Scholarly Collaborations
+
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+## Sustainable Scholarly Collaborations
+---
+### Collective Action and the Common Good
+---
+ Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://kfitz.info/presentations/btaa.html
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Maurice and the BIG Collection team for inviting me to talk with you today.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what I have to say today stems from the work I did in _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves requires regrounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. And a key component of that work lies in recovering the public nature of our work by rejecting the privatization that has overtaken our campuses -- not least through the information systems that we invest in and deploy.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of my book's subtitle grows out of my sense that the necessary changes in front of us are HUGE, that they can't be made incrementally, that they instead require -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+--Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem for the university, after all, begins with politics: the institutions that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, today face not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+## the public good
+
+Note: And the impact of individualism across our culture has similarly undermined the possibilities for collective action. In _Generous Thinking_, I ask the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, by returning its attention to the publics, and the public good, that it is intended to serve. And though I'm certain I'm preaching to the choir in much of this talk, I'm focused on that same message here today. Because however committed you as individuals are to the collective project that something like the BIG Collection represents, most of you still work in institutions whose actual priorities and reward structures may not align with such collective goals.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: In fact, in most cases, those priorities and reward structures privilege the competition in which our culture is mired. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered -- from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press -- to promote a form of competitiveness that relies on prestige. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to "compete all the time" forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+
+
+Note: _Generous Thinking_ explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead open the gates and focus on the university's role in building collectivity.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But my colleagues and I have also been trying to think through this problem in a more pragmatic, applied for through _Humanities Commons_, a non-profit, academy-owned and governed network serving scholars and organizations from across the humanities and around the world. Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several key principles: first, that higher education will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions.
+
+
+## community-supported infrastructure
+
+Note: And part of resisting privatization involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. This is true of a wide range of systems and platforms on which higher education relies, but perhaps nowhere has it become more pressing than in thinking about libraries and scholarly communication, both because these are the systems through which the work of the academy is made public and because these are the systems that have been most deeply privatized at the direct expense of the academy. We -- libraries, publishers, and scholars -- need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education re-engage with the public good.
+
+
+
+http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/
+
+Note: We need to think about these platforms precisely because of the extent to which the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery, data gathering and analysis, through writing, submission, and publishing, to dissemination, evaluation, and reporting, is increasingly concentrated in a very limited number of corporate hands.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But developing the collaborative, community-supported infrastructure that can create the paradigm shift we need will require some careful thinking about the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable. And that includes not just financial and technical sustainability -- the forms of sustainability that we most often consider in this context.
+
+
+
+
+Note: We need, rather, to focus in on social sustainability, on the relationships required to build and maintain our shared infrastructure. Thinking about those relationships under the rubric of social sustainability directs our attention not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to understand and support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Collective action requires a kind of solidarity, in other words, a readiness to put the needs of the whole ahead of local demands, a determination to stand together in support of projects that may not necessarily seem to be our own top priority. And this form of solidarity, I am increasingly convinced, is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Elinor Ostrom, whose work focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place. Relationships, in other words.
+
+
+
+
+Note: To backtrack for a second: Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" -- the overuse of shared natural resources -- can apply.
+
+
+## the "free rider" problem
+
+Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to their upkeep, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without supporting them. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization of the resources involved.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book _Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action_, this model -- like other such economic models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
+
+
+> "What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies."
-- Elinor Ostrom
+
+Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned software projects on which they should be able to rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms often accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the very problem that community-developed projects were developed in order to solve. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements. Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act locally in solidarity with that community. And this is why I argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+
+
+Note: After all, getting institutions to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside is a huge part of what the BIG Collection is working toward, and a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Our original business model focused on asking scholarly societies to work together to support a shared platform for communication with and among their members. However, we wanted to make it possible for anyone interested to join the network, without facing restrictions based on institutional affiliation, membership, or other credentials. The good news is that four years in we have over 26,000 registered users from across the humanities and around the world. But our partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in an exclusive benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But their focus on the network as a club good leads them to understand its openness as diminishing its value, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. Solidarity in the form of collective action is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. And it's at the heart of the BIG Collection: your institutions of course have different structures, different requirements, different needs. And yet you share the same goals: the development, distribution, and preservation of new forms of knowledge. That you are all here together, looking for ways to meet your shared goals despite your different local needs gives me hope.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: It's a key form of generosity, and one that more units on our campuses, and more institutions in their engagements with one another need to embrace. Because the bottom line is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not _other institutions of higher education_, not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather, it is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university, we're going to have to do together, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward the other units within our institutions, toward the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected, and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community-supported infrastructure, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/btaa.html
+
+Note: I'm honored to have had this chance to talk with you today as you continue the work of building that community. Thanks so much.
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+ Generous Thinking
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### A Radical Approach to Saving the University
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: thanks to Maria, Kathi, etc; delighted to be here
+
+
+## overview
+
+Note: quick overview of the next two days
+
+
+## today
+- Introductions
+- Generous Thinking
+- Key issues in higher education
+- Working in public
+
+
+## tomorrow
+- Values
+- Reward Structures
+- What can the liberal arts do?
+
+
+## introductions
+
+
+
+
+Note: I'm grateful to have a chance to talk with you a bit this morning about _Generous Thinking_. I'm going to start with a very brief overview of the book and its goals, and then open things up for discussion. The primary goal, as the book's subtitle suggests, is saving the university, and the overall argument is that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and perhaps especially _public_ institutions of higher education, but other kinds of institutions as well -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of the subtitle grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that's there too. Rather, I see this decline as a result of the fact that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously within two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent, more culturally widespread one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. We find ourselves in a situation today, however, in which both of those paradigms are failing, if in different ways, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
+
+
+## generous thinking
+
+Note: The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It's going to require concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+## listening
+
+Note: So the book asks us to think about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+## reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that our critical reading practices might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+## working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged projects, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns. And this is where some digital tools and technologies will undoubtedly have something to contribute to helping us connect and communicate with those communities.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and public engagement. And this is where the need for a paradigm shift -- for politics -- arises.
+
+
+
+http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
+
+Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study, currently available online in preprint form, entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." We've no doubt all got stories to tell that would support this conclusion, stories that illustrate the ways that the kinds of public-facing, community-oriented work that might best support the university's need for a closer relationship with the public goes un- or under-rewarded by the university.
+
+
+## the anecdote
+
+Note: I tell my version of this story at the beginning of chapter 4, but a quick recap: Right around the time I began sketching the outline for this book, I attended a day-long workshop on new models for university press publishing, for which the provost of a large state research university had been invited to give a keynote address. The talk came during a day of intensive discussions amongst the workshop's participants and university press and university library leaders, all of whom had a real stake in the future of the institution's role in disseminating scholarly work as openly as possible. And the keynote was quite powerful: the provost described his campus's efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty's work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university's singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our work up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
+
+
+## prestige
+
+Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-quality venues, conventionally understood. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising -- really, reimagining -- all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university's core service mission? The provost's response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
+
+
+## honest
+
+Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it's that there is a shadow mission—competition—that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
+
+
+## the worst of it
+
+Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that _Generous Thinking_ is most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered -- from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press -- to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to "compete all the time" forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+## paradigm
+
+Note: That competition is the dominant paradigm under which universities operate today, a paradigm instituted and enforced by those universities' growing privatization. It is competition for faculty, for students, for funding, and above all for rankings, that replaces the public good with the quest for prestige, that turns our institutions from priding themselves on the communities they invite in to bragging about how many they turn away.
+
+
+
+http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: And it is that same concern for reputation that leads so many institutions to protect themselves instead of protecting the publics, the communities, the individuals that they are meant to serve. It is little wonder that universities are held in such low regard by so much of the voting public today: it is not just the rampant anti-intellectualism of contemporary American culture, but also the degree to which our institutions have repeatedly betrayed the trust that the public has placed in them.
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: In us. If we are going to turn this situation around, if we are going to convince the voting public that universities are deserving of public reinvestment, we have to effect a ground-up transformation in our institutions and the ways they work. That transformation cannot begin with new analytics, or new technologies, that derive from the neoliberal paradigm that is responsible for the damage in the first place. It cannot begin with new means of demonstrating the individual, competitive benefits that higher education can confer. It's got to start, instead, with new ways of thinking about who this "us" is, or can be.
+
+
+## community
+
+Note: These new ways of thinking about "us" have to take root both on campus and off, enabling us to understand ourselves both as a community and in a community. We need -- as I urged that provost -- to radically rethink our means of assessment, the relentless spread of metrics through which we are required to demonstrate success, and instead consider what measures might actually begin to reflect the deep values we bring to our work. And we need to contemplate what a higher education whose benefits were genuinely social rather than individual, public rather than private, might look like, and how focusing our work around those social benefits might help us find new means of building solidarity with the publics that our universities are intended to serve.
+
+
+## liberal arts
+
+Note: And all of that work is where we come in, the liberal arts, in demonstrating the generosity that underlies our critical thinking, and in using that generosity to foster and sustain more engaged, more articulated, more actualized publics. I've obviously got a lot more to say about this -- a whole book's worth -- but for the moment I'll leave things by saying that all of us -- faculty, staff, students, administrators, parents, trustees, and beyond -- have more to gain from abandoning competition, from working together, from understanding ourselves and our institutions as intimately connected, than we have to lose in the rankings.
+
+
+## this workshop
+
+Note: Over the next two days, I'm hoping that we can work together to figure out how to put some of that change into practice. So I want to start out by opening up anything in the book you'd like to discuss, and see where that might lead us.
+
+
+# break
+
+
+## key issues in higher education
+- What are key issues and problems do you see in higher education today?
+- How are those issues being felt locally?
+- (Spend 10 minutes surfacing ideas in small groups and then let's regroup and see how much we can put together.)
+
+
+# lunch
+
+
+## publics
+
+Note: Recap of morning discussion; move into afternoon focus on public engagement
+
+
+## Working in public
+- Who are the publics being addressed by your institution, your field, and your research? How do you currently interact with them?
+- What concrete steps can you imagine that might improve connections with those publics?
+- Are there other publics with whom you'd like to be in conversation, and how might you build those connections?
+- (Brainstorm in small groups for 20 minutes, and then we'll regroup.)
+
+Note: Have groups use post-its and white boards/easels to gather ideas and then connect them in larger discussion
+
+
+# break
+
+
+## Working in public (cont.)
+- What parts of your work are currently done in public?
+- What parts of your work _could_ be done in public?
+- What risks do you (or would you need to) face in doing that work in public?
+- How can those risks be mitigated?
+
+Note: depending on how the previous session has gone, turn focus either to exploring digital presence initiatives (incl. Humanities Commons) as means of doing more work in public or to institutional means of becoming a more open knowledge institution.
+
+
+# tomorrow
+
+Note: Tomorrow we'll turn our attention to some of the requirements for instantiating generous thinking at the institutional level.
+
+
+## day 2
+Instantiating Generous Thinking
+
+Note: turning our attention to potential action
+
+
+## reward structures
+- How are the processes of hiring, annual review, and promotion and tenure structured in your department? in your college? on your campus?
+- What parts of those processes might be open to revision? How would you like to see them revised? What would you need to do to begin that revision?
+- Who would you need on your side, and how do you get them there?
+
+Note: starting with the big personnel stuff; document gathering and reading;
+
+
+# break
+
+
+## reward structures, cont.
+- What other systems of reward and support exist on your campus?
+- What forms of support would help enable your work to further the project of generous thinking?
+- How might those forms of support be developed?
+
+Note: somewhat smaller scale questions of funding, time
+
+
+# lunch
+
+
+## alternative models
+
+Note: So much of our work is measured through a set of indicators that don't align with the things we actually care about in that work. The HuMetricsHSS project is working to develop a set of humane metrics that can underwrite values-based evaluation of scholarly work -- but in order to do so, they've of course had to come to some kind of understanding of what those values might be.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Values are necessarily fraught, and while we might want to think of many of them as shared, they are always local and contingent. That said, I thought we might talk through this description of the HuMetrics values and see what they surface for us.
+
+
+## where to from here?
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+ Digital, Public, Scholarship
+
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+## Digital, Public, Scholarship
+---
+### Sustainable Infrastructure for the Future of the University
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Before I get started, I want to thank Cris for inviting me to speak here with you today; I'm delighted to have this chance to celebrate the launch of the Digital Scholarship Studio and Network with you, and to talk a bit about the kinds of work, and the kinds of futures, that an institutional structure like this makes possible.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Part of what I hope to address today stems from my recent book, _Generous Thinking_. The book as a whole argues that the future of the university as we have known it depends heavily on rebuilding relationships of trust between our institutions and the publics that they serve. The book addresses lots of aspects of those relationships and ways they might be fostered, but the key bit for today is that the networks and spaces that support digital scholarship are crucial to building and maintaining connections with a range of broader publics in the context of the work we do on campus.
+
+
+# background
+
+Note: I come to this work through a slightly idiosyncratic path. Back in 2002, I'd just finished the long process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and there seemed the very real possibility that no one else might ever read it. (I wasn't wrong -- it took another four years to get the thing published, for a lot of complicated reasons.) And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience. People read it, and I knew they read it because they left comments responding to and interacting with him. And I thought, wow, that's it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: My blog, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up doing something more interesting than I expected: it helped me build a small community. I found a number of other early academic bloggers, all of whom were in ongoing comment-and-crosslink conversations. Those relationships, which opened out into a growing network of scholars working online, were crucial to me as a somewhat isolated assistant professor. I had struggled to make the intellectual and professional connections that might help my writing develop, and it was the blog that provided the first real opportunity. Even more, posts I published there were the first pieces of my writing to be cited in more formal academic settings.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I'd just finished the draft of my second book. Rather than simply have the manuscript sent out for anonymous peer review, I asked my press to let me post the draft online for open comment too. I get asked a lot about that decision, especially how I worked up the courage to release something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth of the matter is that the risks didn't figure into my thinking. What I knew was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, with whom I'd had productive, engaging interactions that contributed to the book's development, and I wanted to hear their thoughts about where I'd wound up. I trusted them to help me--and they did, overwhelmingly so.
+
+
+# 2009
+
+Note: It's important to acknowledge the entire boatload of privilege not-thinking about the risks requires; I was writing from a sufficiently safe position that allowing flaws in my work-in-progress to be publicly visible wasn't a real threat. It's also not incidental that this was 2009, not 2019--a much more naive hour in the age of the Internet. The events of the last few years, from GamerGate to the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, have made the risks of opening one's work up online all too palpable. But my experiences with the blog, with the book manuscript, and with other projects I've opened to online discussion, still leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kind of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work's development. And--perhaps most importantly today--willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I tested that belief in 2018 by opening the draft of _Generous Thinking_ to a similar open review. Between early February and the end of March, I staged a process in which I first invited a group of readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, after which I opened the project to the world. In the end, 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own), giving me a rich view of the revision process that lay ahead. It wasn't all rainbows and unicorns: there are a few comments that sting, and a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking had been a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is better for having gone through this public process.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: So what I'm focused on is the ways that a digital scholarship network like this one can can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that do not just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
+
+
+# obstacles
+
+Note: There are, of course, real obstacles that have to be faced in this process. Some of them reflect the communication platforms that we use today. Blogs don't readily produce the same level of engagement that they did in the early 2000s. In part this has to do with their massive proliferation, and in part it has to do with the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks. As a result, online communities of readers and writers are unlikely to develop spontaneously; instead, building community around online work has to be far more deliberate, reaching out to potential readers and participants and finding ways to draw them, and ourselves, back into sustained conversation.
+
+
+# trolls
+
+Note: And of course the nature of internet discourse has changed in recent years as much as has its location. Trolls are not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one's work public can involve significant risk--especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
+
+
+# no easy answers
+
+Note: I do not have easy answers to these problems; I do not have a perfect platform to offer, and I do not know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. Countering these destructive forces requires advance preparation and focused responses. Ensuring that public discourse about scholarly work remains productive requires a tremendous amount of collective labor, and the careful development and maintenance of trust, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But there are several other challenges that I want to explore a bit today, challenges that are about the ways that we as scholars do our work, the ways that we can draw a range of broader publics to that work, and the ways that we can ensure that the work we do together is supported in an ongoing way.
+
+
+# access
+
+Note: The first is the need to ensure that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it is impossible for anyone to care about what we do if they cannot see it. And yet, perhaps because we assume we are mostly writing for one another, the results of our work end up overwhelmingly in places where it cannot be found--and even if it is found, where it cannot be accessed--by members of the broader public.
+
+
+# accessibility
+
+Note: The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to get their hands on it, but enabling them to see in it the things that they might care about. We often resent the ways that academic work gets "dumbed down" in public venues, but we might think instead about ways that we can productively mainstream our arguments, engaging readers where they are, rather than always forcing them to come find us, in our venues and on our terms.
+
+
+# participation
+
+Note: Beyond access and accessibility, however, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural creation by more kinds of public thinkers. In other words, we need to focus not just on the public's potential consumption of the work that is done by the university, but also about potential modes of co-production that involve communities in the work of the university. Such collaborations might serve as a style of work that our universities can fruitfully model for the rest of our culture: new modes of scholarship done not just for but with the world.
+
+
+# networks
+
+Note: Networks for digital scholarship have the potential to create the conditions for greater access, for greater accessibility, and for greater public participation in the work that we all do as scholars. By encouraging this kind of work, I don't mean to suggest that there is no room for more traditional modes of internal exchange among field-based experts; there is, and should be. But the twenty-first century university must provide means by which the results of those exchanges can become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. Our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone at all times, of course, but different aspects of our work might engage with different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences--and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors--is a crucial skill for today's scholars, and a skill that needs to be cultivated and supported.
+
+
+# open access
+
+Note: The simplest way of making more scholarly work more available to the public is by making that work available through open access venues. There's a long history to the open access movement, of course, and in the book I dig into that history and the ties the movement created between its altruistic goals -- establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge -- and it more pragmatic arguments about the impact that public access might have on the advancement of research. The key point is that what's good for the public turns out to be good for scholarship, too.
+
+
+# engagement
+
+Note: If we publish in ways that enable any interested reader to access our work, that work will be more read, more cited, creating more impact for us and for our fields. Making our work more openly accessible enables scholars in areas of the world without extensive library budgets, as well as U.S.-based instructors and students at undergraduate teaching institutions and secondary schools, to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. All of this can produce an expansion in our readership and an expansion in our influence -- an unmitigatedly good thing.
+
+
+# resistance
+
+Note: Any yet, it's clear that we often resist opening our work to broader publics, for a variety of reasons. Many of us keep our work restricted to our own discourse communities because we fear the consequences of making it available to broader publics--and not without justification. The public often seems determined to misunderstand us, to interpret what we say with focused hostility or, nearly as bad, utter dismissiveness. Because the subject matter of much of the humanities and social sciences seems as though it should be accessible, our determination to wrestle with difficult or highly politicized questions and our use of expert methods and vocabularies can feel threatening to many readers. They fail to understand us; we take their failure to understand as an insult. (Admittedly, sometimes it is, but not always.) Given this failure to communicate, we see no harm in keeping our work closed off from the public, arguing that we're only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter?
+
+
+# why
+
+Note: It matters because the more we close our work away from the public, and the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of the academy, the more we undermine the public's willingness to support our research and our institutions. As numerous public humanities scholars including Kathleen Woodward have argued, the major crisis facing the funding of higher education is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good. We wind up strengthening that conviction and worsening the crisis when we treat our work as private. Closing our work away from non-scholarly readers might protect us from public criticism, but it can't protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous in the current economic and political environment. The risks are real, especially for scholars working in politically engaged fields, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public, including our governments, of the relevance of what we do on campus.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: And of course engaging readers in thoughtful discussions about the important issues we study lies at the core of the academic mission. It is at the heart of our values. We don't create knowledge in order to hoard it, but instead, every day, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and in our writing, we embrace an ethic of generosity, of paying forward knowledge that we have received as a gift. We teach, as we were taught; we publish, as we learn from the publications of others. We cannot pay back those who came before us, but we can and do give to those who come after. Our participation in an ethical, voluntary scholarly community is grounded in the obligations we hold for one another, obligations that derive from the generosity we have received.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: Okay, idealistic, right? And that kind of idealism is all well and good, but it doesn't adequately account for an academic universe in which we are evaluated based on individual achievement, and in which prestige often overrides all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for and effects of that bias toward prestige in another part of the larger project; here, I want to think a bit about its effects on the individual scholar, as well as that scholar's role in perpetuating this hierarchical status quo. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily shades over into a sense that the more exclusive a publication's audience, the higher its value. // This is, at its most benign, self-defeating; if we privilege exclusivity above all else, we wind up undermining our work's potential cultural impact; as David Parry has commented,
+
+
+"Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge."
+
+Note: "Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge." It is only in giving it away, in making it as publicly available as possible, that we produce knowledge. As it is, most of the players involved in the production of scholarship have always been engaged in a process of "giving it away": authors, reviewers, scholarly editors, and others involved in the process have long offered their work to others without requiring direct compensation. The question, of course, is how we offer it, and to whom.
+
+
+# gift economy
+
+Note: In fact, the entire system of scholarly communication runs on an engine of generosity, one that demonstrates the ways that private enterprise can never adequately provide for the public good. So rather than committing our work to private channels, signing it over to corporate publishers that profit at higher education's expense, how might all of the members of the university community--researchers, instructors, libraries, presses, and administrations--instead work to develop and support a system based on our highest values? What if we understood sustainability in scholarly communication not as the ability to generate revenue, but instead the ability to keep the engine of generosity running?
+
+
+# free
+
+Note: It's important, however, to distinguish between this call to generosity and the injunction to work for free produced by the devaluing of much intellectual and professional labor within the so-called information economy. A mode of forced volunteerism has spread throughout contemporary culture, compelling college students and recent graduates to take on unpaid internships in order to "get a foot in the door," compelling creative professionals to do free work in order to "build exposure," thereby restricting opportunity to those who can already afford to seek it. And of course there are too many academic equivalents: vastly underpaid adjunct instructors, overworked graduate assistants, an ever-growing list of mentoring and other service requirements that fall disproportionately on the shoulders of junior faculty, women faculty, and faculty of color.
+
+
+# labor
+
+Note: Labor, in fact, is the primary reason that we can't just simply make all scholarly publications available for free online. While the scholarship itself might be provided without charge, the authors have by and large been paid by their employers or their granting organizations, and will be compensated with a publication credit, a line on a c.v., a positive annual review outcome. Reviewers are rarely paid (almost never by journals; very modestly by book publishers), but receive insight into developing work and the ability to shape their fields and support their communities by way of compensation. But there is a vast range of other labor that is necessary for the production of publications, even when distributed online: managing submissions, communicating with authors; copyediting, proofreading, website design and maintenance, and so on. We need to understand that labor as professional too and compensate it accordingly.
+
+
+# responsibility
+
+Note: So where I am asking for generosity--for giving it away--it is from those who are fully credited and compensated: those tenured and tenure-track faculty and other fully-employed members of our professions who can and should contribute to the world the products of the labor that they have already been supported in undertaking. Similarly, generosity is called for from those institutions that can and should underwrite the production of scholarship on behalf of the academy and the public at large. It is our mission, and our responsibility, to look beyond our own walls to the world beyond, to enlarge the gifts that we have received by making them public. Doing so requires that we hold the potential for public engagement with our work among our highest values, that we understand such potential engagement as a public good that we can share in creating.
+
+
+# interest
+
+Note: But there are steps beyond simply making work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn't possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that's fine, to an extent: communication within a discourse community plays a crucial role in that community's development, and there must always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But that inwardly-focused sharing of work has been privileged to our detriment. Scholars are not rewarded--and in fact are at times actively punished--for publishing in popular venues. And because the values instantiated by our rewards systems have a profound effect on the ways we train our students, we build the wall between academic and public discourse higher and higher with every passing cohort.
+
+
+# public-facing
+
+Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing publications that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, venues like the _Los Angeles Review of Books_ and _Public Books_. There are also a host of other kinds of digital projects that demonstrate the ways many scholars are already working in multiple registers, engaging with multiple audiences. These venues open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture.
+
+
+# writing
+
+Note: But if we are to open our ideas to larger public audiences, we need to give some serious thought to the mode and voice of our writing. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn't restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many mainstream publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to focus on complexity and nuance, and the result is often lines of argumentation, and lines of prose, that are far from straight-forward. Getting past the accusations of obscurity and irrelevance requires us to open up our rhetoric, to demonstrate to a generally educated reader how and why what we do matters.
+
+
+# accessible
+
+Note: Again, not all academic writing needs to be done in a public register. But we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible to the public. And we are all already called, to varying extents, to be public intellectuals. Our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus and thereby building support for that work. But for that project to be successful, scholars need to be prepared to bridge the communication gaps, by honing our ability to alternate speaking with one another and speaking with different audiences.
+
+
+# learn
+
+Note: So we need to think a bit about what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work. Public-facing writing--as many editors of mainstream intellectual publications would note--is very different from academic writing, and by and large it is not something scholars are trained to do. But numerous initiatives are working to help scholarly authors focus and express the ideas contained in their scholarly publications in ways that help broader audiences engage with them. Ideally, this kind of writing should become part of graduate training across the university.
+
+
+# publics
+
+Note: However, a key component of the work of the public intellectual is not simply addressing but actually helping to build a public in the first place. Nancy Fraser long since noted the fragmentation of contemporary public life into a "plurality of competing counterpublics." We need to consider the possibility that, in retreating from direct engagement with the public, we have actually contributed to the public's fragmentation. As Alan Jacobs has noted, "Subaltern counterpublics are essential for those who have never had seats at the table of power, but they can also be immensely appealing to those who feel that their public presence and authority have waned." The retreat of scholars into private intellectual life has produced a tighter sense of community and the comfort of being understood, but at the cost of withdrawing scholarly issues and perspectives from public view, and with the result of further fragmentation of the public itself. If we are to return to public discourse, if we are to connect with--and perhaps even be responsible for creating--a range of broader publics, we're going to have to contend with those publics' multiplicity, even as we try to draw them into dialogue.
+
+
+# work
+
+Note: Most importantly, perhaps, we need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. Our processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don't meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, when scholars make the transition to more public prose, their work is frequently underrewarded, if not actively derided, back on campus. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it's likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must "dumb down" key ideas in order to do so. If we're going to make publicly engaged digital scholarship genuinely sustainable, we have to ensure that it's properly respected, and properly rewarded, so that the focus can genuinely be placed on engaging with the communities the work is trying to reach.
+
+
+# understanding
+
+Note: This is in some ways the heart of the problem: we too often do not know how to reach those publics, because we don't fully understand them. And, as I argue at length in the larger project, this is in no small part because we spend a bit too much time talking and not enough time listening to them. We need to make room for the public in our arguments, and in our prose, but we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having found a way to connect with a broader audience, having helped to transform that audience into something like a public, how do we then activate that public to work on its own behalf?
+
+
+# public scholarship
+
+Note: Here is where our working in public--creating public access, valuing public engagement, becoming public intellectuals--transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, a scholarship that is not simply performed for the public but that includes and is in fact given over to the publics with whom we work. In public scholarship, members of our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants, as stakeholders.
+
+
+# citizen humanities
+
+Note: Recent experiments in "citizen science" provide some potentially interesting examples, projects like Galaxy Zoo that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. But what might the citizen humanities look like? It might look like museum exhibits such as Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California, which engaged members of local Pacific communities in the planning and development processes. It might look like The September 11 Digital Archive, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project, which presents first-hand accounts of the events of that day, along with photos, emails, and other archival materials from more than 150,000 participants. It might look like the Baltimore Stories project at UMBC, which used humanities scholarship as a convening force to bring community organizers, educators, and non-profit organizations together to explore narratives of race in American life. What these projects have in common is that each of them explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern belongs to them. The work involved is theirs not just to learn from but to shape and define as well. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
+
+
+# "peers"
+
+Note: By working in publicly engaged ways, and by bringing those publics into the self-reflexive modes of humanities- and social science-based critique, we have the potential to produce a renewed conception of how intellectual life operates in contemporary culture -- but that renewed conception is going to require us to be open to a new understanding of the notion of our "peers." Open, public scholarship might lead us to understand the peer not as a pre-existing credential but instead as a status that emerges through participation in the processes of a community of practice. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we address within that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening the notion of the intellectual, or the peer, to a much broader range of forms of critical inquiry and active project participation has the potential to reshape relations between town and gown, to lay the groundwork for more productive conversations across the borders of the campus, and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work of the academy matters for our culture as a whole.
+
+
+# networks
+
+Note: And much of that work begins with projects like the DSSN, which provides not just a place where new forms of collaborative, public scholarship can be invented but the networks through which it can be realized. An institutional structure like the DSSN enables us to ask what might be possible if we were to open up our scholarly practices up to real public engagement, to deep interdisciplinarity, to new modes of working. How can networks like this enable public universities like UB to more genuinely focus on the mission of bringing knowledge to the people of the state? How might a network like this draw public support back to the institution by demonstrating the extent to which the work done here is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public? For public universities to win back public support, they must find ways like this--structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just the mission statement but of the actual mission--to place publicly engaged work at the top of its priorities. And that starts in places like this, where scholars can come together to explore new work in and with the public.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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+ Humanities Commons
+
+
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+## Humanities Commons
+---
+### What We Have to Share
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thank you so much. I'm really happy to have the opportunity to talk with you about some of the work we've been doing with Humanities Commons and about the expansion we have ahead.
+
+
+
+
+Note: HC is an open-source, open-access, academy-owned, community-governed infrastructure supporting collaboration and communication among more than 31,000 researchers and practitioners across the humanities and around the world
+- platform began as MLA Commons in 2013, developed by the MLA in order to provide space for member-to-member sharing and communication; built on CBOX and committed to open-source development
+
+
+
+
+Note: in 2015, expanded functionality to include a Fedora/SOLR-based repository with a WP frontend, allowing members to deposit and share work and receive DOIs, etc
+
+
+
+
+Note: launched Humanities Commons pilot to include other scholarly societies in 2016, as well as an open hub permitting anyone to create an account and use all of the network's features
+- three things this pilot surfaced:
+ - scholarly society budgets aren't sufficiently robust to be able to support the kind of shared infrastructure that might most benefit them
+ - many (though not all) societies see a space like the Commons as a nice-to-have, rather than a core function -- and having it connected to an open hub makes them less likely to want to support it financially
+ - reliance on grant funding rapidly leads to significant technical debt, as well as an inability to develop new functionality that users require
+
+
+
+
+Note: completed the move to a new fiscal host, Michigan State University, in 2020, and began work developing the first institutional node on the network, MSU Commons
+- received two significant investments of multi-year support from the NEH and Mellon, allowing us to staff up, to remediate our technical debt, and to develop a forward-looking roadmap toward a sustainable future
+
+
+
+
+Note: part of sustainability includes shifting our thinking to focus on institutions of higher education and the ways they might be encouraged to support open-source, academy-owned alternatives to the commercial data capture platforms on which they currently rely
+ - the Commons can provide a campus-wide blogging platform, a rich scholarly profile system, and a connected repository
+ - and it can do so in a space that allows scholars to connect with others in their fields, thus making the potential for uptake greater
+- but bringing the Commons to institutions requires us to serve the entirety of the campus, and so we're now thinking beyond the humanities
+
+
+
+
+Note: recently awarded a multi-year grant through the National Science Foundation's new FAIROS RCN program (findable accessible interoperable reusable open science) to modernize our repository platform and create new integrations with key services and tools such as GitHub, as part of establishing DBER+ Commons, a new node on the network intended to support discipline-based education researchers across STEM fields
+- there are several components of this project that are not technical in nature, however, but instead focus on improving the standards and practices through which open science is conducted
+
+
+
+https://datascience.codata.org/articles/10.5334/dsj-2020-043/
+
+Note: the most important to note is that we have added "CARE" to "FAIR"
+ - CARE is a set of principles developed for Indigenous data governance
+ - Adding CARE to FAIR makes it incumbent on us to ensure that data shared and stored through the Commons are not just findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, but are also used for the Collective benefit of those participating in the research, that the communities in which the data are gathered have the Authority to control their use, that the researchers recognize their Responsibility to those communities, and that the relationships, the data, and the platform are all developed with Ethics in mind
+
+
+
+
+Note: DBER+ Commons is an unusual project, not least in that innovations in scholarly communication are typically imagined to originate in STEM fields and from there gradually make their way into the humanities
+- we are instead sharing the lessons learned in the humanities -- about the centrality of community-building, about the need for ethical privacy and data reuse policies, and about the significance of strong community governance -- in developing this new platform for scientific communication
+- I'm going to stop there, and will look forward to discussing as we go forward!
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+ Higher Education as a Social Good
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+## Higher Education as a Social Good
+---
+ Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://kfitz.info/presntations/cece.html
+
+Note: Thanks for that introduction, and for having me here today! I'm happy to have the opportunity to talk with you a bit about some of the ideas that originated in *Generous Thinking* and how they might relate to the concerns that you share on the Commission on Economic and Community Engagement.
+
+
+
+mlive.com
+
+Note: Last week, an independent economic group released a report indicating that the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University together boosted the state economy by $19.3 billion in 2019 -- a figure that they went on to note is *more than 20 times* the funding provided to them by the state.
+This is an extraordinary report, which confirms what we all know: public research universities are crucial contributors to the economic well-being of their communities. Our universities not only conduct the research and development that leads to new business opportunities in the state, but also build an educated workforce ready to take on the challenges our communities face now and into the future.
+
+It's great news, and it's particularly great to have numbers that can be used in arguments about the value of public investment in institutions of higher education, especially at a moment when relationships between legislatures and universities are strained. But I want to spend a bit of time today talking about why reports like this make me nervous. It may sound odd, but frankly it's because they do *too good a job* of tying the public vision of the value of the university to its economic impact, and in the process they inadvertently run the risk of undermining the other equally important areas and modes in which the public research university contributes to the well-being of the publics that it serves.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@m_b_m
+
+Note: That is to say, the danger of a report like this one, as positive as its results are, is that it speaks to a particular mindset in American culture that is primed to hear it, with the result that it completely overshadows all of the good that the university does in areas other than the economic. That focus on economic impact may be fine in good times, when taxpayers and legislators feel like they can afford to invest in a broad range of kinds of exploration and education on campus. But in bad times, when budgets are tight and jobs are scarce, many begin to look at those kinds of exploration that don't have obvious or direct economic benefits as "luxuries," as frivolous, as extraneous to the institution's mission -- precisely because the institution's mission, and the public good that it serves, have come to be wholly associated with the economic.
+
+There is, in other words, a deeply ingrained mindset in American culture that lends itself to the assumption that economic development is the primary good that the university can and should serve. This is a mindset that I would love to see us work on changing. It has its underpinnings in our faith in the extraordinary creative potential generated by capitalism, but it leads to the assumption that all of the problems in the contemporary world can and should be approached through market-based solutions.
+
+
+# #neoliberalism
+
+Note: This tight focus on the market as the telos of contemporary life is often discussed under the umbrella of "neoliberalism" on campus. "Neoliberalism" is admittedly one of those terms that has been so relentlessly misunderstood and misused that it's become a kind of caricature, an empty critique with all the force that "bourgeois" had in the early 1970s, or "postmodern" in the early 2000s, or, from the other side of the aisle today, "critical race theory." It's the kind of term that causes a lot of us just to stop listening, because we know that what's coming is (a) profoundly ideological, and (b) likely not to mean exactly what its speaker thinks it means.
+
+But neoliberalism is nonetheless an important concept, and one that can tell us a lot about what's happened within American culture since the early 1980s -- the forces that have encouraged the public to question the value of institutions of higher education, as well as the other forms of public investment in the public good. In fact, it's part of what's surfaced the question of whether there even *is* such a thing as the public good. Just as Margaret Thatcher argued in the 1980s that there was no such thing as "society," but instead only individuals and families that needed to look out for themselves, so we find today a predominant political perspective in this country that holds that all goods are and should be private rather than public, individual rather than social.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@stri_khedonia
+
+Note: The effects of this conviction on our culture today have been corrosive. We have experienced over the last four decades a dramatic increase in inequality, both economic and social, as those who already *have* benefit from an environment in which rewards accrue to the individuals who are already most equipped to pursue them. We have also seen a radical decline in our cultural sense of shared obligations to or even basic care and respect for others. Broadly speaking, we've lost our collective grip on the notions that our individual actions affect others, that we should act with those others in mind, that we share common concerns, and that we are collectively responsible for ensuring that we provide a viable future for all of us. Without those understandings, without a recognition that the global crises we face today require responsible social engagement and collective action, poverty will continue to increase, structural racism will continue to grow, and the very prospect of a livable planet is thrown into serious question.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry
+
+Note: So. I want to pause here and acknowledge that this all no doubt sounds alarmist, that I've managed to get in a very few minutes from a highly encouraging report on the economic impact of public research universities to the question of whether the future will be a livable one, and that there are several links along the way that I haven't yet fully explored -- not to mention all kinds of alternative paths that we have available to consider. So let's backtrack a bit. If, as I am arguing here, our overdetermined focus on the economic good that universities provide has the potential to undermine the other kinds of goods that our institutions serve, what are those goods, how are they undermined, what do we lose if we lose them, and how might we begin to ensure that they remain a crucial part of the public vision of what the university is for?
+
+
+
+
+Note: In order to explore the university's purpose in serving the public good, and the ways that the neoliberal understanding of the university's function have weakened it almost beyond recognition, we might begin by thinking through the distinctions drawn in economics among the four primary types of goods, and the ways they are defined, first, through their "excludability" -- or whether non-paying customers can be prevented from using them -- and second, through their "rivalrousness" -- or whether their use uses them up. Public goods are nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be excluded from their use and no one's use uses them up for others. Private goods are typically both excludable and rivalrous, and are typically market-based as a result. Goods that are non-excludable but rivalrous are thought of as common-pool resources, which were assumed for a long time to be subject to the "tragedy of the commons" until the work of Elinor Ostrom demonstrated the potential for shared governance in ensuring their sustainability (a set of ideas that I unfortunately don't have time to dig into today, but that have deep implications for our understanding of how we can create a sense of shared responsibility for shared resources like the public university). Finally, club goods are those that are excludable but non-rivalrous -- goods that are not diminished through use, but that people can be prevented from using unless they pay for them.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The question, then, is what kind of goods higher education and the knowledge that it provides and creates are and should be. Knowledge is certainly nonrivalrous; if I have it, and I share it with you, I do not have less of it as a result. The question lies in excludability: where once knowledge and the higher education that fosters it might have been seen as striving to be nonexcludable, making itself available to anyone desiring it, it has since the 1960s increasingly become excludable, restricted to those who can pay. Access to knowledge is today a club good, in other words, rather than the public good that was once imagined to best serve our society: supported by all for the benefit of all.
+
+Those ideals regarding public education were always flawed, even at their most promising moments: our system of land-grant universities was founded on the appropriation of land from indigenous nations, and the GI Bill supported rather than undermined racial inequities. But their underlying ideals were based in an understanding that the university's purpose is the broad education of the public. And that broad education has always been understood to have benefits beyond the directly economic. The Morrill Act of 1862, which established the system of land-grant colleges and universities, designated funds to the states for
+
+
+> "the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." (7 U.S. Code § 304)
+
+Note: (READ SLIDE.) Liberal *and* practical. Pursuits *and* professions. There are clearly economic goals embedded in this sense of what it is to improve the lot of the industrial classes, but there is also clearly expressed here a desire to create a world that is not just more prosperous but *better* in a much deeper sense.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@thirdserving
+
+Note: The wide array of research done on our campuses in pursuit of that *better* has a range of important social impacts that may not be directly economic. This includes basic research in the bench sciences, as well as a panoply of projects in the social sciences, humanities, and arts. These projects help further our shared understanding of how the world works, how it should work, and how it could work. They examine the material world and our interactions with it, as well as the world of ideas and institutions and cultures, enabling us to know more about who we are, about the forces that structure our lives, and about the potential for creating something new. When we focus too narrowly on economic impact, research into gene regulation in fruit flies, or ethics in food distribution and consumption, or migration patterns in the African diaspora, or the history of patronage in early eighteenth-century music, all run the risk of being seen as extraneous, and therefore unworthy of funding, when in fact they extend our understandings of who we are and how we relate to one another in crucial ways. Even more, these projects are not ends in themselves, but the basis for future work in their fields, and that ability to develop and share knowledge in service to a larger project of collective understanding is at the heart of the academic mission.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@skyjlen
+
+Note: The challenge, of course, is that our communities off-campus often aren't privy to the reasons why we work on the projects we've selected, or what the importance of those projects might be, and so it winds up appearing that researchers on campus are engaged in the contemporary equivalent of investigations into the numbers of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, wrapping ourselves up in issues that don't matter -- or worse, that aren't real -- rather than those that will have a direct, material impact on the world. On campus, we know that what we do matters enormously, but we too often fail to communicate that significance in ways that connect with the publics around us. And this divide points to a significant structural problem with the ways that scholarly work on campus gets done: ensuring the visibility and the viability of our fields requires us to communicate our work in public-facing ways -- and yet what we're individually rewarded for, both on campus and within our broader fields, is overwhelmingly our inward-facing communication: the articles and books we write with other experts as our imagined audience. Which raises a key question: how can we begin to shift our reward structures on campus such that faculty are encouraged to communicate not just with one another but with the broader world?
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@sbk202
+
+Note: Of course, one of the most important ways that we communicate with the broader world is through our students. Unfortunately, our students have increasingly been raised in a culture that tells them that the purpose of a college degree is developing the skill set that will lead directly to a lucrative career -- and given how much they and their families are paying, and indeed going into debt, for that degree, it's understandable that they gravitate (or are pushed) toward practical, pre-professional majors. Preparing students to enter the workforce is not a bad thing, and I'm not arguing at all that we should wave that aside. But the goal of the university should be producing graduates who are not just successful economic actors, but who are well-rounded humans, who are able to think creatively about the complex conditions in which we live today, and who are willing to contribute not just materially but socially, ethically, even morally to the improvement of the world around them, not just for themselves but for others.
+
+
+
+jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous-thinking
+
+Note: This is generous thinking: finding ways to use our collective knowledge for the public good, demonstrating our deep connections to -- indeed, our responsibility for -- the world around us. The university's educational mission -- one we need to claim ferociously, loudly, publicly -- is cultivating that generous thinking, preparing our students not just for the professions that might lead to wealth production but for the "several pursuits" in life. We are educating the "leaders of tomorrow" not just in the conventionally understood political and business realms, but in the kinds of engagement that will help their communities grow from the grassroots up. And that mission demands that we focus on what is required to make a better world, both on campus and off. It requires that we think about our institutions' often unspoken structural biases, including that toward "economic impact"; it requires us to focus not just on making it possible for more kinds of people to achieve conventionally coded success, but on examining what constitutes success, how it is measured, and why. And that requires a values-first approach to higher education, and an ongoing examination of the ways that those values are instantiated in institutional structures and processes.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@john_cameron
+
+Note: So: what if we understood the well-being of communities to lie not just in the individual economic prosperity that can result but in terms of individuals' ability to work together -- to engage in collective action -- toward a wide range of common goals? What areas of the university might we find value in if the kinds of leadership we educate for were focused less on individual professional success and more on connection and collaboration?
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@edulauton
+
+Note: We'd probably want to start by ensuring that every student on campus receives a deep education in ethics, in creative thinking, and in individual and collaborative expression. These are, as it turns out, the skills and qualities that many employers are looking for today, and that too many of our pre-professional graduates don't have the opportunity to develop, as they've been led to understand the liberal pursuits -- the study of literature, of art, of philosophy, of history -- as extraneous to their goal of beginning a remunerative career.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@goian
+
+Note: We'd also want to think about the kinds of studies and stories that we would use to highlight the contribution of universities to a more richly understood social good. Those studies and stories may not have the dramatic numbers that we can point to as evidence of the university's economic impact, but they can play a key role in surfacing the significance of a broad range of work on campus for the publics whom we serve. Producing those stories will require deep faculty involvement, and will thus ask the university to think about how such public-facing work can be understood to "count" in the structures of faculty evaluation and reward. And that public-facing, community engaged work must count, precisely because it can help us communicate the impact of everything that the university does -- not just its economic impact, and not just the benefits that it provides for individuals, but our deeper social and cultural impact, and the benefits we provide for communities and for society as a whole.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/cece.html
+
+Note: I'm honored to have had this chance to talk with you today as you continue that work of telling the stories of engagement between our universities and our communities. Thanks so much.
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+ Generous University
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+## Toward a More Generous University
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thanks so much; I'm sorry not to be able to be with you today in Helsinki, but I'm delighted to have the opportunity to share some thoughts with you. My thoughts largely derive from my own position in a large public research university in the U.S., but I hope that they have some applicability to the kinds of questions that you are exploring today.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Back in February, a moment that now feels a lifetime ago, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread on Twitter thinking through the things she tells the Black scholars who seek her advice about surviving the academy. And these two tweets in particular caught my attention. (READ TWEETS)
+
+
+
+
+Note: These tweets prompted me to respond, saying (READ TWEET). This may be utterly quixotic on my part, but it's something I've been thinking about for a while: what would it be for us to remake the university -- or build a new one -- that was structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members?
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what's ahead derives from the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves.
+
+
+## "radical approach"
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Cottom has noted in her book _Lower Ed_ of the crisis that she has seen growing in the financialization of higher education,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that exists too. But we need to consider the possibility that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, the paradigm under which higher education has operated in the United States is failing, and failing fast, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world. And this is true not least because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+##### http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the decline in confidence in the university is not just caused by the public failing to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. What I'm asking for is a tall order -- in many ways swimming against the current of the neoliberal institution. But a large part of what I'm after is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions _as_ communities, as well as _in interaction with_ communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while my argument about the importance of generosity for the future of the university might appear self-indulgent, a head-in-the-sand retreat into philosophizing and a refusal of real political action, I hope, in the book, to have put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole."
-- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
+
+
+# "them"
+
+Note: So it's important to be careful about how we define "us," precisely because every "us" implies a "them," and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly in service to the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other. Granted, sometimes "they" are imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that benefits from and takes in information we provide. But what might it mean if we understood ourselves, and our institutions, as embedded in and responsible to the complex collection of communities by which we are surrounded? How might we develop a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the institution itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
+
+
+# liberal education
+
+Note: However, in building those relationships, we have to contend with the fact that what faculty members actually _do_ on our campuses is often a mystery, and indeed a site of profound misunderstanding, for people outside the academic profession, and even at times for one another. One of the key areas of misunderstanding, and one that most needs opening up, is the fundamental purpose of higher education. Public figures such as politicians increasingly discuss colleges and universities as sites of workforce preparation, making it seem as if the provision of career-enhancing credentials were the sole purpose for which our institutions exist, and as if everything else they do that does not lead directly to economic growth were a misappropriation of funds. Those of us who work on campus, by and large, understand our institutions not as credentialing agencies but as sites of broad-based education: a "liberal" education in the original sense of the term. Of course the very term "liberal education," so natural to those of us steeped in it, has itself become profoundly politicized, as if the liberal aspect of higher education were not its breadth but its ideological bent. So we see, for instance, the state of Colorado stripping the term out of official university documents. But even where the concept of liberal education isn't imagined to be a cover for some revolution we're fomenting on campus, there's a widespread misconception about it that's almost worse: it is a mode of education in which we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students' heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path.
+
+
+# humanities
+
+Note: And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities. The portrait I'm about to sketch of the humanities today could be extended to many other areas within the curriculum -- for example, the sciences' focus on "basic science," or science without direct industry applicability, is often imagined to be just as frivolous. But the humanities -- the study of literature, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of culture -- are in certain ways both the core and the limit case of the liberal arts. The humanities cultivate an inquisitive mindset, they teach key skills of reading and interpretation, and they focus on writing in ways that can prepare a student to learn absolutely anything else over the course of their lives -- and yet they are the fields around which no end of hilarious jokes about what a student might actually do with that degree have been constructed. (The answer, of course: absolutely anything. As a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes clear, not only do humanities majors wind up gainfully employed, but they also wind up happy in their choices. But I digress.) The key thing to note is that the humanities serve as a bellwether of sorts: what has been happening to them is happening to higher education in general, if a little more slowly. So while I'm focused here on the kinds of arguments that are being made about the humanities in our culture today, it doesn't take too much of a stretch to imagine them being made about sociology, or about physics, or about any other field on campus that isn't named after a specific, well-paying career.
+
+
+# marginalization
+
+Note: The humanities, in any case, have long been lauded as providing students with a rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills with which they can engage the world around them. These skills are increasingly necessary in today's hypermediated, globalized, conflict-filled world -- and yet many humanities departments find themselves increasingly marginalized within their own institutions. This marginalization is related, if not directly attributable, to the degree to which students, parents, administrators, trustees, politicians, the media, and the public at large have been led in a self-reinforcing cycle to believe that the skills these fields provide are useless in the current economic environment. Someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about all those English majors working at Starbucks; commentators reinforce the sense that humanities majors are worth less than pre-professional degrees; parents strongly encourage their students to turn toward pragmatic fields that seem somehow to describe a job; administrators note a decline in humanities majors and cut budgets and positions; the jobs crisis for humanities PhDs worsens; someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about what all those adjuncts were planning on doing with that humanities PhD anyhow; and the whole thing intensifies. In many institutions, this draining away of majors and faculty and resources has reduced the humanities to a means of ensuring that students studying to become engineers and bankers are reminded of the human ends of their work. This is not a terrible thing in and of itself, but it is not a sufficient ground on which humanities fields can do their best work for the institution, or for the world.
+
+
+# spreading
+
+Note: And while this kind of cyclical crisis has not manifested to anything like the same extent in the sciences, there are early indications that it may be spreading in that direction. Where once the world at large seemed mostly to understand that scientific research, and the kinds of study that support it, are crucial to the general advancement of knowledge, recent shifts in funder policies and priorities suggest a growing scrutiny of that work's economic rather than educational impact, as well as a growing restriction on research areas that have been heavily politicized. The humanities, again, may well be the canary in the higher education coal mine, and for that reason, it's crucial that we pay close attention to what's happened in those fields, and particularly to the things that haven't worked as the humanities have attempted to remedy the situation.
+
+
+# defense
+
+Note: One of the key things that hasn't worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defenses of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy have been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which have had the desired impact. Calls to save the humanities issued by public figures have frequently left scholars annoyed, as they often begin with a somewhat retrograde sense of what we do and why, and thus frequently give the sense of trying to save our fields from us. (One might see, for instance, a column published in 2016 by the former chairman of the NEH, Bruce Cole, entitled "What's Wrong with the Humanities?", which begins memorably:
+
+
+> "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance."
-- Bruce Cole
+
+Note: "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.") But perhaps even worse is the degree to which humanities professors themselves -- those one would think best positioned to make the case -- have failed to find traction with their arguments. As the unsuccessful defenses proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worse,
+
+
+> "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them."
-- Simon During
+
+Note: leading Simon During to grumble that "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." And maybe we like it that way, as we are often those who take issue with our own defenses, bitterly disagreeing as we frequently do about the purposes and practices of our fields.
+
+
+# definition
+
+Note: Perhaps this is a good moment for us to stop and consider what it is that the humanities do do well, what the humanities are for. I will start with a basic definition of the humanities as a cluster of fields that focus on the careful study and analysis of cultures and their many modes of thought and forms of representation -- writing, music, art, media, and so on -- as they have developed and moved through time and across geographical boundaries, growing out of and adding to our senses of who we are as individuals, as groups, and as nations. The humanities are interested, then, in the ways that representations work, in the relationships between representations and social structures, in all the ways that human ideas and their expression shape and are shaped by human culture. In this definition we might begin to see the possibility that studying literature or history or art or film or philosophy might not be solely about the object itself, but instead about a way of engaging with the world: in the process we develop the ability to read and interpret what we see and hear, the insight to understand the multiple layers of what is being communicated and why, and the capacity to put together for ourselves an appropriate, thoughtful contribution to our culture.
+
+
+# disagreement
+
+Note: Now, the first thing to note about this definition is that I am certain that many humanities scholars who hear it will disagree with it -- they will have nuances and correctives to offer -- and it is important to understand that this disagreement does not necessarily mean that my definition is wrong. Nor, however, do I mean to suggest that the nuances and correctives presented would be wrong. Rather, that form of disagreement is at the heart of how we do what we do: we hear one another's interpretations (of texts, of performances, of historical events) and we push back against them. We advance the work in our field through disagreement and revision. This agonistic approach, however, is both a strength of the humanities -- and by extension of the university in general -- and its Achilles' heel, a thought to which I'll return shortly.
+
+
+# sermonizing
+
+Note: For the moment, though, back to Simon During and his sense that the humanities are terrible at self-promotion. During's complaint, levied at the essays included in Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewitt's volume, _The Humanities and Public Life_, is largely that, in the act of self-defense, humanities scholars leave behind doing what they do and instead turn to "sermonizing" (his word) about the value of what they do. He argues that part of the problem is the assumption that the humanities as we practice them ought to have a public life in the first place. He winds up suggesting that we should continue to ensure that there is sufficient state support for the humanities so that students who do not already occupy a position of financial comfort can study our fields, but that we should not stretch beyond that point by arguing for the public importance of studying the humanities, because that importance is primarily, overwhelmingly, private.
+
+
+# privatization
+
+Note: This sense that education in the humanities is of primarily private value is increasingly in today's popular discourse extended to higher education in general: the purpose, we are told, of a college degree is some form of personal enrichment, whether financial or otherwise, rather than a social good. This privatization of higher education's benefits -- part of the general privatization that Chris Newfield has referred to as the academy's "great mistake" -- has been accompanied by a related shift in its costs from the state to individual families and students, resulting in the downward spiral in funding and other forms of public support in which our institutions and our fields are caught, as well as the astronomically increasing debt load faced by students and their families. As long as a university education is assumed to have a predominantly personal rather than social benefit, it will be argued that making such an education possible is a private rather than a public responsibility. And that mindset will of necessity lead to the devaluation of fields whose benefits are less immediately tangible, less material, less individual. If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.
+
+
+# public good
+
+Note: But what is that public good? We don't always do a terribly good job of articulating these things, of describing what we do and arguing on behalf of the values that sustain our work. That may be in part because it's hard to express our values without recourse to what feel to us like politically regressive, universalizing master narratives about the nature of the good that have long been used as means of solidifying and perpetuating the social order, with all its injustices and exclusions. And so instead of stating clearly and passionately the ethics and values and goals that we bring to our work, we critique. We protect ourselves with what Lisa Ruddick has described as "the game of academic cool": in order to avoid appearing naïve -- or worse, complicit -- we complicate; we argue; we read against the grain.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: One of the things that happens when we engage in this mode of critique is that we get accused of having primarily ideological ends; this is how our universities come to be accused of "brainwashing" their students, filling their heads with leftist rejections of the basic goodness of the dominant western culture. On campus, of course, we know that's not true; our classes in American history and in English literature may strive to teach the full range of that history and that literature, but western culture is far from being marginalized in the curriculum. And, in fact, even our most critical reading practices turn out to be perfectly compatible with the contemporary political landscape. In fact, in the larger project, I argue that our critiques of contemporary culture surface not just despite but because of the conservative-leaning systems and structures in which the university as a whole, and each of us as a result, is mired. Our tendency to read against the grain is part of our makeup precisely because of the ways that we are ourselves subject to politics rather than being able to stand outside and neutrally analyze the political. The politics we are subject to -- one that structures all institutions in the contemporary United States, and perhaps especially universities -- makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before. It is a politics structured around competition, and what historian Winfried Fluck has referred to as the race for individual distinction.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives -- on campus and off -- are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. From college admissions through the entirety of our careers, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which we are measured, and the best -- whatever that might mean in a given context -- are rewarded. In actual practice, however, our metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. We are in constant competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can't ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we're working together. Hence the danger of our agonistic modes of work: too often, that agon is turned on one another, discrediting competing theories rather than building on one another's work.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: This competitive individualism contradicts -- and in fact undermines -- all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning, but in actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from their colleagues, from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly managed by administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. This is no way to run a collective. It's also no way to build solidarity among academic units, or across categories of academic employment, or between the academy and the communities with which it engages.
+
+
+# the point
+
+Note: And perhaps that's the point. Perhaps we are locked into this endless competition with one another in order to keep us distracted from the work that we might do if we were truly joined together. The requirement that we continually compare ourselves with one another, that we take on only the work that will lead to our own individual achievement, is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social.
+
+
+# so
+
+Note: So how do we step off of this treadmill? How do we begin to insist upon living our academic lives another way? How do we return to the collective, the social, the communal potential that higher education should enable?
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: This, at last, is where I get to bring in generous thinking, a way of being that I propose as an alternative to the competitive thinking in which the academy is steeped. Generous thinking is not intended to be opposed to critical thinking -- in fact, I argue strongly that the best of our critical thinking is always steeped in generosity. Rather, generous thinking involves the whole-hearted embrace of the deepest values of the humanities -- among them, attention, care, and equity -- in order to create communities that think critically together, both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What is it I mean when I talk about generosity in this context? The book obviously spends much more time exploring this question, but for the moment: I think of generosity as a practice, something to which we have to return again and again. It's an approach to engagement that focuses first and foremost on developing a generosity of mind, an openness to possibility. That openness begins for me by trying to develop a listening presence in the world, which is to say a conversational disposition that is not merely waiting for my next opportunity to speak but instead genuinely paying attention to what is being said. It means caring about the concerns of my interlocutor as much as I care about my own. It means beginning from the assumption that in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn. Generous thinking also means working to think with rather than against the people and texts with whom I'm in dialogue. It means starting an encounter with an idea with _yes_ rather than _no_, with _and_ rather than _but_. _Yes, and_ creates the possibility for genuine dialogue, not only among academic colleagues but with our objects of study, our predecessors, and the many potential publics that surround us. _Yes, and_ asks us to step away from competition, from the race for professional distinction; when we allow ourselves to linger in _yes, and_, we create the possibility of working together to build something entirely new.
+
+
+# together
+
+Note: And it's through working together that we can begin to build the kinds of connections with the publics that might help turn the tide on the declining esteem our institutions, and higher education in general, are held in. This mode of generous thinking is already instantiated in a wide range of projects that focus on fostering public engagement in and through the work done in colleges and universities. Collaborations with the public can work to create a sense of collective ownership of and investment in the university, making the institution's relevance to contemporary communities abundantly clear.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: But this mode of working in public asks a lot of us. It asks us to stop disseminating our work solely in the venues that give us the greatest chance at the forms of individual prestige for which we're rewarded and instead start looking for ways to make our work a gift to the world. It asks us to accept the risk involved in writing for audiences with whom we're less familiar than we are with our colleagues, finding ways to draw them into our concerns and to acquaint ourselves with theirs. It asks us not just to bring our knowledge to those audiences, but to open space for them to become interlocutors, bringing us their own knowledge in response.
+
+
+# vulnerability
+
+Note: It takes a lot of work -- difficult, scary, failure-filled work -- to allow ourselves to become open to this kind of engagement. We're prone as scholars to focus on conversations with those we already know well, and in forms we already know we do well, and there are times when our attempts to address public audiences go badly. It's possible that Simon During is onto something here, when he notes that humanities professors, in the act of public professing, turn away from "doing what they do" and toward "sermonizing" about our fields' value. But the problem isn't assuming that there's a public value in what we do, it's the mode of sermonizing: too much professional public address takes the form or tone of the edifying lecture, instructing the less privileged on better ways of being. If, contra During, we do believe that there is a public value to the work of the humanities, we must find ways to engage the public as equals, without sermonizing. We have to prepare for and accept the vulnerability involved in doing away with the hierarchy of teacher and learner, and find ways to engage in open-ended, multidirectional, generous conversation.
+
+
+# possibility
+
+Note: In that conversation lies the possibility of building solidarity with the concerns of the publics we hope to reach, as well as the possibility of encouraging understanding of our own concerns. In that conversation lies the possibility of creating another mode of being for the twenty-first century university and those who care about it, as well as the possibility of developing a new understanding of how expertise is structured and how it functions. In that conversation lies the possibility of a higher education whose ends are social rather than individual, aimed at community-building rather than personal achievement. In all of those conversations -- in which we engage perspectives other than our own, in which we value the productions and manifestations of our diverse culture, in which we encounter the other in all its irreducible otherness -- lie the best of what the humanities can bring to the university, and the university to the world.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+ Sustainability and Solidarity
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Common Good
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Cliff and the CNI team for inviting me to talk with you. I'm really looking forward to the conversations that develop over the course of today and tomorrow.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of the talk ahead grows out of the work I did in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as “generous thinking,” focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of the book's subtitle grows out of my increasing sense that this necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can’t be made incrementally, that instead it requires — as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ — a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+> --Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be understood as evidence that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. The crisis in higher education today stems both from the incommensurability of these two paradigms and from the fact that _both of them are failing_, if in different ways.
+
+
+## Thomas Kuhn
+
+Note: As Thomas Kuhn noted in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, the failure of a scientific paradigm, as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account, throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely, one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the "period of pronounced professional insecurity" that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift, the cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. And my argument is that we are desperately in need of such a paradigm shift if higher education as we want it to be is to survive.
+
+
+
+
+Note: _Generous Thinking_ explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education -- faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more -- to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead focus on the university's role in building community.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So some of my thoughts here today grow out of this aspect of _Generous Thinking_, but some stem more pragmatically from my work over the last several years on _Humanities Commons_, which is a non-profit, community-developed and governed network serving humanities scholars and organizations.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of _Generous Thinking_: first, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation -- even among those universities that we call "private" -- can allow us to build the kind of community that can sustain them.
+
+
+## community-supported infrastructure
+
+Note: And part of resisting privatization, for both scholars and their institutions, involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. We need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education return to its mission of public service. But developing this form of community-supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it, and the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The stories I'm about to tell are ones with which all of you are much too familiar, and in many cases with which you are far more familiar than I am. I hope you'll forgive this; my usual audiences are scholars and administrators who don't always have a clear sense of why community-supported infrastructure might matter, and the examples I'm about to cite make that importance clear. So, bear with me.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Though the issues that I'm discussing of course long predate this particular moment, they came into stark visibility in August 2017, when bepress announced that it had been purchased by the RELX Group, the multi-national parent company of publishing behemoth Elsevier. Bepress had of course been founded in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open-access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. Bepress thus grew out of the academy, and was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at its heart.
+
+
+
+
+Note: As the bepress website notes, over 500 institutions have purchased bepress services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly-accessible ways. And in one fell swoop, these 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing behemoths such as Elsevier.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure -- built and run by academics, for the academic community -- appeared to have been turned on that community. It's not as though anyone had been unaware that bepress was a commercial service all along, but they were one of the good guys, and the costs of outsourcing infrastructural needs to them had been balanced against the often impossible task of maintaining locally hosted repository and publishing systems. Bepress provided what many saw as best-of-breed functionality at a reasonable price, and it supported libraries' desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But the acquisition of bepress by RELX not only put libraries in the position of unintentionally supporting a growing corporate control not just of scholarly publishing but of the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery through production to communication; it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely in promoting greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. As a result, serious conversations have since focused on means of supporting open-source, academy-owned and -controlled infrastructure.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is not an impossible move, by any stretch, but it's harder than it might sound. Long-standing open-access, open-infrastructure projects like arXiv might suggest some possible areas of concern.
+
+
+
+
+Note: By every reasonable measure, arXiv has been exemplary -- in its uptake, in its independence, and in the ways that it has helped to transform the fields that it serves. But in some crucial ways, arXiv has experienced what can only be called "catastrophic success" -- a crucial, paradigm-shifting project whose growing annual operating costs and mounting infrastructural requirements have demanded increasingly creative mechanisms for the platform's support.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So in 2010, the arXiv team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource. But our institutions, as we unfortunately know, are largely unaccustomed to this work of cross-institutional collaboration. For one thing, they're far more prone to understand such resources as terrain for competition, and for another, the community-building required becomes yet another form of labor added on top of maintaining the resources themselves.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I do not know the extent to which such difficulties may have played a role in arXiv's recent move from the Library to Cornell Computing and Information Science. It's entirely likely that the move is a matter of infrastructural pragmatics. But even so, the challenges of maintaining the kind of cross-institutional coalition necessary to sustain such a crucial resource remain.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Another example, with a different narrative, might be found in the Samvera project. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories rely, developers at a number of institutions have come together to create a collective solution. As the proverb and their website have it, if you want to go far, go together.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But this distributed developer community, like all such communities, has faced some challenges in coordination, challenges that have caused it, as the proverb also reminds us, to go more slowly than it might. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers involved in the project but of the institutions for which the developers actually work is not a simple matter.
+
+
+# sustainability
+
+Note: The foundation of the challenges that arXiv and Samvera have faced is the same challenge faced by any number of other projects and programs and initiatives: sustainability. This is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late, as my colleagues and I have been working to ensure that Humanities Commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And those attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point; they too would like to see the network thrive, but they cannot support it indefinitely. We need, they reasonably suggest, a plan for demonstrating that the network will, at some point in the future, be able to support itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models, in business plans, in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a non-profit entity forever tied to kinds of economic concerns that are very often divergent from, if not at odds with, the non-profit's primary mission. As a result, these non-profits remain forever precarious; one small miscalculation can make the difference between survival and collapse.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But sustainability broadly understood extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed -- or more waste produced -- than can be developed or managed in the near term.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There's technological sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects' future stability and growth.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All of these forms of sustainability are important, to varying degrees, to providing for the future of non-profit and open-source projects. But there's another form that gets a good bit less attention, and that I increasingly think precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability: social sustainability. The social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Ensuring that these commitments are sustained is, I increasingly think, a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward.
+
+
+# community
+
+Note: This notion -- of the role of "community" in community-supported software, and of the best ways of building and sustaining it -- raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. As Miranda Joseph argues in _Against the Romance of Community_, the concept is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life, a set of ostensibly organic felt relationships that harken back to a mythical premodern moment in which people lived and worked in direct connection with one another, without the mediating forces of modern capitalism.
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: "Community" is in this sense, in Benedict Anderson's sense, an imagined relationship, and even an imaginary one, as its invocation is designed to yoke together bodies whose existence as a group is largely constructed. It's a concept often used both idealistically and as a form of discipline, a claim of unity that smooths over and thus suppresses internal difference and disagreement. And, as Joseph points out, the notion of community is often deployed as if the relationships that it describes could provide an antidote to or an escape from the problems created by contemporary political and economic life. But this suggestion serves to distract us from the supplementary role that community in fact actually serves with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network–based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises, rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education. "Community" becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So it's important to be careful in issuing calls to build community: such calls, issued uncritically, not only run the risk of enabling the institutions that structure contemporary life to absolve themselves of responsibility for public care, but they also risk essentializing a highly complex and intersectional set of social relations, treating those relations as if they were a simple, single thing. At the same time, though, there are some important uses for the notion of community that remain, uses that might benefit from an analogy to Gayatri Spivak's "strategic essentialism." In these uses we might simultaneously recognize that our calls to community are flawed, in fact impossible, but nonetheless useful as organizing tools.
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: We might thus begin to think of the call to community not as an invocation of organic unity but instead as a form of coalition-building, of a developing solidarity. Solidarity itself is a challenged concept, of course; there are important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom, and for whom.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Women of color, for instance, have pointed out the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests, leading author Mikki Kendall to establish the Twitter hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen. So I don't want to make it sound as though "solidarity" can serve as an unproblematic substitute for "community."
+
+
+
+
+Note: But I remain convinced that there are stronger forms of solidarity to be found, forms that do not demand that individuals seeking redress for institutionalized injustices drop their own issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those individuals are all of our issues too, and that we must stand together in support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this is the form of solidarity that I'm seeking, a form that I am convinced is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom was not just, as the UBS Nobel Perspectives website has it, the first female Nobel laureate in economics; she remains to date the _only_ female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place.
+
+
+## common-pool resources
+
+Note: It's important first to focus in a bit on what is meant by the notion of common-pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" -- the overuse of shared natural resources -- can apply.
+
+
+## the "free rider" problem
+
+Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization.
+
+
+## _Governing the Commons_
+
+Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book _Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action_, this model -- like other such models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
+
+
+> What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies. -- Elinor Ostrom
+
+Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned software projects -- like arXiv, like Samvera, like Humanities Commons -- on which they should be able to rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the problem that community-developed projects were developed to evade. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So last summer, Brett Bobley tweeted a question about ways of sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Cayless --
+
+
+
+
+Note: -- noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining such projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in _Generous Thinking_, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+# collaboration
+
+Note: But getting institutions to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside, is a huge part of what I've tried to do in _Generous Thinking_, and it's a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: A bit of background, for those of you who may not be fully familiar with the project. The MLA is the largest scholarly society in the humanities, representing around 25,000 members across North America and around the world, members who teach and study a very wide range of languages, literatures, and cultures. (The MLA, full disclosure, is also my former employer.) With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 to provide members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching the platform, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with colleagues in other areas in the humanities, so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields.
+
+
+
+
+Note: With further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons spaces developed for the members of the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the College Art Association. But beyond working with these partners, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work, and so we made the decision to open the network's hub to anyone who wants to join -- across the disciplines, around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites, and they can deposit and share their work in the network's open-access repository. This fusion of a social network with a library-quality repository (adhering to commonly accepted metadata standards, employing digital object identifiers, and so on) means that not only is stuff being put into the repository, and not only can that stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used, as there's a community there with which it can be shared.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while fully opening the Humanities Commons hub to free participation by any interested scholar or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use -- a little over two years later, we have over 17,000 members -- it has created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms Humanities Commons from a common-pool resource into a club good, one whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the network if it were an exclusive service see the openness of the hub as diminishing the network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
+
+
+## sustainability and solidarity
+
+Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. My arguments to this end, probably needless to say, have a tough road ahead of them.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: I'm asking the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, fully aligning its internal reward structures with the public mission it claims to espouse. And this is where the need for a paradigm shift -- for politics -- arises.
+
+
+
+http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
+
+Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." We've no doubt all got stories to tell that would support this conclusion, stories that illustrate the ways that the kinds of collaborative work that might best support the university's need for a more open, publicly oriented future goes un- or under-rewarded.
+
+
+## the anecdote
+
+Note: Here's mine: Right around the time I began sketching the outline for this book, I attended a day-long workshop on new models for open scholarly communication, for which the provost of a large state research university had been invited to give a keynote address. And the keynote was quite powerful: the provost described his campus’s efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty’s work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university’s singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our work up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-quality venues, conventionally understood. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising—really, reimagining—all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university’s core service mission? The provost’s response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
+
+
+# honest
+
+Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it’s that there is a shadow mission—competition—that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
+
+
+## the worst of it
+
+Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that _Generous Thinking_ is most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered—from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press—to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to “compete all the time” forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What I am arguing, both directly in _Generous Thinking_ and indirectly through Humanities Commons, is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not _other institutions of higher education_, not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather, it is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university, we're going to have to do it as a sector, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward both the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community-supported infrastructure, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community. None of this will be easy -- but the alternatives, which we have all seen building over the last several years, will be far worse.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: And with that cheery note, I'm going to say thanks, and open things up for discussion.
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+
+ On the Comps Process
+
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+# Comps!
+---
+### A Few Things to Consider
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Thanks so much for having me, etc.
+
+
+## process
+- Work with your advisor and committee to develop and revise your proposal
+- Get committee approval to go forward
+- Read, read, read
+- Write!
+- Defend!
+- Done
+
+Note: This is what the comps process looks like in theory; in reality, it's a good bit more complex
+
+
+## what are comps for?
+- A hurdle you need to get past
+- A key transition from coursework to independent research
+- A moment to synthesize, reflect, and look forward
+- A demonstration that you're ready to make a contribution to the field
+- A start on your dissertation research
+
+Note: Comps feel like a hurdle, and its true that they are something you need to get past
+- but they mark perhaps the most important transition in your graduate career: out of coursework and into your own independent research project
+- and so they ask you to gather together what you've learned from your work thus far and to put it into practice in laying out the work you hope to take on
+- which is to say that they are not intended to be a massive final exam -- it's not a matter of demonstrating that you've been paying attention and that you've read everything (or not just that, in any case)
+- rather, it's a matter of demonstrating that you've done your homework and are now ready to make an original contribution to the literature in the field
+- and, done right, the comps can give you an enormous jump on the research toward your dissertation
+
+
+## so what does that mean?
+
+Note: this is a moment to stretch beyond the received wisdom about the texts you're reading and to think instead about the meaningful connections across texts that will help you surface the ideas you intend to work on in your dissertation
+- it's also a time to think toward that project and what tools you're going to need to accomplish it
+- all of which is to say that while your committee members will undoubtedly have things they think you need to have on your lists, and issues they want you to be sure to take up, this is the moment when you should start filtering that advice through your own lenses
+- which is not me telling you to ignore your advisors' advice! but rather to talk with them about what you're thinking and see how that conversation might help shape the directions you take
+
+
+## the actual process
+- Put together the start of a list of books and some early thoughts on your focus
+- Talk with your advisor and get some input
+- Read around in what's on your list and mine for related texts
+- Revise your list and your early draft proposal
+- Talk with your advisor again, as well as your committee members
+- Ponder their input and revise
+- Read around some more
+- Rinse, repeat
+
+Note: this is why the process is in fact super nonlinear
+- it seems as though the process would be linear: put together list of books, read books on list, write essays
+- in fact it's more recursive: put together list of books, read some, talk to people, write some, add more to list, read more, write more, add more, etc
+- which is to say that (1) you're going to start the reading and writing even while you're still putting the list together, but (b) you might need to think about the reading in waves, getting a basic familiarity with texts early on and then diving deeper into them once the lists are approved
+
+
+## independent
+
+Note: and finally: the comps are the moment when you start getting pulled out of the more collective model that operates during coursework, in which you're at least seeing the same people relatively frequently, into the far more isolated model of focus on solo projects
+- it can be super lonely, so find ways to work together, to maintain contact with your colleagues
+- share drafts and trade off commenting on them
+- talk about process and exchange preparation ideas
+- set up meal trains for one another during exam week
+No doubt you and your colleagues will have other, even better ideas for how to make the best of this process.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+ Generous Thinking
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### A Radical Approach to Saving the University
+---
+
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start by thanking Chancellor Grasso for inviting me to talk with you today, and Michelle Barnes for all of her work arranging the visit. This talk is a highly compressed overview of sorts of my book, _Generous Thinking_, which was published in February by Johns Hopkins. The overall argument of the project is that the future of higher education demands that those of us on campus pay more attention to building relationships of trust with the publics that the university serves.
+
+
+
+##### http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
+
+Note: Evidence of the need for rebuilding trusting relationships between universities and the public might be found in an increasing number of reports and studies such as this one, released in 2017 by the Pew Research Center, showing a precipitous decline in the esteem colleges and universities are held in in the United States, primarily on the political right. One frequent on-campus reaction to this kind of report, understandably, is to decry the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture, to turn inward, and to spend more time talking with those who understand us -- meaning us. But in that reaction we run the risk of deepening the divide, allowing those who want to argue that today's colleges and universities are not only irrelevant but actively detrimental to the well-being of the general public to say, "see? They're out of touch. Who needs them anyway?" Because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+##### http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the problem is not just that the public doesn't understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. So a large part of what I'm after in _Generous Thinking_ is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions _as_ communities, as well as _in interaction with_ communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work: asking us, in other words, to examine how our colleges and universities engage with the world. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot solve on our own.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises, I want to acknowledge, do not always give the impression of being life-threatening, world-historical, or approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we face today. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while some might take my argument, about the importance of generosity for the future of the university, to be a self-indulgent, head-in-the-sand retreat into philosophizing and a refusal of real political action, I hope, in the larger project, to have put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. My argument is that we need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer may lie less in its power to advance knowledge or solve problems in any of its many fields than in our more crucial ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it precisely that we do, and why does it matter? Much of my argument focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But I want to be careful with the ways that I deploy this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." -- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, and that it might become possible for the "we" that I am addressing to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities. But it's important to acknowledge that the "we" that bears the greatest responsibility for caring for the university and for building relationships between the university and the broader publics that it serves, and thus the most immediate antecedent for my "we," is those of us on campus, and especially the faculty.
+
+
+# "them"
+
+Note: Every "we" implies a "them," of course, and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly to serve the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other that at times gets imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that takes in information we provide. What might it mean if we understood them as a complex collection of communities -- not just groups who interact with one another and with us, but groups of which we are in fact a part? How might this lead to a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the university itself as a community, but we don't talk a lot about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. "Community" in the singular -- "the community" -- also runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we are able to understand community instead as multiple and multifarious, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to think of community as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. And this sense of solidarity is a key part of the university's recent past, one of the important elements of its history that has been undone by recent political shifts. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, the student-led calls for institutional change in the 1960s and 1970s in many ways focused on the potential that the university held -- and failed to meet -- for connecting with the communities around it. Instead, our institutions have turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can be built.
+
+
+# liberal education
+
+Note: However, in building those relationships, we have to contend with the fact that what faculty members actually do on our campuses is often a mystery, and indeed a site of profound misunderstanding, for people outside the academic profession, and even at times for one another. One of the key areas of misunderstanding, and one that most needs opening up, is the fundamental purpose of higher education. Public figures such as politicians increasingly discuss colleges and universities as sites of workforce preparation, making it seem as if the provision of career-enhancing credentials were the sole purpose for which our institutions exist, and as if everything else they do that does not lead directly to economic growth were a misappropriation of resources. Those of us who work on campus, however, understand our institutions not as credentialing agencies but as sites of broad-based education: a "liberal" education in the original sense of the term. Of course the very term "liberal education," so natural to those of us who are engaged in it, has itself become profoundly politicized, as if the liberal aspect of higher education were not its breadth but its ideological bent. So we see, for instance, Colorado stripping the term out of official university documents. But even where the concept of liberal education isn't imagined to be a cover for some revolution we're fomenting on campus, there's a widespread misconception about it that's almost worse: it is a mode of education in which we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students' heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path.
+
+
+# humanities
+
+Note: And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities. The portrait I'm about to sketch of the humanities today could be extended to many other areas within the curriculum -- for example, the sciences' focus on "basic science," or science without direct industry applicability, is often imagined to be just as frivolous. But the humanities -- the study of literature, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of culture -- are in certain ways both the core and the limit case of the liberal arts. The humanities cultivate an inquisitive mindset, they teach key skills of reading and interpretation, and they focus on writing in ways that can prepare a student to learn absolutely anything else over the course of their lives -- and yet they are the fields around which no end of hilarious jokes about what a student might actually do with that degree have been constructed. (The answer, of course: absolutely anything. As a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes clear, not only do humanities majors wind up gainfully employed, but they also wind up happy. But I digress.) The key thing to note is that the humanities serve as a bellwether of sorts: what has been happening to them is happening to higher education in general, if a little more slowly. So while I focus a bit on the kinds of arguments that are being made about the humanities in our culture today, it doesn't take too much of a stretch to imagine them being made about sociology, or about physics, or about any other field on campus that isn't named after a specific, well-paying career.
+
+
+# marginalization
+
+Note: The humanities, in any case, have long been lauded as providing students with a rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills with which they can engage the world around them. These skills are increasingly necessary in today's hypermediated, globalized, conflict-filled world -- and yet many humanities departments feel themselves increasingly marginalized within their own institutions. This marginalization is related, if not directly attributable, to the degree to which students, parents, administrators, trustees, politicians, the media, and the public at large have been led in a self-reinforcing cycle to believe that the skills these fields provide are useless in the current economic environment. Someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about all those English majors working at Starbucks; commentators reinforce the sense that humanities majors are worth less than pre-professional degrees; parents strongly encourage their students to turn toward pragmatic fields that seem somehow to describe a job; administrators note a decline in humanities majors and cut budgets and positions; the jobs crisis for humanities PhDs worsens; someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about what all those adjuncts were planning on doing with that humanities PhD anyhow; and the whole thing intensifies. In many institutions, this draining away of majors and faculty and resources has reduced the humanities to a means of ensuring that students studying to become engineers and bankers are reminded of the human ends of their work. This is not a terrible thing in and of itself, but it is not a sufficient ground on which humanities fields can do their best work for the institution.
+
+
+# spreading
+
+Note: And while this kind of cyclical crisis has not manifested to anything like the same extent in the sciences, there are early indications that it may be spreading in that direction. Where once the world at large seemed mostly to understand that scientific research, and the kinds of study that support it, are crucial to the general advancement of knowledge, recent shifts in funder policies and priorities suggest a growing scrutiny of that work's economic rather than educational impact, as well as a growing restriction on research areas that have been heavily politicized. The humanities, again, may well be the canary in the higher education coal mine, and for that reason, it's crucial that we pay close attention to what's happened in those fields, and particularly to the things that haven't worked as the humanities have attempted to remedy the situation.
+
+
+# defense
+
+Note: One of the key things that hasn't worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defenses of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy have been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which have had the desired impact. Calls to save the humanities issued by public figures have frequently left scholars annoyed, as they often begin with a somewhat retrograde sense of what we do and why, and thus frequently give the sense of trying to save our fields from us. (One might see, for instance, a column published in 2016 by the former chairman of the NEH, Bruce Cole, entitled "What's Wrong with the Humanities?", which begins memorably:
+
+
+> "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance." -- Bruce Cole
+
+Note: "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.") But perhaps even worse is the degree to which humanities professors themselves -- those one would think best positioned to make the case -- have failed to find traction with their arguments. As the unsuccessful defenses proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worse,
+
+
+> "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." -- Simon During
+
+Note: leading Simon During to grumble that "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." And maybe we like it that way, as we are often those who take issue with our own defenses, bitterly disagreeing as we frequently do about the purposes and practices of our fields.
+
+
+# definition
+
+Note: Perhaps this is a good moment for us to stop and consider what it is that the humanities do do well, what the humanities are for. I will start with a basic definition of the humanities as a cluster of fields that focus on the careful study and analysis of cultures and their many modes of thought and forms of representation -- writing, music, art, media, and so on -- as they have developed and moved through time and across geographical boundaries, growing out of and adding to our senses of who we are as individuals, as groups, and as nations. The humanities are interested, then, in the ways that representations work, in the relationships between representations and social structures, in all the ways that human ideas and their expression shape and are shaped by human culture. In this definition we might begin to see the possibility that studying literature or history or art or film or philosophy might not be solely about the object itself, but instead about a way of engaging with the world: in the process we develop the ability to read and interpret what we see and hear, the insight to understand the multiple layers of what is being communicated and why, and the capacity to put together for ourselves an appropriate, thoughtful contribution.
+
+
+# disagreement
+
+Note: Now, the first thing to note about this definition is that I am certain that many humanities scholars who hear it will disagree with it -- they will have nuances and correctives to offer -- and it is important to understand that this disagreement does not necessarily mean that my definition is wrong. Nor, however, do I mean to suggest that the nuances and correctives presented would be wrong. Rather, that form of disagreement is at the heart of how we do what we do: we hear one another's interpretations (of texts, of performances, of historical events) and we push back against them. We advance the work in our field through disagreement and revision. This agonistic approach, however, is both a strength of the humanities -- and by extension of the university in general -- and its Achilles' heel, a thought to which I'll return shortly.
+
+
+# sermonizing
+
+Note: For the moment, though, back to Simon During and his sense that the humanities are terrible at self-promotion. During's complaint, levied at the essays included in Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewitt's volume, _The Humanities and Public Life_, is largely that, in the act of self-defense, humanities scholars leave behind doing what they do and instead turn to "sermonizing" (his word) about the value of what they do. He argues that part of the problem is the assumption that the humanities as we practice them ought to have a public life in the first place. He winds up suggesting that we should continue to ensure that there is sufficient state support for the humanities so that students who do not already occupy a position of financial comfort can study our fields, but that we should not stretch beyond that point, arguing for the public importance of studying the humanities, because that importance is primarily, overwhelmingly, private.
+
+
+# privatization
+
+Note: This sense that education in the humanities is of primarily private value is everywhere in today's popular discourse extended to higher education in general: the purpose, we are told, of a college degree is some form of personal enrichment, whether financial or otherwise, rather than a social good. This privatization of higher education's benefits -- part of the general privatization that Chris Newfield has referred to as the academy's "great mistake" -- has been accompanied by a similar shift in its costs from the state to individual families and students, resulting in the downward spiral in funding and other forms of public support in which our institutions and our fields are caught, as well as the astronomically increasing debt load faced by students and their families. As long as a university education is assumed to have a predominantly personal rather than social benefit, it will be argued that making such an education possible is a private rather than a public responsibility. And that mindset will of necessity lead to the devaluation of fields whose benefits are less immediately tangible, less material, less individual. If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.
+
+
+# public good
+
+Note: But what is that public good? We don't do a terribly good job of articulating these things. In fact, despite the role so many of us have as professors, we often seem to have a hard time professing, describing what we do and arguing on behalf of the values that sustain our work. It's hard to express our values without recourse to what feel to us like politically regressive, universalizing master narratives about the nature of the good that have long been used as means of solidifying and perpetuating the social order, with all its injustices and exclusions. And so instead of stating clearly and passionately the ethics and values and goals that we bring to our work, we critique. We protect ourselves with what Lisa Ruddick has described as "the game of academic cool": in order to avoid appearing naïve -- or worse, complicit -- we complicate; we argue; we read against the grain.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: This mode of critique gets mistaken in public discourse for being primarily ideological in intent and effect; this is how our universities come to be accused of "brainwashing" their students, filling their heads with leftist rejections of the basic goodness of the dominant western culture. On campus, we know that's not the case. The political and social commitments behind much of our work are real, and crucial, but even our most critical reading practices turn out to be perfectly compatible with the contemporary political landscape. In fact, I would argue that our critiques of contemporary culture do not simply surface out of our social commitments. Rather, they surface not just despite but because of the conservative-leaning systems and structures in which the university as a whole, and each of us as a result, is mired. Our tendency to read against the grain is part of our makeup precisely because of the ways that we are ourselves subject to politics rather than being able to stand outside and neutrally analyze the political. The politics we are subject to structures all institutions in the contemporary United States, and perhaps especially universities, a politics that makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before. It is a politics structured around competition, and what historian Winfried Fluck has referred to as the race for individual distinction.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives -- on campus and off -- are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. Beginning with college applications, extending through graduate school admissions, fellowship applications, the job market, publication submissions, and, seemingly finally, the tenure and promotion review, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which applicants are measured, and the best -- whatever that might mean in a given context -- are rewarded. In actual practice, however, those metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. Always, in the unconscious of the profession, there is competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can't ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we're working together. The competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed individually, with the result that even those fields whose advancement depends most on team-based efforts are required to develop careful guidelines for establishing credit and priority.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: This competitive individualism contradicts -- and in fact undermines -- all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning, but in actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly managed by administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. This is no way to run a collective. It's also no way to structure a fulfilling life: this disengagement from community and race for individual distinction is a key factor in the extremely high risk of burnout among college faculty and other intellectual workers. It is all but impossible for us to build our lives around the things that are most in line with our deepest personal values when we are driven to focus on those things that will allow us to compare ourselves -- or our institutions -- favorably with one another. This individualistic, competitive requirement is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social. And no amount of trying to persuade ourselves, or our administrations, or our legislatures of the public good that we, our fields, and our institutions serve will take root unless we figure out how to step off the competitive track, to insist upon living our academic lives another way.
+
+
+# ruins
+
+Note: Worse, scholars' internalization of the individualistic imperative to compete has provided an inroad into higher education for some forces that are hastening its disintegration. Bill Readings, in _The University in Ruins_, powerfully traces the transition of the purposes of higher education from the propagation of the culture of the nation-state and the training of its citizens therein, through an important period of resistance and protest that did the crucial work of opening up both access to higher education and the canon that it taught, to its current role, which seems to be the production of value (both intellectual and human) for global capital. This is to say that many of our critiques of our fields and our institutions are well-founded: they were developed in order to cultivate a particular model of citizenship based on exclusion and oppression and focused on the reproduction of state power. The problem is that in the absence of such a clear if problematic goal, the purpose of higher education has drifted. As in so many other areas of the contemporary public world, where the state has lost authority, corporate interests have interceded; the university may no longer promote exclusion and oppression in training state citizens, but it reinstantiates it in a new guise by turning to training corporate citizens. Even worse, rejecting or critiquing that purpose is simply not working: not only is capital extraordinarily able to absorb all critique and to marginalize those who make it, but our inability to stop competing with one another ensures that our critique is contained within the forces of the market that we serve. Perhaps we might have reached, as Rita Felski suggests, the limits of critique; perhaps we might need to adopt a new mode of approach in order to make a dent in the systems that hem us in.
+
+
+# the critique of critique
+
+Note: But that is not to say that I am rejecting critique, or critical thinking. Critical thinking is at the heart of what scholars do. Not only would we be justified in rejecting any suggestion that we abandon it, or abandon the commitments that underwrite it, in favor of an approach that might be more friendly, but we'd also be well within reason if we were to point out that the critique of critique _is still critique_, that it makes use of criticism's negative mode in the very act of negating it. Moreover, the critique of critique is too often driven either by a disdain for difficulty or by a rejection of the political in scholarly work.
+
+
+# connection
+
+Note: I want to suggest, however, that though these rejections and dismissals undoubtedly lie behind the calls for comprehensibility and the return to tradition in our work -- see again Bruce Cole -- they aren't the only things there. These calls may be at least in part a sign of the degree to which people care about our subject matter, about literature or history or art. They might indicate the degree to which people want on some level to engage with us, and the ways they feel rejected by us. There is grave political opposition to much of the work that is done on our college campuses today, and I do not at all wish to dismiss the threat that opposition can pose, but I also want to suggest that even that glimmer of care for our subject matter creates the opportunity, if we take it seriously, to create forms of connection and dialogue that might help further rather than stymie the work that we do.
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: Some of my thinking about ways that attention to such care might encourage scholars to approach the work that we do from a slightly different perspective has developed out of a talk I heard a couple of years ago by David Scobey, then the dean of the New School for Public Engagement. His suggestion was that scholarly work in the humanities is in a kind of imbalance, that critical thinking has dominated at the expense of a more socially-directed mode of what he called "generous thinking," and that a recalibration of the balance between the two might enable us to make possible a greater public commitment in our work, which in turn might inspire a greater public commitment to our work. My project, having drawn its title from Scobey, obviously builds on his argument, but with one key revision: generous thinking is not and should not be opposed to critical thinking. In fact, the two should be fully aligned, and my hope is to help guide us toward modes of working that allow us to more fruitfully connect the generous and the critical in scholarly work. Rather, the dark opposite of generous thinking, that which has in fact created an imbalance in scholarly work is competitive thinking, thinking that is compelled by what sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen called invidious comparison, or what Fluck refers to as the race for professional distinction. It is the competitive that has undermined the capacity for coalition-building, both within our campuses and between our campuses and the broader public. Entirely new discussions, new relationships, new projects might be possible if our critical thinking practices refused competition and were instead grounded in generosity.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What is it I mean when I talk about generosity in this context? The book spends much more time exploring this question, but for the moment: what I'm hoping to develop, in myself most of all, is a generosity of mind, an openness to possibility. That openness begins for me by trying to develop a listening presence in the world, which is to say a conversational disposition that is not merely waiting for my next opportunity to speak but instead genuinely focusing on what is being said, beginning from the assumption that in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn. Generous thinking also means working to think with rather than against, whether the objects of those prepositions are texts or people. It means starting an encounter with a text or an idea with _yes_ rather than _no_, with _and_ rather than _but_. _Yes, and_ creates the possibility for genuine dialogue, not only among academic colleagues but with our objects of study, our predecessors, and the many potential publics that surround us. _Yes, and_ requires us to step away from competition, from the race for professional distinction; when we allow ourselves to linger in _yes, and_, we create the possibility of working together to build something entirely new.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: This mode of generous thinking is already instantiated in many projects that focus on fostering public engagement in and through the work done in colleges and universities. Public projects like these are well-established on many campuses around the country and in many fields across the curriculum. But one key aspect of understanding generosity as the ground from which the work of the university can and should grow is the requirement that all of us take such public projects just as seriously as the more traditional forms of scholarly work that circulate amongst ourselves. Scholars working in public history, just as one example, have some important stories to tell about the difficulties they have faced in getting work in that field appropriately evaluated and credited as scholarship. And a few years ago, after a talk in which a well-respected scholar discussed the expanding possibilities for careers in the public humanities, I overheard a senior scholar say with some bemusement, "I take the point, but I don't think it works in all fields. There's long been a ‘public history.' But can you imagine a ‘public literary criticism'?" His interlocutor chortled bemusedly: the very idea. But the world has long been filled with public literary criticism, from public reading projects to book reviews to fan production, modes of literary work that reach out to non-specialist audiences and draw them into the kinds of interpretation and analysis that we profess.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: Resistance to taking such public projects as seriously as the work we do for one another -- according them the same kinds of credit and prestige as traditional publications -- speaks to one of two things: first, our anxieties (and they are very real) about deprofessionalization; and second, to our continued (and I would argue profoundly misguided) division and ordering of the various categories to which academic labor is committed, with a completely distinct category called "service" almost inevitably coming in a distant third behind research and teaching. Grounding our work in a spirit of generosity might lead us to erase some of the boundaries between the work that faculty do to support the engagements of readers and instructors both inside and outside the academy, and the work that we consider to be genuinely "scholarly." A proper valuation of public engagement in scholarly life, however, will require a systemic rethinking of the role that prestige plays in the academic reward system -- and this, as I discuss late in the book, is no small task. It is, however, crucial to a renewed understanding of the relationship between the university and the public good.
+
+
+# collaboration
+
+Note: Similarly, grounding our work in generous thinking might not only encourage us to adopt a position of greater openness to dialogue with our communities, and might not only foster projects that are more publicly engaged, but it might also lead us to place a greater emphasis on -- and to attribute a greater value to -- collaboration in academic life. It might encourage us to support and value various means of working in the open, of sharing our writing at more and earlier stages in the process of its development, and of making the results of our research more readily accessible to and usable by more readers.
+
+
+# naïveté
+
+Note: But I want to acknowledge that adopting a mode of generous thinking is a task that is simultaneously extremely difficult and easily dismissible. The kinds of listening and openness for which I advocate may well be taken as a form of cultural naïveté at best, or worse, a politically regressive knuckling-under to the pressures of contemporary ideologies. I want to suggest, however, that in embracing competitive modes of "smartness," we are already well within the grip of the neoliberal order, and at great cost -- not only to individual scholars in setting a course toward stress-related burnout, but to scholars collectively in undermining our ability to understand ourselves as a community, one capable of disagreeing profoundly and yet still coming together in solidarity to argue for our collective interests. What might become possible for us if we were to retain the social commitment that motivates our critical work while stepping off the field of competition, opening ourselves and our work to its many potential connections and conversations?
+
+
+# what if
+
+Note: What if -- and this should be taken as a series of genuinely open rather than rhetorical questions -- what if the university's values and commitments made it possible for those of us who work on campus to develop a new understanding of how expertise is structured and how it functions, an understanding focused just a bit less on individual achievement, on invidious distinction? What if the expertise that the university cultivated were at its root connected to building forms of collectivity, solidarity, and community both on campus and off? What if the communities around the campus were invited to be part of these processes? How might we work together to break down the us-and-them divide between campus and public and instead create a richer, more complex sense of the connections among all of us? What kinds of public support for institutions of higher education might we be able to generate if we were able to argue persuasively on behalf of using scholarly work to cultivate community, of understanding ourselves in service to that community, while refusing to allow our institutions and our governments to lose sight of the fact that such service is a form of labor that is crucial to the future that we all share? What new purposes for the university might we imagine if we understand its role to be not inculcating state citizens, nor training corporate citizens, but instead facilitating the development of diverse, open communities -- both on their campuses and across their borders -- encouraged to think together, to be involved in the ongoing project of how we understand and shape our world?
+
+
+# possibilities
+
+Note: All of these possibilities that we open up -- engaging perspectives other than our own, valuing the productions and manifestations of our diverse culture, encountering the other in all its irreducible otherness -- are the best of what the university can offer to the world. And all of these possibilities begin with cultivating the ability to think generously, to listen -- to our subject matter, to our communities, to ourselves. There is much more to say, obviously -- a whole book's worth -- but this listening presence, in which I am willing to countenance the possibility that I just might be wrong, is where I will now leave myself, ready to listen to you.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+## Digital Humanities
+---
+### and the Neoliberal University
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Over the last several years, a series of critical and theoretical interventions -- perhaps most pointedly the 2016 LARB essay by David Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia -- have connected the perceived technocentrism of the digital humanities to the positivist conservatism of higher education and other related institutions, resulting in the field and its proponents being considered "neoliberal tools."
+
+
+## neoliberal tools
+
+Note: I'm not here today to make the case that neoliberalism plays no role in the rise of the digital humanities, or frankly of the rise of anything else on university campuses these days. Honestly, to say that any aspect of our institutions bears some relation to the neoliberal is only to point out the water in which we all swim. All of our work -- our programs, our courses, our research -- is determined by a set of forces that are today hopelessly beholden to the market, whether that work is digital or not.
+
+In the particular case of the digital humanities, however, it's important to distinguish between, on the one hand, what an institution's administrations and governing bodies might assume that the digital can do for the humanities, and the digital humanities might do for the institution, and on the other hand, what the digital humanities actually does, and is for. A university's administration might see DH as a way of increasing the "marketable skills" delivered as part of humanities degrees, in order to ensure that the credential provided appears to be worth paying for. Or a university's administration might see the grant programs that support many digital humanities projects and assume that DH is a way to increase external funding for an area on campus that doesn't bring in the dollars in the way that STEM fields do. Or a university's administration might see the capacity for digital technologies to produce more quantified metrics about scholarship and its impact and assume that digital humanities will foster uptake of such measurement.
+
+All of these assumptions have some basis in truth. Learning how to manipulate a computer is a valuable skill in today's economy. In the US context, at least, there are more sizable grants available for large-scale digital projects than there are for writing books. And the impact of work in DH is often more readily quantified than is the impact of work in book-based fields.
+
+
+## DH != technology
+
+Note: But all of these assumptions hinge on a critical misunderstanding: that DH is about the technology. This is one of the sources of the critique of DH and its neoliberal tools, after all; as Brian Greenspan has noted, "the very taint of technology is enough to convince some conventional humanists that DH must somehow smack of neoliberal tendencies" (Brian Greenspan, "The Scandal of Digital Humanities" https://carleton.ca/hyperlab/2018/the-scandal-of-digital-humanities/). The associations of technology with the technocratic, the managerial, and the kinds of "disruptive innovation" that have overtaken our culture are enough to make any good scholar leery about what those technologies are doing in our literature departments.
+
+But DH is not primarily about tool-building, or even archive-building, even though the technologies we use and produce often draw the lion's share of attention. In my own institution, Michigan State University, where digital humanities is both an academic program and a research unit, we understand DH as a kind of Venn diagram, bringing together both uses of technology to study the questions and materials that are explored within the humanities, and uses of humanities-based modes of inquiry to technology and its uses. But even here, those two parts of the Venn diagram should *not* be understood as putting technology on one side and theory on the other, and only bringing them together in the overlap. Every choice we make about our uses of technology in DH brings with it -- or should bring with it -- a reckoning with the social, communal, and ethical issues the technology surfaces.
+
+
+## technological
+
+Note: What I want to ask at this point is whether the work of humanities fields that don't explicitly focus on digital technologies have engaged to the same extent in critical considerations of their own systems and methods. Because, honestly, all work in the academy is technological, whether those technologies are foregrounded, as in the digital, or not. It's in part for this reason that Brian Greenspan argues that, "if anything, DH is guilty of making all too visible the dirty gears that drive the scholarly machine, along with the mechanic’s maintenance bill." That machine may not be driven by industrially-produced code, but it is industrial all the same: the scholarly machine grinds along whenever our tenure and promotion standards demand the production of a published monograph, or whenever we rank some journals as more prestigious than others. Greenspan continues:
+
+
+> DH doesn’t so much pander to the system (at least not more than any other field) as it scandalously reveals the system’s components, while focusing critical attention on the mechanisms needed to maintain them. And that’s precisely its unique and urgent potential: by providing the possibility of apprehending these mechanisms fully, DH takes the first steps toward a genuinely materialist and radical critique of scholarship in the 21st century.
+
+
+## radical critique
+
+In fact, much of the "disruption" that DH has sought to create in recent years has had little to do with technology per se, and far more to do with this radical critique of the ways that scholars work, their relationships to their institutions, and more. In this vein, we might explore:
+
+- The Collaborators' Bill of Rights, which developed a set of ethical principles for crediting the work done on complex projects;
+- The Colored Conventions Project, which defies assumptions about ways that humanities scholars work by always speaking from the point of view of the collective, and by focusing on process rather than product, recognizing that it will in some sense never be "done";
+- The Commons, which seeks to transform the economics not just of research-sharing, but of research community facilitation; and
+- HuMetricsHSS, which is using thinking derived from digital scholarship to insist upon new values-enacted principles for assessing and evaluating scholarly work.
+And there are many more such projects besides, projects that are fully digital but explicitly focused on countering the neoliberal university's tendencies toward the use of quantified metrics for productivity, toward competitive individualism, toward market-based notions of impact. Through projects like these the digital humanities broadly conceived can become not a source of neoliberal tools, but rather a transformative force within the university.
\ No newline at end of file
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new file mode 100644
index 00000000..9aadcf72
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diff --git a/friday.html b/friday.html
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Toward a More Generous University
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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diff --git a/friday.md b/friday.md
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+## Toward a More Generous University
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thanks; happy to be here.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Earlier this week, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread on Twitter thinking through the things she tells the Black scholars who seek her advice about surviving the academy. And these two tweets in particular caught my attention. (READ TWEETS)
+
+
+
+
+Note: These tweets prompted me to respond, saying (READ TWEET). This may be utterly quixotic on my part, but it's something I've been thinking about for a while: what would it be if we could remake the university -- or build a new one -- that was structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members?
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of this thinking derives from the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves.
+
+
+## "radical approach"
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Cottom has noted in her book _Lower Ed_ of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too. Rather we need to consider the possibility that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, the paradigm under which higher education has operated in the United States is failing, and failing fast, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world. And this is true not least because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+##### http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the decline in confidence in the university is not just caused by the public failing to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. What I'm asking for is a tall order -- in many ways swimming against the current of the neoliberal institution. But a large part of what I'm after is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions _as_ communities, as well as _in interaction with_ communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while my argument about the importance of generosity for the future of the university might appear self-indulgent, a head-in-the-sand retreat into philosophizing and a refusal of real political action, I hope, in the book, to have put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole."
-- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
+
+
+# "them"
+
+Note: So it's important to be careful about how we define "us," precisely because every "us" implies a "them," and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly in service to the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other. Granted, sometimes "they" are imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that benefits from and takes in information we provide. But what might it mean if we understood ourselves, and our institutions, as embedded in and responsible to the complex collection of communities by which we are surrounded? How might we develop a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the institution itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
+
+
+# liberal education
+
+Note: However, in building those relationships, we have to contend with the fact that what faculty members actually _do_ on our campuses is often a mystery, and indeed a site of profound misunderstanding, for people outside the academic profession, and even at times for one another. One of the key areas of misunderstanding, and one that most needs opening up, is the fundamental purpose of higher education. Public figures such as politicians increasingly discuss colleges and universities as sites of workforce preparation, making it seem as if the provision of career-enhancing credentials were the sole purpose for which our institutions exist, and as if everything else they do that does not lead directly to economic growth were a misappropriation of funds. Those of us who work on campus, by and large, understand our institutions not as credentialing agencies but as sites of broad-based education: a "liberal" education in the original sense of the term. Of course the very term "liberal education," so natural to those of us steeped in it, has itself become profoundly politicized, as if the liberal aspect of higher education were not its breadth but its ideological bent. So we see, for instance, the state of Colorado stripping the term out of official university documents. But even where the concept of liberal education isn't imagined to be a cover for some revolution we're fomenting on campus, there's a widespread misconception about it that's almost worse: it is a mode of education in which we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students' heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path.
+
+
+# humanities
+
+Note: And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities. The portrait I'm about to sketch of the humanities today could be extended to many other areas within the curriculum -- for example, the sciences' focus on "basic science," or science without direct industry applicability, is often imagined to be just as frivolous. But the humanities -- the study of literature, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of culture -- are in certain ways both the core and the limit case of the liberal arts. The humanities cultivate an inquisitive mindset, they teach key skills of reading and interpretation, and they focus on writing in ways that can prepare a student to learn absolutely anything else over the course of their lives -- and yet they are the fields around which no end of hilarious jokes about what a student might actually do with that degree have been constructed. (The answer, of course: absolutely anything. As a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes clear, not only do humanities majors wind up gainfully employed, but they also wind up happy in their choices. But I digress.) The key thing to note is that the humanities serve as a bellwether of sorts: what has been happening to them is happening to higher education in general, if a little more slowly. So while I'm focused here on the kinds of arguments that are being made about the humanities in our culture today, it doesn't take too much of a stretch to imagine them being made about sociology, or about physics, or about any other field on campus that isn't named after a specific, well-paying career.
+
+
+# marginalization
+
+Note: The humanities, in any case, have long been lauded as providing students with a rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills with which they can engage the world around them. These skills are increasingly necessary in today's hypermediated, globalized, conflict-filled world -- and yet many humanities departments find themselves increasingly marginalized within their own institutions. This marginalization is related, if not directly attributable, to the degree to which students, parents, administrators, trustees, politicians, the media, and the public at large have been led in a self-reinforcing cycle to believe that the skills these fields provide are useless in the current economic environment. Someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about all those English majors working at Starbucks; commentators reinforce the sense that humanities majors are worth less than pre-professional degrees; parents strongly encourage their students to turn toward pragmatic fields that seem somehow to describe a job; administrators note a decline in humanities majors and cut budgets and positions; the jobs crisis for humanities PhDs worsens; someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about what all those adjuncts were planning on doing with that humanities PhD anyhow; and the whole thing intensifies. In many institutions, this draining away of majors and faculty and resources has reduced the humanities to a means of ensuring that students studying to become engineers and bankers are reminded of the human ends of their work. This is not a terrible thing in and of itself, but it is not a sufficient ground on which humanities fields can do their best work for the institution, or for the world.
+
+
+# spreading
+
+Note: And while this kind of cyclical crisis has not manifested to anything like the same extent in the sciences, there are early indications that it may be spreading in that direction. Where once the world at large seemed mostly to understand that scientific research, and the kinds of study that support it, are crucial to the general advancement of knowledge, recent shifts in funder policies and priorities suggest a growing scrutiny of that work's economic rather than educational impact, as well as a growing restriction on research areas that have been heavily politicized. The humanities, again, may well be the canary in the higher education coal mine, and for that reason, it's crucial that we pay close attention to what's happened in those fields, and particularly to the things that haven't worked as the humanities have attempted to remedy the situation.
+
+
+# defense
+
+Note: One of the key things that hasn't worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defenses of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy have been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which have had the desired impact. Calls to save the humanities issued by public figures have frequently left scholars annoyed, as they often begin with a somewhat retrograde sense of what we do and why, and thus frequently give the sense of trying to save our fields from us. (One might see, for instance, a column published in 2016 by the former chairman of the NEH, Bruce Cole, entitled "What's Wrong with the Humanities?", which begins memorably:
+
+
+> "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance."
-- Bruce Cole
+
+Note: "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.") But perhaps even worse is the degree to which humanities professors themselves -- those one would think best positioned to make the case -- have failed to find traction with their arguments. As the unsuccessful defenses proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worse,
+
+
+> "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them."
-- Simon During
+
+Note: leading Simon During to grumble that "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." And maybe we like it that way, as we are often those who take issue with our own defenses, bitterly disagreeing as we frequently do about the purposes and practices of our fields.
+
+
+# definition
+
+Note: Perhaps this is a good moment for us to stop and consider what it is that the humanities do do well, what the humanities are for. I will start with a basic definition of the humanities as a cluster of fields that focus on the careful study and analysis of cultures and their many modes of thought and forms of representation -- writing, music, art, media, and so on -- as they have developed and moved through time and across geographical boundaries, growing out of and adding to our senses of who we are as individuals, as groups, and as nations. The humanities are interested, then, in the ways that representations work, in the relationships between representations and social structures, in all the ways that human ideas and their expression shape and are shaped by human culture. In this definition we might begin to see the possibility that studying literature or history or art or film or philosophy might not be solely about the object itself, but instead about a way of engaging with the world: in the process we develop the ability to read and interpret what we see and hear, the insight to understand the multiple layers of what is being communicated and why, and the capacity to put together for ourselves an appropriate, thoughtful contribution to our culture.
+
+
+# disagreement
+
+Note: Now, the first thing to note about this definition is that I am certain that many humanities scholars who hear it will disagree with it -- they will have nuances and correctives to offer -- and it is important to understand that this disagreement does not necessarily mean that my definition is wrong. Nor, however, do I mean to suggest that the nuances and correctives presented would be wrong. Rather, that form of disagreement is at the heart of how we do what we do: we hear one another's interpretations (of texts, of performances, of historical events) and we push back against them. We advance the work in our field through disagreement and revision. This agonistic approach, however, is both a strength of the humanities -- and by extension of the university in general -- and its Achilles' heel, a thought to which I'll return shortly.
+
+
+# sermonizing
+
+Note: For the moment, though, back to Simon During and his sense that the humanities are terrible at self-promotion. During's complaint, levied at the essays included in Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewitt's volume, _The Humanities and Public Life_, is largely that, in the act of self-defense, humanities scholars leave behind doing what they do and instead turn to "sermonizing" (his word) about the value of what they do. He argues that part of the problem is the assumption that the humanities as we practice them ought to have a public life in the first place. He winds up suggesting that we should continue to ensure that there is sufficient state support for the humanities so that students who do not already occupy a position of financial comfort can study our fields, but that we should not stretch beyond that point by arguing for the public importance of studying the humanities, because that importance is primarily, overwhelmingly, private.
+
+
+# privatization
+
+Note: This sense that education in the humanities is of primarily private value is increasingly in today's popular discourse extended to higher education in general: the purpose, we are told, of a college degree is some form of personal enrichment, whether financial or otherwise, rather than a social good. This privatization of higher education's benefits -- part of the general privatization that Chris Newfield has referred to as the academy's "great mistake" -- has been accompanied by a related shift in its costs from the state to individual families and students, resulting in the downward spiral in funding and other forms of public support in which our institutions and our fields are caught, as well as the astronomically increasing debt load faced by students and their families. As long as a university education is assumed to have a predominantly personal rather than social benefit, it will be argued that making such an education possible is a private rather than a public responsibility. And that mindset will of necessity lead to the devaluation of fields whose benefits are less immediately tangible, less material, less individual. If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.
+
+
+# public good
+
+Note: But what is that public good? We don't always do a terribly good job of articulating these things, of describing what we do and arguing on behalf of the values that sustain our work. That may be in part because it's hard to express our values without recourse to what feel to us like politically regressive, universalizing master narratives about the nature of the good that have long been used as means of solidifying and perpetuating the social order, with all its injustices and exclusions. And so instead of stating clearly and passionately the ethics and values and goals that we bring to our work, we critique. We protect ourselves with what Lisa Ruddick has described as "the game of academic cool": in order to avoid appearing naïve -- or worse, complicit -- we complicate; we argue; we read against the grain.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: One of the things that happens when we engage in this mode of critique is that we get accused of having primarily ideological ends; this is how our universities come to be accused of "brainwashing" their students, filling their heads with leftist rejections of the basic goodness of the dominant western culture. On campus, of course, we know that's not true; our classes in American history and in English literature may strive to teach the full range of that history and that literature, but western culture is far from being marginalized in the curriculum. And, in fact, even our most critical reading practices turn out to be perfectly compatible with the contemporary political landscape. In fact, in the larger project, I argue that our critiques of contemporary culture surface not just despite but because of the conservative-leaning systems and structures in which the university as a whole, and each of us as a result, is mired. Our tendency to read against the grain is part of our makeup precisely because of the ways that we are ourselves subject to politics rather than being able to stand outside and neutrally analyze the political. The politics we are subject to -- one that structures all institutions in the contemporary United States, and perhaps especially universities -- makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before. It is a politics structured around competition, and what historian Winfried Fluck has referred to as the race for individual distinction.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives -- on campus and off -- are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. From college admissions through the entirety of our careers, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which we are measured, and the best -- whatever that might mean in a given context -- are rewarded. In actual practice, however, our metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. We are in constant competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can't ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we're working together. Hence the danger of our agonistic modes of work: too often, that agon is turned on one another, discrediting competing theories rather than building on one another's work.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: This competitive individualism contradicts -- and in fact undermines -- all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning, but in actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from their colleagues, from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly managed by administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. This is no way to run a collective. It's also no way to build solidarity among academic units, or across categories of academic employment, or between the academy and the communities with which it engages.
+
+
+# the point
+
+Note: And perhaps that's the point. Perhaps we are locked into this endless competition with one another in order to keep us distracted from the work that we might do if we were truly joined together. The requirement that we continually compare ourselves with one another, that we take on only the work that will lead to our own individual achievement, is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social.
+
+
+# so
+
+Note: So how do we step off of this treadmill? How do we begin to insist upon living our academic lives another way? How do we return to the collective, the social, the communal potential that higher education should enable?
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: This, at last, is where I get to bring in generous thinking, a way of being that I propose as an alternative to the competitive thinking in which the academy is steeped. Generous thinking is not intended to be opposed to critical thinking -- in fact, I argue strongly that the best of our critical thinking is always steeped in generosity. Rather, generous thinking involves the whole-hearted embrace of the deepest values of the humanities -- among them, attention, care, and equity -- in order to create communities that think critically together, both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What is it I mean when I talk about generosity in this context? The book obviously spends much more time exploring this question, but for the moment: I think of generosity as a practice, something to which we have to return again and again. It's an approach to engagement that focuses first and foremost on developing a generosity of mind, an openness to possibility. That openness begins for me by trying to develop a listening presence in the world, which is to say a conversational disposition that is not merely waiting for my next opportunity to speak but instead genuinely paying attention to what is being said. It means caring about the concerns of my interlocutor as much as I care about my own. It means beginning from the assumption that in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn. Generous thinking also means working to think with rather than against the people and texts with whom I'm in dialogue. It means starting an encounter with an idea with _yes_ rather than _no_, with _and_ rather than _but_. _Yes, and_ creates the possibility for genuine dialogue, not only among academic colleagues but with our objects of study, our predecessors, and the many potential publics that surround us. _Yes, and_ asks us to step away from competition, from the race for professional distinction; when we allow ourselves to linger in _yes, and_, we create the possibility of working together to build something entirely new.
+
+
+# together
+
+Note: And it's through working together that we can begin to build the kinds of connections with the publics that might help turn the tide on the declining esteem our institutions, and higher education in general, are held in. This mode of generous thinking is already instantiated in a wide range of projects that focus on fostering public engagement in and through the work done in colleges and universities. Collaborations with the public can work to create a sense of collective ownership of and investment in the university, making the institution's relevance to contemporary communities abundantly clear.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: But this mode of working in public asks a lot of us. It asks us to stop disseminating our work solely in the venues that give us the greatest chance at the forms of individual prestige for which we're rewarded and instead start looking for ways to make our work a gift to the world. It asks us to accept the risk involved in writing for audiences with whom we're less familiar than we are with our colleagues, finding ways to draw them into our concerns and to acquaint ourselves with theirs. It asks us not just to bring our knowledge to those audiences, but to open space for them to become interlocutors, bringing us their own knowledge in response.
+
+
+# vulnerability
+
+Note: It takes a lot of work -- difficult, scary, failure-filled work -- to allow ourselves to become open to this kind of engagement. We're prone as scholars to focus on conversations with those we already know well, and in forms we already know we do well, and there are times when our attempts to address public audiences go badly. It's possible that Simon During is onto something here, when he notes that humanities professors, in the act of public professing, turn away from "doing what they do" and toward "sermonizing" about our fields' value. But the problem isn't assuming that there's a public value in what we do, it's the mode of sermonizing: too much professional public address takes the form or tone of the edifying lecture, instructing the less privileged on better ways of being. If, contra During, we do believe that there is a public value to the work of the humanities, we must find ways to engage the public as equals, without sermonizing. We have to prepare for and accept the vulnerability involved in doing away with the hierarchy of teacher and learner, and find ways to engage in open-ended, multidirectional, generous conversation.
+
+
+# possibility
+
+Note: In that conversation lies the possibility of building solidarity with the concerns of the publics we hope to reach, as well as the possibility of encouraging understanding of our own concerns. In that conversation lies the possibility of creating another mode of being for the twenty-first century university and those who care about it, as well as the possibility of developing a new understanding of how expertise is structured and how it functions. In that conversation lies the possibility of a higher education whose ends are social rather than individual, aimed at community-building rather than personal achievement. In all of those conversations -- in which we engage perspectives other than our own, in which we value the productions and manifestations of our diverse culture, in which we encounter the other in all its irreducible otherness -- lie the best of what the humanities can bring to the university, and the university to the world.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Argument, Community, Pedagogy
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thanks so much, Patti; I'm delighted to have the opportunity to talk with you this morning.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what follows builds on the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be understood as evidence that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. We find ourselves in a situation today, however, in which both of those paradigms are failing, if in different ways, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
+
+
+## generous thinking
+
+Note: The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It's going to require concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+## listening
+
+Note: So the book asks us to think about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+## reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that our critical reading practices might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+## working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged projects, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and public engagement. And this needs to begin with our students.
+
+
+## students
+
+Note: Our students, after all, are our first and most important point of contact with the publics we serve. Our students come to us from a very wide range of backgrounds and with a very wide range of interests. Ensuring that we connect with them, that we work with them in creating the university's future, is job one. But I want to suggest that some of our students are learning habits of mind from us that ultimately work to undermine the future that we want to build.
+
+
+## seminar
+
+Note: So, _Generous Thinking_ had several points of inception over the years, one of which was a moment in a graduate seminar I taught years ago, a moment that has come to feel emblematic of the situation of the contemporary university. I want to preface the story by saying that I offer it not as an indictment of the kids today, but rather of the m.o. of higher education since the last decades of the 20th century. So here's the scene: the seminar is in cultural studies, and is meant to provide an overview of some current questions in critical theory. I do not now remember what article it was we'd read for that class session, but I opened our discussion by asking for first responses. And three students in a row issued withering takedowns of the article, pointing to the author's methodological flaws and ideological weaknesses. After the third, I said okay, that's all important and I definitely want to dig into it, but let's back up a bit: what is the author's argument here? What is she trying to accomplish?
+
+
+## silence
+
+Note: Nothing. "It's not a trick question," I said. "What is this article about?" Now, I was a fair bit younger and less sure of myself at that point, and I immediately began wondering whether I'd asked a stupid question, whether the sudden failure to meet my gaze was a sign that I, like the author, was now being dismissed as having pedestrian interest in neoliberal forms of meaning-making that demonstrated my complicity with the systems of oppression within which I worked. But it gradually dawned on me that the problem with the question wasn't its stupidity but its unfamiliarity. The students were prepared to dismantle the argument, but not to examine how it was built.
+
+
+## they say / i say
+
+Note: The students in this seminar, like so many of us, had learned all too well the lessons of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's _They Say, I Say_: that the key move in academic argumentation is from what others have previously said to one's own -- almost always contrasting, and inevitably more interesting or correct -- contribution. That is to say, that the goal of critical thinking is to expose the flawed arguments of others in order to demonstrate the inherent rightness of our own.
+
+
+## conversation
+
+Note: The larger point that Graff and Birkenstein make in _They Say, I Say_ is a good and important one: that scholarship proceeds through conversation, and thus that scholarly argument begins with engaging with what others have said and then develops through one's own individual contribution to the discussion. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first part is that we are -- and when I say we, I mean human beings at this hour of the world -- we are by and large TERRIBLE at conversation. Witness any set of talking heads on television, or any Thanksgiving dinner table, or any department meeting: more often than not, we spend the time when other people are talking waiting for our own turn to speak, and we take what's being said to us mostly as a means of formulating our own response. We do not genuinely *listen*, but instead *react*. And the same is too often true of scholarly conversation: the primary purpose of engaging with what "they" have said is to get to the important bit -- what I am saying.
+
+
+## individualism
+
+Note: That's the first problem. The second is the assumption that what I am saying, my own individual contribution to the discussion, is genuinely individual, that it is my own. In no small part this stems from the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university -- an orientation inseparable from the individualism of the surrounding culture -- in which the entire institutional reward structure, including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and every other form of merit is determined by what I individually have done. Every tub sits on its own bottom, in other words, and if I am to succeed it must be based on my own individual accomplishments.
+
+
+## zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. We all find ourselves in an environment in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time.
+
+
+## competitive thinking
+
+Note: As a result, the mode of conversation promoted by _They Say, I Say_ has become less about the most important forms of critical thinking on which our work focuses -- engaging with what has been said before us and adding to the discussion -- than about competitive thinking. Competitive thinking is a hyperindividualistic mode of debate that suggests that we are in an endless struggle with one another, in which there is only room for so much success, for so much attention. In competitive thinking, the quest for academic and professional success requires us to defend our own positions, and attack others. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+## institutions
+
+Note: It's important for me to note that in _Generous Thinking_ I apply this analysis as much to institutions as I do to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the institutional reward structures within which we operate privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions separate themselves from quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that we'll likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more productive.
+
+
+## teaching
+
+Note: But in the meantime, one of the places where we can begin to create a new ethos and transform the values that structure our institutions is in teaching. This is not to say that such transformation will be easy. We are working within a system that instills these notions of competition and individual achievement earlier and earlier, of course, as students come to us from elementary and secondary institutions increasingly structured around testing. Perhaps students aren't competing directly against one another in the moment of testing, but they are nonetheless being inculcated into at least two of competitive thinking's underpinnings: the responsibility of the individual for demonstrating mastery, and the significant consequences of being wrong.
+
+
+## wrong
+
+Note: And perhaps it's here that we see the origins of at least some of our students' -- and our -- terror of being wrong. Wrong means failure. Wrong brings shame. But wrong is inevitable, a horrible thought. And so if we can't avoid being wrong, we can certainly refuse to acknowledge when we're wrong; as Kathryn Schulz has explored, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid recognizing their wrongness. But of course there is no real thinking without the possibility of being wrong. Without being willing to be wrong, we can't hypothesize, we can't experiment, we can't create. We can't imagine new possibilities. We can't dream. But we are hard-wired not to admit the possibility that we might be wrong.
+
+
+## you're wrong
+
+Note: And one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong -- and again, by "we" here, I mean both to point to academics in particular and to humans living at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century in general -- again, one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong is by demonstrating the inherent wrongness in everyone else's ideas. In the academy, and perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, this takes the form of critique: if I can demonstrate what's wrong with your ideas, it must mean that my ideas are better.
+
+
+## critique
+
+Note: This is the upshot of _They Say, I Say_, and it's what leads to the situation I faced in my graduate seminar: we have armed our students with all the most important tools of critique. They are ready to unpack and dismantle. They are well-trained, that is to say, in playing what Peter Elbow once referred to as the doubting game, in which they focus on the parts of an idea that could be wrong and what it might mean if they were. But they have -- and if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we all have -- a tendency to skip the half of the game that's supposed to come first: the believing game, in which we focus on what it might mean if the idea were right. The m.o. of _They Say, I Say_, in other words, encourages us to dismiss what "they say" as quickly as possible, in order to get on to the more crucial "I say," the part for which we will actually get credit.
+
+
+## critical thinking
+
+Note: I want to be clear here: there is a LOT of what "they say" that in fact should be pushed back against. There's a lot out there worth doubting. I'm not asking us not to disagree, not to push new ideas forward, not to think critically. I am, however, hoping that we might find ways to remember that critical thinking requires deep understanding and even generosity as a prerequisite.
+
+
+## generosity
+
+Note: So what I want to ask this morning is what we and our students might gain from slowing the process down a bit, from emphasizing the believing game before leaping to the doubting game, from lingering a bit longer in the "they say." We might, just as a start, find that we all become better listeners. We might open up new ground for mutual understanding, even with those with whom we most disagree.
+
+
+## we say
+
+Note: And we might find ourselves moving less from "they say" to "I say" than instead to "we say," thinking additively and collaboratively about what we might build together rather than understanding our own ideas to require vanquishing everyone else's. We might, as Lakoff and Johnson have suggested, move away from understanding argument through the metaphor of war and instead think of it as a dance, in which two creative individuals come together to produce something that neither could do alone.
+
+
+## asset
+
+Note: We might learn from theories of community engaged scholarship which, as my colleague Burt Bargerstock has told me, have recognized the damage that a deficit model of engagement has produced -- saying to the community, in effect, you have a problem and we're here to fix it -- and instead focus on an asset model: your community has these strengths, and we as scholars have these others, and together we might do something remarkable.
+
+
+## improv
+
+Note: Or we might think of ways that the work that we do together in the classroom could learn from improvisational comedy, which operates within an ethos of "yes, and." Saying "no" to an improv partner can derail a scene in progress; contradicting what's already happened in order to go a different direction fragments the scenario and shuts down possibility. "Yes, and" instead builds on what's been established, even if in order to go somewhere entirely new.
+
+
+## generous argument
+
+Note: All of these models begin to suggest what a more generous model of argument might provide, one based on building something collective rather than tearing down our predecessors in order to promote our own ideas. Generous argument might help us frame ways of thinking that focus on higher education as a means of fostering community rather than providing individual benefit. And this, as I argue at length in _Generous Thinking_, is key to the future of the university: we have to find our way back to an understanding of the university's work as grounded in service to a broadly construed public, and that requires all of us -- faculty, students, staff, administrators, trustees -- reframing the good that higher education provides as a social good, a collective and communal good, rather than a personal, private, individual one.
+
+
+## generous assessment
+
+Note: Of course, if we are really going to effect this transformation -- what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about the values that underwrite higher education -- we're going to have to think differently about how we measure our success as well. About what success means in the first place. If we're going to move away from the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom, hyper individualistic, competitive mode of achievement, in which all outcomes are understood to be individual and are therefore assessed at that level, and instead foster more collective goals, we're going to need to think carefully about what we're assessing and why. How might we instead focus our modes of assessment at all levels, and the rewards that follow, on collaboration, on process?
+
+
+## us
+
+Note: If we're going to bring this mode of generous thinking, of generous argument, of generous assessment to bear on our classrooms, of course, we'd be well served by bringing it to bear on our work together first. We need to think seriously about how all of the processes that structure our professional lives -- not least our processes of hiring, of retention, of tenure and promotion -- might help to instantiate the values we want to bring to the work we do, rather than fostering the culture of competition, of invidious distinction, that colors all of the ways that we work today, and the environment within which our students learn.
+
+
+## critique
+
+Note: One cautionary note, however: I do not mean this emphasis on generosity, on a supportive engagement with the work that has gone before us, to be used as a means of defusing the important work that critique actually does in helping make ideas better. In the early days of working on _Generous Thinking_, I gave an invited talk in which I tested out some of its core ideas. In the question-and-answer period that followed, one commenter pointed out what he saw as a canny move on my part in talking about generosity: no one wanted to be seen as an ungenerous jerk in disagreeing with me. It was a funny moment, but it gave me real pause; I did not at all intend to use generosity as a shield with which to fend off the possibility of critique. Generosity, in fact, requires remaining open to criticism -- in fact, it requires recognizing the generous purposes that critique can serve. So in pressing for more generous modes of argument and more generous modes of assessment, I do not mean to impose a regime that is all rainbows and unicorns on us. Instead, what I'm hoping to ask is how we might all benefit from thinking *with* rather than *against* one another, *with* rather than *against* the arguments of our predecessors, and *with* rather than *against* our students in developing the knowledge that might make all of us better contributors to the social good.
+
+
+## questions
+
+Note: I've asked a lot of questions about what we might do and how it might work, and I'm not sure how many answers I have for them. In part, that's by design: the problems facing the university today are larger and more complicated than can be solved by any one mind working alone. They're going to require all of us, thinking together, building one one another's ideas, in order to create something new. And so I'm going to stop here, in the hopes that we might use the rest of this time to move from what *I say* to what *we say.* I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we might encourage more generous forms of argument in our classrooms, and how we might use that generosity to encourage new ways of being within the university.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
+
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+ Generous Thinking
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### A Radical Approach to Saving the University
+---
+
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start by thanking Vice Chancellor Drummond for inviting me to talk with you today, and Julie Yoder for all of her help with making sure that this visit could happen. This talk is a highly compressed overview of sorts of my book, _Generous Thinking_, which came out in early February from Johns Hopkins. The overall argument of the project is that the future of higher education demands that those of us on campus pay more attention to building relationships of trust with the publics that the university serves. My focus is particularly on the future of the American university, but I think most of it holds for those other nations that seem to be following our relentless course toward austerity and privatization.
+
+
+
+http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
+
+Note: Evidence of the need for rebuilding trusting relationships between universities and the public might be found in an increasing number of reports and studies such as this one, released in 2017 by the Pew Research Center, showing a precipitous decline in the esteem colleges and universities are held in in the United States, primarily on the political right. One frequent on-campus reaction to this kind of report, understandably, is to decry the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture, to turn inward, and to spend more time talking with those who understand us — meaning us. But in that reaction we run the risk of deepening the divide, allowing those who want to argue that today’s colleges and universities are not only irrelevant but actively detrimental to the well-being of the general public to say, “see? They’re out of touch. Who needs them anyway?” Because this shift in public opinion didn’t just happen; it was made to happen.
+
+
+
+http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions—even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service—have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the problem is not just that the public doesn’t understand the importance of what we do; it’s also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. So a large part of what I’m after in _Generous Thinking_ is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions _as_ communities, as well as _in interaction with_ communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work: asking us, in other words, to examine how our colleges and universities engage with the world. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot solve on our own.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises, I want to acknowledge, do not always give the impression of being life-threatening, world-historical, or approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we face today. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good—the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good—and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while some might take my argument, about the importance of generosity for the future of the university, to be a self-indulgent, head-in-the-sand retreat into philosophizing and a refusal of real political action, I hope, in the larger project, to have put together a case for why this is not so—why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. My argument is that we need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer may lie less in its power to advance knowledge or solve problems in any of its many fields than in our more crucial ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# “we”
+
+Note: But first: who is this “we” I keep referring to, what is it precisely that we do, and why does it matter? Much of my argument focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate—at least in theory—suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But I want to be careful with the ways that I deploy this “we”; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> “The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole.”
+> —Helen Small
+
+Note: “The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole.” I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, and that it might become possible for the “we” that I am addressing to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities. But it’s important to acknowledge that the “we” that bears the greatest responsibility for caring for the university and for building relationships between the university and the broader publics that it serves, and thus the most immediate antecedent for my “we,” is those of us on campus, and especially the faculty.
+
+
+# “them”
+
+Note: Every "we" implies a "them," of course, and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly to serve the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other that at times gets imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that takes in information we provide. What might it mean if we understood them as a complex collection of communities -- not just groups who interact with one another and with us, but groups of which we are in fact a part? How might this lead to a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
+
+
+# “community”
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the university itself as a community, but we don't talk a lot about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. "Community" in the singular—"the community"—also runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we are able to understand community instead as multiple and multifarious, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to think of community as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. And this sense of solidarity is a key part of the university's recent past, one of the important elements of its history that has been undone by recent political shifts. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, the student-led calls for institutional change in the 1960s and 1970s in many ways focused on the potential that the university held -- and failed to meet -- for connecting with the communities around it. Instead, our institutions have turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can be built.
+
+
+# liberal education
+
+Note: However, in building those relationships, we have to contend with the fact that what faculty members actually do on our campuses is often a mystery, and indeed a site of profound misunderstanding, for people outside the academic profession, and even at times for one another. One of the key areas of misunderstanding, and one that most needs opening up, is the fundamental purpose of higher education. Public figures such as politicians increasingly discuss colleges and universities as sites of workforce preparation, making it seem as if the provision of career-enhancing credentials were the sole purpose for which our institutions exist, and as if everything else they do that does not lead directly to economic growth were a misappropriation of resources. Those of us who work on campus, however, understand our institutions not as credentialing agencies but as sites of broad-based education: a “liberal” education in the original sense of the term. Of course the very term "liberal education," so natural to those of us who are engaged in it, has itself become profoundly politicized, as if the liberal aspect of higher education were not its breadth but its ideological bent. So we see, for instance, Colorado stripping the term out of official university documents. But even where the concept of liberal education isn't imagined to be a cover for some revolution we're fomenting on campus, there’s a widespread misconception about it that’s almost worse: it is a mode of education in which we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students’ heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path.
+
+
+# humanities
+
+Note: And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities. The portrait I’m about to sketch of the humanities today could be extended to many other areas within the curriculum—for example, the sciences’ focus on “basic science,” or science without direct industry applicability, is often imagined to be just as frivolous. But the humanities—the study of literature, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of culture—are in certain ways both the core and the limit case of the liberal arts. The humanities cultivate an inquisitive mindset, they teach key skills of reading and interpretation, and they focus on writing in ways that can prepare a student to learn absolutely anything else over the course of their lives—and yet they are the fields around which no end of hilarious jokes about what a student might actually do with that degree have been constructed. (The answer, of course: absolutely anything. As a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes clear, not only do humanities majors wind up gainfully employed, but they also wind up happy. But I digress.) The key thing to note is that the humanities serve as a bellwether of sorts: what has been happening to them is happening to higher education in general, if a little more slowly. So while I focus a bit on the kinds of arguments that are being made about the humanities in our culture today, it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to imagine them being made about sociology, or about physics, or about any other field on campus that isn’t named after a specific, well-paying career.
+
+
+# marginalization
+
+Note: The humanities, in any case, have long been lauded as providing students with a rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills with which they can engage the world around them. These skills are increasingly necessary in today’s hypermediated, globalized, conflict-filled world—and yet many humanities departments feel themselves increasingly marginalized within their own institutions. This marginalization is related, if not directly attributable, to the degree to which students, parents, administrators, trustees, politicians, the media, and the public at large have been led in a self-reinforcing cycle to believe that the skills these fields provide are useless in the current economic environment. Someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about all those English majors working at Starbucks; commentators reinforce the sense that humanities majors are worth less than pre-professional degrees; parents strongly encourage their students to turn toward pragmatic fields that seem somehow to describe a job; administrators note a decline in humanities majors and cut budgets and positions; the jobs crisis for humanities PhDs worsens; someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about what all those adjuncts were planning on doing with that humanities PhD anyhow; and the whole thing intensifies. In many institutions, this draining away of majors and faculty and resources has reduced the humanities to a means of ensuring that students studying to become engineers and bankers are reminded of the human ends of their work. This is not a terrible thing in and of itself, but it is not a sufficient ground on which humanities fields can do their best work for the institution.
+
+
+# spreading
+
+Note: And while this kind of cyclical crisis has not manifested to anything like the same extent in the sciences, there are early indications that it may be spreading in that direction. Where once the world at large seemed mostly to understand that scientific research, and the kinds of study that support it, are crucial to the general advancement of knowledge, recent shifts in funder policies and priorities suggest a growing scrutiny of that work’s economic rather than educational impact, as well as a growing restriction on research areas that have been heavily politicized. The humanities, again, may well be the canary in the higher education coal mine, and for that reason, it’s crucial that we pay close attention to what’s happened in those fields, and particularly to the things that haven’t worked as the humanities have attempted to remedy the situation.
+
+
+# defense
+
+Note: One of the key things that hasn’t worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defenses of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy have been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which have had the desired impact. Calls to save the humanities issued by public figures have frequently left scholars annoyed, as they often begin with a somewhat retrograde sense of what we do and why, and thus frequently give the sense of trying to save our fields from us. (One might see, for instance, a column published in 2016 by the former chairman of the NEH, Bruce Cole, entitled “What’s Wrong with the Humanities?”, which begins memorably:
+
+
+> “Let’s face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.” —Bruce Cole
+
+Note: “Let’s face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.”) But perhaps even worse is the degree to which humanities professors themselves—those one would think best positioned to make the case—have failed to find traction with their arguments. As the unsuccessful defenses proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worse,
+
+
+> “Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." —Simon During
+
+Note: leading Simon During to grumble that “Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them.” And maybe we like it that way, as we are often those who take issue with our own defenses, bitterly disagreeing as we frequently do about the purposes and practices of our fields.
+
+
+# definition
+
+Note: Perhaps this is a good moment for us to stop and consider what it is that the humanities do do well, what the humanities are for. I will start with a basic definition of the humanities as a cluster of fields that focus on the careful study and analysis of cultures and their many modes of thought and forms of representation—writing, music, art, media, and so on—as they have developed and moved through time and across geographical boundaries, growing out of and adding to our senses of who we are as individuals, as groups, and as nations. The humanities are interested, then, in the ways that representations work, in the relationships between representations and social structures, in all the ways that human ideas and their expression shape and are shaped by human culture. In this definition we might begin to see the possibility that studying literature or history or art or film or philosophy might not be solely about the object itself, but instead about a way of engaging with the world: in the process we develop the ability to read and interpret what we see and hear, the insight to understand the multiple layers of what is being communicated and why, and the capacity to put together for ourselves an appropriate, thoughtful contribution.
+
+
+# disagreement
+
+Note: Now, the first thing to note about this definition is that I am certain that many humanities scholars who hear it will disagree with it—they will have nuances and correctives to offer—and it is important to understand that this disagreement does not necessarily mean that my definition is wrong. Nor, however, do I mean to suggest that the nuances and correctives presented would be wrong. Rather, that form of disagreement is at the heart of how we do what we do: we hear one another’s interpretations (of texts, of performances, of historical events) and we push back against them. We advance the work in our field through disagreement and revision. This agonistic approach, however, is both a strength of the humanities—and by extension of the university in general—and its Achilles’ heel, a thought to which I’ll return shortly.
+
+
+# sermonizing
+
+Note: For the moment, though, back to Simon During and his sense that the humanities are terrible at self-promotion. During’s complaint, levied at the essays included in Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewitt’s volume, _The Humanities and Public Life_, is largely that, in the act of self-defense, humanities scholars leave behind doing what they do and instead turn to “sermonizing” (his word) about the value of what they do. He argues that part of the problem is the assumption that the humanities as we practice them ought to have a public life in the first place. He winds up suggesting that we should continue to ensure that there is sufficient state support for the humanities so that students who do not already occupy a position of financial comfort can study our fields, but that we should not stretch beyond that point, arguing for the public importance of studying the humanities, because that importance is primarily, overwhelmingly, private.
+
+
+# privatization
+
+Note: This sense that education in the humanities is of primarily private value is everywhere in today’s popular discourse extended to higher education in general: the purpose, we are told, of a college degree is some form of personal enrichment, whether financial or otherwise, rather than a social good. This privatization of higher education’s benefits—part of the general privatization that Chris Newfield has referred to as the academy’s “great mistake”—has been accompanied by a similar shift in its costs from the state to individual families and students, resulting in the downward spiral in funding and other forms of public support in which our institutions and our fields are caught, as well as the astronomically increasing debt load faced by students and their families. As long as a university education is assumed to have a predominantly personal rather than social benefit, it will be argued that making such an education possible is a private rather than a public responsibility. And that mindset will of necessity lead to the devaluation of fields whose benefits are less immediately tangible, less material, less individual. If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.
+
+
+# public good
+
+Note: But what is that public good? We don’t do a terribly good job of articulating these things. In fact, despite the role so many of us have as professors, we often seem to have a hard time professing, describing what we do and arguing on behalf of the values that sustain our work. It’s hard to express our values without recourse to what feel to us like politically regressive, universalizing master narratives about the nature of the good that have long been used as means of solidifying and perpetuating the social order, with all its injustices and exclusions. And so instead of stating clearly and passionately the ethics and values and goals that we bring to our work, we critique. We protect ourselves with what Lisa Ruddick has described as “the game of academic cool”: in order to avoid appearing naïve—or worse, complicit—we complicate; we argue; we read against the grain.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: This mode of critique gets mistaken in public discourse for being primarily ideological in intent and effect; this is how our universities come to be accused of “brainwashing” their students, filling their heads with leftist rejections of the basic goodness of the dominant western culture. On campus, we know that’s not the case. The political and social commitments behind much of our work are real, and crucial, but even our most critical reading practices turn out to be perfectly compatible with the contemporary political landscape. In fact, I would argue that our critiques of contemporary culture do not simply surface out of our social commitments. Rather, they surface not just despite but because of the conservative-leaning systems and structures in which the university as a whole, and each of us as a result, is mired. Our tendency to read against the grain is part of our makeup precisely because of the ways that we are ourselves subject to politics rather than being able to stand outside and neutrally analyze the political. The politics we are subject to structures all institutions in the contemporary United States, and perhaps especially universities, a politics that makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before. It is a politics structured around competition, and what historian Winfried Fluck has referred to as the race for individual distinction.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives—on campus and off—are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. Beginning with college applications, extending through graduate school admissions, fellowship applications, the job market, publication submissions, and, seemingly finally, the tenure and promotion review, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which applicants are measured, and the best—whatever that might mean in a given context—are rewarded. In actual practice, however, those metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. Always, in the unconscious of the profession, there is competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can’t ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we’re working together. The competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed individually, with the result that even those fields whose advancement depends most on team-based efforts are required to develop careful guidelines for establishing credit and priority.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: This competitive individualism contradicts—and in fact undermines—all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning, but in actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly managed by administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. This is no way to run a collective. It’s also no way to structure a fulfilling life: this disengagement from community and race for individual distinction is a key factor in the extremely high risk of burnout among college faculty and other intellectual workers. It is all but impossible for us to structure our lives around the things that are most in line with our deepest personal values when we are driven to focus on those things that will allow us to compare ourselves—or our institutions—favorably with one another. This individualistic, competitive requirement is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social. And no amount of trying to persuade ourselves, or our administrations, or our legislatures of the public good that we, our fields, and our institutions serve will take root unless we figure out how to step off the competitive track, to insist upon living our academic lives another way.
+
+
+# ruins
+
+Note: Worse, scholars’ internalization of the individualistic imperative to compete has provided an inroad into higher education for some forces that are hastening its disintegration. Bill Readings, in _The University in Ruins_, powerfully traces the transition of the purposes of higher education from the propagation of the culture of the nation-state and the training of its citizens therein, through an important period of resistance and protest that did the crucial work of opening up both access to higher education and the canon that it taught, to its current role, which seems to be the production of value (both intellectual and human) for global capital. This is to say that many of our critiques of our fields and our institutions are well-founded: they were developed in order to cultivate a particular model of citizenship based on exclusion and oppression and focused on the reproduction of state power. The problem is that in the absence of such a clear if problematic goal, the purpose of higher education has drifted. As in so many other areas of the contemporary public world, where the state has lost authority, corporate interests have interceded; the university may no longer promote exclusion and oppression in training state citizens, but it reinstantiates it in a new guise by turning to training corporate citizens. Even worse, rejecting or critiquing that purpose is simply not working: not only is capital extraordinarily able to absorb all critique and to marginalize those who make it, but our inability to stop competing with one another ensures that our critique is contained within the forces of the market that we serve. Perhaps we might have reached, as Rita Felski suggests, the limits of critique; perhaps we might need to adopt a new mode of approach in order to make a dent in the systems that hem us in.
+
+
+# the critique of critique
+
+Note: But that is not to say that I am rejecting critique, or critical thinking. Critical thinking is at the heart of what scholars do. Not only would we be justified in rejecting any suggestion that we abandon it, or abandon the commitments that underwrite it, in favor of an approach that might be more friendly, but we’d also be well within reason if we were to point out that the critique of critique _is still critique_, that it makes use of criticism’s negative mode in the very act of negating it. Moreover, the critique of critique is too often driven either by a disdain for difficulty or by a rejection of the political in scholarly work.
+
+
+# connection
+
+Note: I want to suggest, however, that though these rejections and dismissals undoubtedly lie behind the calls for comprehensibility and the return to tradition in our work—see again Bruce Cole—they aren’t the only things there. These calls may be at least in part a sign of the degree to which people care about our subject matter, about literature or history or art. They might indicate the degree to which people want on some level to engage with us, and the ways they feel rejected by us. There is grave political opposition to much of the work that is done on our college campuses today, and I do not at all wish to dismiss the threat that opposition can pose, but I also want to suggest that even that glimmer of care for our subject matter creates the opportunity, if we take it seriously, to create forms of connection and dialogue that might help further rather than stymie the work that we do.
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: Some of my thinking about ways that attention to such care might encourage scholars to approach the work that we do from a slightly different perspective has developed out of a talk I heard a couple of years ago by David Scobey, then the dean of the New School for Public Engagement. His suggestion was that scholarly work in the humanities is in a kind of imbalance, that critical thinking has dominated at the expense of a more socially-directed mode of what he called “generous thinking,” and that a recalibration of the balance between the two might enable us to make possible a greater public commitment in our work, which in turn might inspire a greater public commitment to our work. My project, having drawn its title from Scobey, obviously builds on his argument, but with one key revision: generous thinking is not and should not be opposed to critical thinking. In fact, the two should be fully aligned, and my hope is to help guide us toward modes of working that allow us to more fruitfully connect the generous and the critical in scholarly work. Rather, the dark opposite of generous thinking, that which has in fact created an imbalance in scholarly work is competitive thinking, thinking that is compelled by what sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen called invidious comparison, or what Fluck refers to as the race for professional distinction. It is the competitive that has undermined the capacity for coalition-building, both within our campuses and between our campuses and the broader public. Entirely new discussions, new relationships, new projects might be possible if our critical thinking practices refused competition and were instead grounded in generosity.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What is it I mean when I talk about generosity in this context? The book spends much more time exploring this question, but for the moment: what I’m hoping to develop, in myself most of all, is a generosity of mind, an openness to possibility. That openness begins for me by trying to develop a listening presence in the world, which is to say a conversational disposition that is not merely waiting for my next opportunity to speak but instead genuinely focusing on what is being said, beginning from the assumption that in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn. Generous thinking also means working to think with rather than against, whether the objects of those prepositions are texts or people. It means starting an encounter with a text or an idea with _yes_ rather than _no_, with _and_ rather than _but_. _Yes, and_ creates the possibility for genuine dialogue, not only among academic colleagues but with our objects of study, our predecessors, and the many potential publics that surround us. _Yes, and_ requires us to step away from competition, from the race for professional distinction; when we allow ourselves to linger in _yes, and_, we create the possibility of working together to build something entirely new.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: This mode of generous thinking is already instantiated in many projects that focus on fostering public engagement in and through the work done in colleges and universities. Public projects like these are well-established on many campuses around the country and in many fields across the curriculum. But one key aspect of understanding generosity as the ground from which the work of the university can and should grow is the requirement that all of us take such public projects just as seriously as the more traditional forms of scholarly work that circulate amongst ourselves. Scholars working in public history, just as one example, have some important stories to tell about the difficulties they have faced in getting work in that field appropriately evaluated and credited as scholarship. And a few years ago, after a talk in which a well-respected scholar discussed the expanding possibilities for careers in the public humanities, I overheard a senior scholar say with some bemusement, “I take the point, but I don’t think it works in all fields. There’s long been a ‘public history.’ But can you imagine a ‘public literary criticism’?” His interlocutor chortled bemusedly: the very idea. But the world has long been filled with public literary criticism, from public reading projects to book reviews to fan production, modes of literary work that reach out to non-specialist audiences and draw them into the kinds of interpretation and analysis that we profess.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: Resistance to taking such public projects as seriously as the work we do for one another—according them the same kinds of credit and prestige as traditional publications—speaks to one of two things: first, our anxieties (and they are very real) about deprofessionalization; and second, to our continued (and I would argue profoundly misguided) division and ordering of the various categories to which academic labor is committed, with a completely distinct category called “service” almost inevitably coming in a distant third behind research and teaching. Grounding our work in a spirit of generosity might lead us to erase some of the boundaries between the work that faculty do to support the engagements of readers and instructors both inside and outside the academy, and the work that we consider to be genuinely “scholarly.” A proper valuation of public engagement in scholarly life, however, will require a systemic rethinking of the role that prestige plays in the academic reward system—and this, as I discuss late in the book, is no small task. It is, however, crucial to a renewed understanding of the relationship between the university and the public good.
+
+
+# collaboration
+
+Note: Similarly, grounding our work in generous thinking might not only encourage us to adopt a position of greater openness to dialogue with our communities, and might not only foster projects that are more publicly engaged, but it might also lead us to place a greater emphasis on—and to attribute a greater value to—collaboration in academic life. It might encourage us to support and value various means of working in the open, of sharing our writing at more and earlier stages in the process of its development, and of making the results of our research more readily accessible to and usable by more readers. Scholarly work often presupposes a deep knowledge of a subject, not just on the part of the speaker but of the listener as well, and at its most competitive can forbid engagement by all but a select few. Generous, generative modes of critical thinking might invite others into our discussions as they develop, bringing them along in the process of discovery.
+
+
+# naïveté
+
+Note: But I want to acknowledge that adopting a mode of generous thinking is a task that is simultaneously extremely difficult and easily dismissible. We are accustomed to finding “smart” ways of thinking that rebut, that question, that complicate. The kinds of listening and openness for which I am here advocating may well be taken as acceding to a form of cultural naïveté at best, or worse, a politically regressive knuckling-under to the pressures of contemporary ideologies and institutions. I want to suggest, however, that in embracing competitive modes of "smartness" we are already well within the grip of the neoliberal order, and at great cost -- not only to individual scholars in setting a course toward stress-related burnout, but to scholars collectively in undermining our ability to understand ourselves as a community, one capable of disagreeing profoundly and yet still coming together in solidarity to argue for our collective interests. What might become possible for us if we were to retain the social commitment that motivates our critical work while stepping off the field of competition, opening ourselves and our work to its many potential connections and conversations?
+
+
+# wrong
+
+Note: Such an opening would require us to place ourselves in a new relationship to our objects of study and their many audiences; we would need to be prepared to listen to what they have to tell us, to ask questions that are designed to elicit more about their interests than about ours. That is to say, we would need to open ourselves to the possibility that our ideas might turn out to be wrong. This, it may not surprise you to hear, is an alarming possibility not just for most scholars but for most human beings to countenance, but given what Kathryn Schulz has called the “Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything,” it is all but certain that at some future moment our own blind spots, biases, and points of general ignorance will have been uncovered. But there's good news in this: if everything we write today already bears within it a future anterior in which it will have been demonstrated to be wrong-headed, there opens up the chance to explore a new path, one along which we develop not just a form of critical audacity but also a kind of critical humility.
+
+
+# critical humility
+
+Note: Critical humility is one key to generous thinking. In the early days of working on this project, I gave an invited talk in which I tested out some of its core ideas. In the question-and-answer period that followed, one commenter pointed out what he saw as a canny move on my part in talking about generosity: no one wanted to be seen as an ungenerous jerk in disagreeing with me. It was a funny moment, but it gave me real pause; I did not at all intend to use generosity as a shield with which to fend off the possibility of critique. Generosity, in fact, requires remaining open to criticism. This tension was powerfully illustrated for me in a series of tweets from April Hathcock, a scholarly communications librarian who was recently engaged in establishing a new working group in her field. As the members of that working group laid out their expectations and norms for one another, one member offered “assume positive intent”: be generous, in other words, in interpreting the behavior and words of others. Hathcock insisted that this expectation be accompanied by another: “own negative effects.”
+
+
+> "Assume positive intent; own negative effects." —April Hathcock
+
+Note: That is to say, we must not only refrain from assuming that everyone else is in the wrong, but we also must remain open to the very real possibility that we might be. This is generosity accompanied by critical humility, a mode that creates space for genuinely listening to the ideas and experiences of others, even when they contradict or critique our own. // It is probably unnecessary to point out that critical humility is neither selected for nor encouraged in the academy, and it is certainly not cultivated in graduate school. Quite the opposite, at least in my experience: everything in the environment of the seminar room makes flirting with being wrong unthinkable. A real critical humility—stepping outside competition and into generosity—can open up new space for discovery, but only if we are free to let go, just a tiny bit, of the necessity of being right.
+
+
+# discomfort
+
+Note: The possibility of being wrong is not the only area of discomfort that foregrounding generosity in our thinking might expose us to, however. In turning away from the competitive, we might be asked to shed the adopted position of the neutral, impartial, critical observer and instead become full participants in the work and world around us. This might mean being able to more readily and wholeheartedly profess our feelings for our subject matter without fear of sounding naïve or hokey, but it might also mean opening ourselves to more communal experiences of other emotions as well, some of them ours, and some of them directed at us: anxiety, fear, anger. Genuine generosity as I intend it is not a feel-good emotion, but an at times painful, failure-filled process of what Dominick LaCapra has referred to as “empathic unsettlement,” which asks us to open ourselves to difference as fully as possible without trying to tamp it down into bland “understanding.” This kind of ethical engagement can be a hallmark of the university, if we open ourselves and our institutions to the opportunities that genuinely being in community might create.
+
+
+# what if
+
+Note: So what if—and this flurry should be taken as a series of genuinely open rather than rhetorical questions—what if the university’s values and commitments made it possible for those of us who work on campus to develop a new understanding of how expertise is structured and how it functions, an understanding focused just a bit less on individual achievement, on invidious distinction? What if the expertise that the university cultivated were at its root connected to building forms of collectivity, solidarity, and community both on campus and off? What if the communities around the campus were invited to be part of these processes? How might we work together to break down the us-and-them divide between campus and public and instead create a richer, more complex sense of the connections among all of us? What kinds of public support for institutions of higher education might we be able to generate if we were able to argue persuasively on behalf of using scholarly work to cultivate community, of understanding ourselves in service to that community, while refusing to allow our administrations, our institutions, and our governments to lose sight of the fact that such service is a form of labor that is crucial to the future that we all share? What new purposes for the university might we imagine if we understand its role to be not inculcating state citizens, nor training corporate citizens, but instead facilitating the development of diverse, open communities—both on their campuses and across their borders—encouraged to think together, to be involved in the ongoing project of how we understand and shape our world?
+
+
+# possibilities
+
+Note: All of these possibilities that we open up—engaging perspectives other than our own, valuing the productions and manifestations of our multifarious culture, encountering the other in all its irreducible otherness—are the best of what the university can offer to the world. And all of these possibilities begin with cultivating the ability to think generously, to listen—to our subject matter, to our communities, to ourselves. There is much more to say, obviously—a whole book’s worth—but this listening presence, in which I am willing to countenance the possibility that I just might be wrong, is where I will now leave myself, ready to listen to you.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+ The Generous University
+
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+## The Public University
+---
+### and the Public Good
+---
+
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Antoinette and Jennifer and everyone else who made it possible for me to join you here for this event; I'm very much looking forward to the conversations that unfold tonight and tomorrow. This is also the point at which I've got to confess the liberties I've taken with our panel topic this evening. I have a book that's on its way out, entitled _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_, and it is inevitably coloring everything I'm thinking about right now.
+
+
+## saving the university
+
+Note: The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education — and especially _public_ institutions of higher education — is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can’t be made incrementally, that instead it requires — as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ — a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom notes,
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics. —Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
+
+
+## generous thinking
+
+Note: The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as “generous thinking,” focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+## big data
+
+Note: So the book does not make an argument about big data, or even about the digital more broadly, in that process, except to suggest that trying to solve the problems created by the current paradigm in higher education by applying the tools created by and for that paradigm is unlikely to work. Instead, the book argues that we need to focus on ways of working that enable and support empowered publics that might in turn have an interest in supporting the universities that serve them.
+
+
+## listening
+
+Note: So the book asks us to step back to some distinctly non-digital practices in thinking about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+## reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that our critical reading practices might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+## working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged projects, in order to bring the university’s resources to bear in helping work through community concerns. And this is where network-based technologies will undoubtedly have something to contribute to helping us connect and communicate with those communities.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) public engagement. And this is where the need for a paradigm shift -- for politics -- arises.
+
+
+
+http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
+
+Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study, currently available online in preprint form, entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." We've no doubt all got stories to tell that would support this conclusion, stories that illustrate the ways that the kinds of public-facing, community-oriented work that might best support the university's need for a closer relationship with the public goes un- or under-rewarded by the university.
+
+
+## the anecdote
+
+Note: Here's mine: Right around the time I began sketching the outline for this book, I attended a day-long workshop on new models for university press publishing, for which the provost of a large state research university had been invited to give a keynote address. The talk came during a day of intensive discussions amongst the workshop’s participants and university press and university library leaders, all of whom had a real stake in the future of the institution’s role in disseminating scholarly work as openly as possible. And the keynote was quite powerful: the provost described his campus’s efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty’s work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university’s singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our work up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
+
+
+## prestige
+
+Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-quality venues, conventionally understood. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising—really, reimagining—all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university’s core service mission? The provost’s response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
+
+
+## honest
+
+Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it’s that there is a shadow mission—competition—that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
+
+
+## the worst of it
+
+Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that _Generous Thinking_ is most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered—from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press—to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to “compete all the time” forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+## paradigm
+
+Note: That competition is the dominant paradigm under which universities operate today, a paradigm instituted and enforced by those universities' growing privatization. It is competition for faculty, for students, for funding, and above all for rankings, that replaces the public good with the quest for prestige, that turns our institutions from priding themselves on the communities they invite in to bragging about how many they turn away.
+
+
+
+http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: And it is that same concern for reputation that leads so many institutions to protect themselves instead of protecting the publics, the communities, the individuals that they are meant to serve. It is little wonder that universities are held in such low regard by so much of the voting public today: it is not just the rampant anti-intellectualism of contemporary American culture, but also the degree to which our institutions have repeatedly betrayed the trust that the public has placed in them.
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: In us. If we are going to turn this situation around, if we are going to convince the voting public that universities are deserving of public reinvestment, we have to effect a ground-up transformation in our institutions and the ways they work. That transformation cannot begin with new analytics, or new technologies, that derive from the neoliberal paradigm that is responsible for the damage in the first place. It cannot begin with new means of demonstrating the individual, competitive benefits that higher education can confer. It's got to start, instead, with new ways of thinking about who this "us" is, or can be.
+
+
+## community
+
+Note: These new ways of thinking about "us" have to take root both on campus and off, enabling us to understand ourselves both as a community and in a community. We need -- as I urged that provost -- to radically rethink our means of assessment, the relentless spread of metrics through which we are required to demonstrate success, and instead consider what measures might actually begin to reflect the deep values we bring to our work. And we need to contemplate what a higher education whose benefits were genuinely social rather than individual, public rather than private, might look like, and how focusing our work around those social benefits might help us find new means of building solidarity with the publics that our universities are intended to serve.
+
+
+## humanities
+
+Note: And all of that work is where we come in, the humanities and the arts, in demonstrating the generosity that underlies our critical thinking, and in using that generosity to foster and sustain more engaged, more articulated, more actualized publics. I've obviously got a lot more to say about this -- a whole book's worth -- but for the moment I'll leave things by saying that all of us -- faculty, staff, students, administrators, parents, trustees, and beyond -- have more to gain from abandoning competition, from working together, from understanding ourselves and our institutions as intimately connected, than we have to lose in the rankings.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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+ Sustainable Scholarly Communities
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+#### and Sustainable Scholarly Communities
+---
+ Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+Goethe University Frankfurt
+16 November 2021
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Tim for inviting me to talk with you. I'm delighted to have this opportunity.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what I have to say today grows out of the work I did in _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. And a key component of that work lies in recovering the public nature of that work by rejecting the privatization that has overtaken our campuses -- not least through the information systems that we invest in and deploy.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of my book's subtitle grows out of my sense that the necessary changes in front of us are HUGE, that they can't be made incrementally, that they instead require -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+> --Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem for the university, after all, begins with politics: the institutions that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, have been utterly undone. We face today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+## the public good
+
+Note: And the impact of individualism across our culture has similarly undermined the possibilities for collective action in a wide range of fields. In _Generous Thinking_, I ask the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, by returning its attention to the publics, and the public good, that it is intended to serve. And though I'm certain I'm preaching to the choir in much of this talk, I'm focused on that same message here today. Because however committed you as individuals are to the collective project that Apereo represents, most of you still work in institutions whose priorities and reward structures may not align with your own. And those reward structures must be changed.
+
+
+
+http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
+
+Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study by Juan Alperin and his colleagues entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." If the university is going to work toward the public good, that work has got to be rewarded -- and yet the current structure of higher education, the paradigm within which it operates, leaves such collaborative, community-oriented work un- or under-rewarded.
+
+
+## the anecdote
+
+Note: This problem first became painfully clear to me at a meeting of university libraries and the university presses that reported up through them. The meeting was keynoted by the highly distinguished provost of a large state research university, and it was an extraordinary talk. He described his campus's efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty's work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university's singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our research up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-ranked venues. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising -- really, reimagining -- all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university's core service mission? The provost's response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
+
+
+# honest
+
+Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it's that there is a shadow mission -- competition -- that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
+
+
+## the worst of it
+
+Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that _Generous Thinking_ was most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered -- from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press -- to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to "compete all the time" forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while we have been trapped for the last several decades in this mode of inter-institutional competition, higher education as a sector has been facing what Inside Higher Ed described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though that is undoubtedly there. Rather, this decline in confidence in higher education should ask us to contemplate what we believe higher education is for, and why the paradigm under which our institutions largely operate -- in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge -- has been in such a protracted conflict with the paradigm under which our function is understood in the broader culture, as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. Even more -- especially at a moment such as we are experiencing today -- it should make us consider whether in fact both of those paradigms are failing, and why.
+
+
+## Thomas Kuhn
+
+Note: As Thomas Kuhn noted in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, the failure of a scientific paradigm, as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account, throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely, one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the "period of pronounced professional insecurity" that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift, the cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. There is in 2020 zero question that cataclysm is all around us. My argument is that we must rethink our purpose and functioning altogether if we are to discover that new paradigm that allows higher education as we want it to be to survive.
+
+
+
+
+Note: _Generous Thinking_ explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education -- faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more -- to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead open the gates and focus on the university's role in building community.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But my colleagues and I have also been trying to think through this problem in a more pragmatic, applied for through _Humanities Commons_, a non-profit, community-developed and governed network serving humanities scholars and organizations. Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of _Generous Thinking_: first, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation -- even among those universities that we call "private" -- can allow us to build the kind of community that can sustain them.
+
+
+## community-supported infrastructure
+
+Note: And part of resisting privatization, for both scholars and their institutions, involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. This is true of a wide range of systems and platforms on which higher education relies, but perhaps nowhere has it become more pressing than in thinking about scholarly communication, both because these are the mechanisms through which the work of the academy is made public and because these are the systems that have been most deeply privatized at the direct expense of the academy. We -- libraries, publishers, and scholars -- need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education re-engage with the public good. But developing this form of collaborative, community-supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it, and the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable.
+
+
+
+http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/
+
+Note: And we need to think about these platforms precisely because of the extent to which the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery, data gathering and analysis, through writing, submission, and publishing, to dissemination, evaluation, and reporting, is increasingly concentrated in a very limited number of corporate hands.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Though the issues that I'm discussing long predate this particular moment, the risk they posed came into stark visibility in August 2017, when bepress announced that it had been purchased by the RELX Group, the multi-national parent company of publishing behemoth Elsevier. Bepress had of course been founded in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open-access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. Bepress thus grew out of the academy, and was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at its heart.
+
+
+
+
+Note: As the bepress website notes, over 500 institutions have purchased bepress services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly-accessible ways. And in one fell swoop, these 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing behemoths such as Elsevier.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure -- built and run by academics, for the academic community -- appeared to have been turned on that community. It's not as though anyone had been unaware that bepress was a commercial service all along, but they were one of the good guys, and the costs of outsourcing infrastructural needs to them had been balanced against the often impossible task of maintaining locally hosted repository and publishing systems. Bepress provided what many saw as best-of-breed functionality at a reasonable price, and it supported libraries' desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But the acquisition of bepress by RELX not only put libraries in the position of unintentionally supporting a growing corporate control not just of scholarly publishing but of the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery through production to communication; it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely in promoting greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. As a result, serious conversations have since focused on means of supporting open-source, academy-owned and -controlled infrastructure.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is not an impossible move, by any stretch, but it's harder than it might sound. Long-standing open-access, open-infrastructure projects like arXiv might suggest some possible areas of concern.
+
+
+
+
+Note: By every reasonable measure, arXiv has been exemplary -- in its uptake, in its independence, and in the ways that it has helped to transform the fields that it serves. But in some crucial ways, arXiv has experienced what can only be called "catastrophic success" -- a crucial, paradigm-shifting project whose growing annual operating costs and mounting infrastructural requirements have demanded increasingly creative mechanisms for the platform's support.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So in 2010, the arXiv team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource. But our institutions, as we unfortunately know, are largely unaccustomed to this work of cross-institutional collaboration. For one thing, they're far more prone to understand such resources as terrain for competition, and for another, the community-building required becomes yet another form of labor added on top of maintaining the resources themselves.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I do not know the extent to which such difficulties may have played a role in arXiv's 2019 move from the Library to Cornell Computing and Information Science. It's entirely likely that the move is a matter of infrastructural pragmatics. But even so, the challenges of maintaining the kind of cross-institutional coalition necessary to sustain such a crucial resource remain.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Another example, with a different narrative, might be found in the Samvera project. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories rely, developers at a number of institutions have come together to create a collective solution. As the proverb and their website have it, if you want to go far, go together.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But this distributed developer community, like all such communities, has faced some challenges in coordination, challenges that have caused it, as the proverb also reminds us, to go more slowly than it might. It has also run the risk of fragmenting project priorities. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers involved in the project but of the institutions for which the developers actually work is not a simple matter.
+
+
+# sustainability
+
+Note: The foundation of the challenges that arXiv and Samvera have faced is the same challenge faced by any number of other projects and programs and initiatives: sustainability. This is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late, as my colleagues and I have been working to ensure that Humanities Commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And those attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point; they too would like to see the network thrive, but they cannot support it indefinitely. We need, they reasonably suggest, a plan for demonstrating that the network will, at some point in the future, be able to support itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models, in business plans, in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a non-profit entity forever tied to kinds of economic concerns that are very often divergent from, if not at odds with, the non-profit's primary mission. As a result, these non-profits remain forever precarious; one small miscalculation can make the difference between survival and collapse.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But sustainability broadly understood extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed -- or more waste produced -- than can be developed or managed in the near term.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There's technological sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects' future stability and growth.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All of these forms of sustainability are important, to varying degrees, to providing for the future of non-profit and open-source projects. But there's another form that gets a good bit less attention, and that I increasingly think precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability: social sustainability. The social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Ensuring that these commitments are sustained is, I increasingly think, a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward.
+
+
+# community
+
+Note: This notion -- of the role of "community" in community-supported software, and of the best ways of building and sustaining it -- raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. In an early chapter in _Generous Thinking_, I explore Miranda Joseph's argument that "community" is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life. In this sense, "community" becomes a relief valve of sorts for those structures, a way of mitigating the damage that they do. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network–based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises, rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education. "Community" becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: However, if we recognize that the communities that we form both on campus and off can be crucial organizing tools, ways of ensuring that our institutions meet their public obligations, we might start to think of the call to community as a form of coalition-building, of a developing solidarity. Solidarity itself is a concept that's been challenged, of course; there are important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom, and for whom. Women of color, for instance, have pointed out the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests. But I remain convinced that institutions of higher education must embrace forms of solidarity that do not demand that individuals seeking redress for institutionalized injustices drop their own issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those individuals are all of our issues too. This form of solidarity asks us to stand together in support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this form of solidarity, I am increasingly convinced, is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom was the first female Nobel laureate in economics and remained until 2019 the _only_ female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place.
+
+
+## common-pool resources
+
+Note: It's important first to focus in a bit on what is meant by the notion of common-pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" -- the overuse of shared natural resources -- can apply.
+
+
+## the "free rider" problem
+
+Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization.
+
+
+## _Governing the Commons_
+
+Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book _Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action_, this model -- like other such models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
+
+
+> What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies. -- Elinor Ostrom
+
+Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned software projects -- like arXiv, like Samvera, like Humanities Commons -- on which they should be able to rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the problem that community-developed projects were developed to evade. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So in summer 2018, Brett Bobley tweeted a question about ways of sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Cayless --
+
+
+
+
+Note: -- noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining such projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in _Generous Thinking_, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+# collaboration
+
+Note: But getting institutions to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside, is a huge part of what I've tried to do in _Generous Thinking_, and it's a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The project began its life at the Modern Language Association. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 to provide members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching the platform, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with colleagues in other areas in the humanities, so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields.
+
+
+
+
+Note: With further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons sites developed for several other society partners. But beyond these proprietary sites, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work, and so we made the decision to open the network's hub to anyone who wants to join -- across the disciplines, around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites, and they can deposit and share their work in the network's open-access repository. This fusion of a social network with a library-quality repository (adhering to commonly accepted metadata standards, employing digital object identifiers, and so on) means that not only is stuff being put into the repository, and not only can that stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used, as there's a community there with which it can be shared.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while fully opening the Humanities Commons hub to free participation by any interested scholar or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use -- three and a half years later, we have over 21,000 registered users -- it has created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms Humanities Commons from a common-pool resource into a club good, one whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the network if it were an exclusive service see the openness of the hub as diminishing the network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
+
+
+## sustainability and solidarity
+
+Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. And it's of course where your work in the various Apereo communities lies: your institutions may of course have different structures, different requirements, different needs. And yet you share the same goals: the development, distribution, and preservation of new forms of knowledge. That you are all here together, looking for ways to meet your shared goals despite your different local needs gives me hope.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: It's a key form of generosity, and one that more units on our campuses, and more institutions in their engagements with one another need to embrace. Because the bottom line is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not _other institutions of higher education_, not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather, it is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university, we're going to have to do together, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward the other units within our institutions, toward the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected, and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community-supported infrastructure, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thanks so much.
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- reveal.js
+About Me - Kathleen Fitzpatrick
+
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Giving talks is a major component of my scholarly practice, enabling me to share my work directly with a range of different audiences and engage with their responses as my projects evolve. This is a non-exhaustive collection of the presentations I've given over the last few years.
"Sustainability and Solidarity," keynote, Politics and Aesthetics of Obsolescence, University of Minnesota, 12 October 2018.
+
“The Public University and the Public Good”, invited presenter, Humanities and Arts in the Age of Big Data, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 4 October 2018.
+
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+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Toward a More Generous University
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thanks; happy to be here.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what follows builds on the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be understood as evidence that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. We find ourselves in a situation today, however, in which both of those paradigms are failing, if in different ways, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
+
+
+## generous thinking
+
+Note: My overall argument is that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It's going to require concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+## listening
+
+Note: So I ask us to think about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. This begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+## reading together
+
+Note: I also explore ways that our critical reading practices could be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+## working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged projects, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and public engagement. And this needs to begin with our engagement with one another on campus, and perhaps especially our engagement with our students.
+
+
+## students
+
+Note: Our students, after all, are our first and most important point of contact with the publics we serve. Our students come to us from a very wide range of backgrounds and with a very wide range of interests. Ensuring that we connect with them, that we work with them in creating the university's future, is job one. But I want to suggest that some of our students are learning habits of mind from us that ultimately work to undermine the future that we want to build.
+
+
+## seminar
+
+Note: My thinking in this project had several points of inception over the years, one of which was a moment in a graduate seminar I taught years ago, a moment that has come to feel emblematic of the situation of the contemporary university. I want to preface the story by saying that I offer it not as an indictment of the kids today, but rather of the m.o. of higher education since the last decades of the 20th century. So here's the scene: the seminar is in cultural studies, and is meant to provide an overview of some current questions in critical theory. I do not now remember what article it was we'd read for that class session, but I opened our discussion by asking for first responses. And three students in a row issued withering takedowns of the article, pointing to the author's methodological flaws and ideological weaknesses. After the third, I said okay, that's all important and I definitely want to dig into it, but let's back up a bit: what is the author's argument here? What is she trying to accomplish?
+
+
+## silence
+
+Note: Nothing. "It's not a trick question," I said. "What is this article about?" Now, I was a fair bit younger and less sure of myself at that point, and I immediately began wondering whether I'd asked a stupid question, whether the sudden failure to meet my gaze was a sign that I, like the author, was now being dismissed as having pedestrian interest in neoliberal forms of meaning-making that demonstrated my complicity with the systems of oppression within which I worked. But it gradually dawned on me that the problem with the question wasn't its stupidity but its unfamiliarity. The students were prepared to dismantle the argument, but not to examine how it was built.
+
+
+## they say / i say
+
+Note: The students in this seminar, like so many of us, had learned all too well the lessons of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's _They Say, I Say_: that the key move in academic argumentation is from what others have previously said to one's own -- almost always contrasting, and inevitably more interesting or correct -- contribution. That is to say, that the goal of critical thinking is to expose the flawed arguments of others in order to demonstrate the inherent rightness of our own.
+
+
+## conversation
+
+Note: The larger point that Graff and Birkenstein make in _They Say, I Say_ is a good and important one: that scholarship proceeds through conversation, and thus that scholarly argument begins with engaging with what others have said and then develops through one's own individual contribution to the discussion. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first part is that we are -- and when I say we, I mean human beings at this hour of the world -- we are by and large TERRIBLE at conversation. Witness any set of talking heads on television, or any Thanksgiving dinner table, or any department meeting: more often than not, we spend the time when other people are talking waiting for our own turn to speak, and we take what's being said to us mostly as a means of formulating our own response. We do not genuinely *listen*, but instead *react*. And the same is too often true of scholarly conversation: the primary purpose of engaging with what "they" have said is to get to the important bit -- what I am saying.
+
+
+## individualism
+
+Note: That's the first problem. The second is the assumption that what I am saying, my own individual contribution to the discussion, is genuinely individual, that it is my own. In no small part this stems from the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university -- an orientation inseparable from the individualism of the surrounding culture -- in which the entire institutional reward structure, including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and every other form of merit is determined by what I individually have done. Every tub sits on its own bottom, in other words, and if I am to succeed it must be based on my own individual accomplishments.
+
+
+## zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. We all find ourselves in an environment in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time.
+
+
+## competitive thinking
+
+Note: As a result, the mode of conversation promoted by _They Say, I Say_ has become less about the most important forms of critical thinking on which our work focuses -- engaging with what has been said before us and adding to the discussion -- than about competitive thinking. Competitive thinking is a hyperindividualistic mode of debate that suggests that we are in an endless struggle with one another, in which there is only room for so much success, for so much attention. In competitive thinking, the quest for academic and professional success requires us to defend our own positions, and attack others. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+## institutions
+
+Note: This analysis of course applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the institutional reward structures within which we operate privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions separate themselves from quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that we'll likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more productive.
+
+
+## teaching
+
+Note: But in the meantime, one of the places where we can begin to create a new ethos and transform the values that structure our institutions is in teaching. This is not to say that such transformation will be easy. We are working within a system that instills these notions of competition and individual achievement earlier and earlier, of course, as students come to us from elementary and secondary institutions increasingly structured around testing. Perhaps students aren't competing directly against one another in the moment of testing, but they are nonetheless being inculcated into at least two of competitive thinking's underpinnings: the responsibility of the individual for demonstrating mastery, and the significant consequences of being wrong.
+
+
+## wrong
+
+Note: And perhaps it's here that we see the origins of at least some of our students' -- and our -- terror of being wrong. Wrong means failure. Wrong brings shame. But wrong is inevitable, a horrible thought. And so if we can't avoid being wrong, we can certainly refuse to acknowledge when we're wrong; as Kathryn Schulz has explored, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid recognizing their wrongness. But of course there is no real thinking without the possibility of being wrong. Without being willing to be wrong, we can't hypothesize, we can't experiment, we can't create. We can't imagine new possibilities. We can't dream. But we are hard-wired not to admit the possibility that we might be wrong.
+
+
+## you're wrong
+
+Note: And one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong -- and again, by "we" here, I mean both to point to academics in particular and to humans living at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century in general -- again, one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong is by demonstrating the inherent wrongness in everyone else's ideas. In the academy, and perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, this takes the form of critique: if I can demonstrate what's wrong with your ideas, it must mean that my ideas are better.
+
+
+## critique
+
+Note: This is the upshot of _They Say, I Say_, and it's what leads to the situation I faced in my graduate seminar: we have armed our students with all the most important tools of critique. They are ready to unpack and dismantle. They are well-trained, that is to say, in playing what Peter Elbow once referred to as the doubting game, in which they focus on the parts of an idea that could be wrong and what it might mean if they were. But they have -- and if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we all have -- a tendency to skip the half of the game that's supposed to come first: the believing game, in which we focus on what it might mean if the idea were right. The m.o. of _They Say, I Say_, in other words, encourages us to dismiss what "they say" as quickly as possible, in order to get on to the more crucial "I say," the part for which we will actually get credit.
+
+
+## critical thinking
+
+Note: I want to be clear here: there is a LOT of what "they say" that in fact should be pushed back against. There's a lot out there worth doubting. I'm not asking us not to disagree, not to push new ideas forward, not to think critically. I am, however, hoping that we might find ways to remember that critical thinking requires deep understanding and even generosity as a prerequisite.
+
+
+## generosity
+
+Note: So what I want to ask today is what we and our students might gain from slowing the process down a bit, from emphasizing the believing game before leaping to the doubting game, from lingering a bit longer in the "they say." We might, just as a start, find that we all become better listeners. We might open up new ground for mutual understanding, even with those with whom we most disagree.
+
+
+## we say
+
+Note: And we might find ourselves moving less from "they say" to "I say" than instead to "we say," thinking additively and collaboratively about what we might build together rather than understanding our own ideas to require vanquishing everyone else's. We might, as Lakoff and Johnson have suggested, move away from understanding argument through the metaphor of war and instead think of it as a dance, in which two creative individuals come together to produce something that neither could do alone.
+
+
+## asset
+
+Note: We might learn from theories of community engaged scholarship which, as my colleague Burt Bargerstock has told me, have recognized the damage that a deficit model of engagement has produced -- saying to the community, in effect, you have a problem and we're here to fix it -- and instead focus on an asset model: your community has these strengths, and we as scholars have these others, and together we might do something remarkable.
+
+
+## improv
+
+Note: Or we might think of ways that the work that we do together in the classroom could learn from improvisational comedy, which operates within an ethos of "yes, and." Saying "no" to an improv partner can derail a scene in progress; contradicting what's already happened in order to go a different direction fragments the scenario and shuts down possibility. "Yes, and" instead builds on what's been established, even if in order to go somewhere entirely new.
+
+
+## generous university
+
+Note: All of these models begin to suggest what a more generous university might look like, one based on building something collective rather than tearing down our predecessors in order to promote our own ideas. Generosity might help us frame ways of thinking that focus on higher education as a means of fostering community rather than providing individual benefit. And this is key to the future of the university: we have to find our way back to an understanding of the university's work as grounded in service to a broadly construed public, and that requires all of us -- faculty, students, staff, administrators, trustees -- reframing the good that higher education provides as a social good, a collective and communal good, rather than a personal, private, individual one.
+
+
+## generous assessment
+
+Note: Of course, if we are really going to effect this transformation -- what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about the values that underwrite higher education -- we're going to have to think differently about how we measure our success as well. About what success means in the first place. If we're going to move away from the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom, hyper individualistic, competitive mode of achievement, in which all outcomes are understood to be individual and are therefore assessed at that level, and instead foster more collective goals, we're going to need to think carefully about what we're assessing and why. How might we instead focus our modes of assessment at all levels, and the rewards that follow, on collaboration, on process?
+
+
+## us
+
+Note: And that's of course not just about assessing our students; it's about our own professional reviews and evaluations as well. We need to think seriously about, and to press our institutions on, ways that all of the processes that structure our professional lives -- not least our processes of hiring, of retention, of tenure and promotion -- might help to instantiate the values we want to bring to the work we do, rather than fostering the culture of competition, of invidious distinction, that colors all of the ways that we work today.
+
+
+## critique
+
+Note: One cautionary note, however: I do not mean this emphasis on generosity, on a supportive engagement with the work that has gone before us, to be used as a means of defusing the important work that critique actually does in helping make ideas better. In the early days of working on _Generous Thinking_, I gave an invited talk in which I tested out some of its core ideas. In the Q-and-A that followed, one commenter pointed out what he saw as a canny move on my part in talking about generosity: no one wanted to be seen as an ungenerous jerk in disagreeing with me. It was a funny moment, but it gave me real pause; I did not at all intend to use generosity as a shield with which to fend off the possibility of critique. Generosity, in fact, requires remaining open to criticism -- in fact, it requires recognizing the generous purposes that critique can serve. So in pressing for more generous modes of working, I do not mean to impose a regime that is all rainbows and unicorns on us. Instead, what I'm hoping to ask is how we might all benefit from thinking *with* rather than *against* one another in developing the knowledge that might make all of us better contributors to the social good.
+
+
+## questions
+
+Note: I've asked a lot of questions about what we might do and how it might work, and I'm not sure how many answers I have for them. In part, that's by design: the problems facing the university today are larger and more complicated than can be solved by any one mind working alone. They're going to require all of us, thinking together, building one one another's ideas, in order to create something new. And so I'm going to stop here, both to hand things over to my colleague to talk about ways we might begin that process, but also in the hopes that we might use our discussion period to move from what *I say* to what *we say.* I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we might encourage more generous ways of being across the university.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
+
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+ Generosity, Collaboration, and the Common Good
+
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+## Generosity, Collaboration, and the Common Good
+---
+### Platform as Scholarly Practice
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+INKE, 24 January 2022
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Ray and Alyssa and Graham and the rest of the INKE and HSS Commons teams for inviting me to talk with you today. I'm delighted to have this opportunity to get to contribute to the launch of HSS Commons and to talk a bit with you about a few issues that have been worrying me with respect to the present course of higher education, as well as what my colleagues and I have been trying to do about it.
+
+
+
+mlive.com
+
+Note: All of this starts, alas, with economics, and the lock it has on contemporary ideas about the public good. In June 2021, an independent economic group released a report indicating that the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University together boosted the state economy by $19.3 billion in 2019 -- a figure that they went on to note is *more than 20 times* the funding provided to them by the state. This is an extraordinary report, which confirms what we all know: public research universities are crucial contributors to the economic well-being of their communities. Our universities not only conduct the research and development that leads to new business opportunities in the state, but they also build an educated workforce ready to take on the challenges our communities face now and into the future.
+
+This is great news, and it's particularly great to have numbers that can be used in arguments about the value of public investment in institutions of higher education, especially at a moment when relationships between legislatures and boards of trustees and universities are strained. But I want to spend a bit of time today talking about why reports like this make me nervous. It may sound odd, but frankly it's because they do *too good a job* of tying the public vision of the value of the university to its economic impact, and in the process they inadvertently run the risk of undermining the purpose of the university as a broad service to the public rather than an engine of economic growth, and thus the ways that investments in the *non-money-making parts* of the university pay off in the public good.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@m_b_m
+
+Note: In other words, the danger of a report like this one, as positive as its results are, is that it speaks to a particular mindset in American culture that is primed to hear it, with the result that it completely overshadows all of the good that the university does in areas other than the economic. That focus on economic impact may be fine in good times, when taxpayers and legislators feel like they can afford to invest in a broad range of kinds of exploration and education on campus. But in bad times, when budgets are tight and jobs are scarce, many begin to look at those kinds of exploration that don't have obvious or direct economic benefits as "luxuries," as frivolous, as extraneous to the institution's mission -- precisely because the institution's mission, and the public good that it serves, have come to be wholly tied to ideas about economic growth.
+
+There is, in other words, a deeply ingrained mindset in American culture (and that, unfortunately, appears to be one of our primary exports) that lends itself to the assumption that economic development -- both at the social level and at the individual level -- is the primary good that the university can and should serve. This is a mindset that I would love to see us work on changing. It has its underpinnings in our faith in the extraordinary creative potential unleashed by capitalism, but it leads to the assumption that all of the problems in the contemporary world can and should be approached through market-based solutions.
+
+
+# #neoliberalism
+
+Note: This tight focus on the market as the telos of contemporary life is often discussed under the umbrella of "neoliberalism" on campus. "Neoliberalism" is admittedly one of those terms that has been so relentlessly misunderstood and misused that it's become a kind of caricature, an empty critique with all the force that "bourgeois" had in the early 1970s. It's the kind of term that causes a lot of people just to stop listening, because we know that what's coming is (a) profoundly ideological, and (b) likely not to mean exactly what its speaker thinks it means.
+
+But neoliberalism is nonetheless an important concept, and one that can tell us a lot about what's happened within western culture since the early 1980s -- the forces that have encouraged the public to question the value of institutions of higher education, as well as the other forms of public investment in the public good. In fact, it's part of what's surfaced the question of whether there even *is* such a thing as the public good. Just as Margaret Thatcher argued in the 1980s that there was no such thing as "society," but instead only individuals and families that needed to look out for themselves, so we find today a predominant political perspective in this country that holds that all goods are and should be private rather than public, individual rather than social.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@stri_khedonia
+
+Note: The effects of this conviction on our culture today have been corrosive. We have experienced over the last four decades a dramatic increase in inequality, both economic and social, as those who already *have* benefit from an environment in which rewards accrue to the individuals who are already most equipped to pursue them. We have also seen a radical decline in our cultural sense of shared obligations to or even basic care and respect for others. Broadly speaking, we've lost our collective grip on the notions that our individual actions affect others, that we should act with those others in mind, that we share common concerns, and that we are collectively responsible for ensuring that we provide a viable future for all of us. Without those understandings, without a recognition that the global crises we face today require responsible social engagement and collective action, poverty will continue to increase, structural racism will continue to grow, and the very prospect of a livable planet is thrown into serious question.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry
+
+Note: So. I want to pause here and acknowledge that I've managed to get in a very few minutes from a highly encouraging report on the economic impact of public research universities to the question of whether the future will be a livable one, and that there are several links along the way that I haven't yet fully explored -- not to mention all kinds of alternative paths that we have available to consider. So let's backtrack a bit. If, as I am arguing here, our overdetermined focus on the economic good that universities provide has the potential to undermine the other kinds of goods that our institutions serve, what are those goods, how are they undermined, what do we lose if we lose them, and how might we begin to ensure that they remain a crucial part of the public vision of what the university is for?
+
+
+
+
+Note: In order to explore the university's purpose in serving the public good, and the ways that the neoliberal understanding of the university's function have weakened it almost beyond recognition, we might begin by thinking through the distinctions drawn in economics among the four primary types of goods, and the ways they are defined, first, through their "excludability" -- or whether non-paying customers can be prevented from using them -- and second, through their "rivalrousness" -- or whether their use uses them up. Public goods are nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be excluded from their use and no one's use uses them up for others. Private goods are typically both excludable and rivalrous, and are typically market-based as a result. Goods that are non-excludable but rivalrous are thought of as common-pool resources, which were assumed for a long time to be subject to the "tragedy of the commons" until the work of Elinor Ostrom demonstrated the potential for shared governance in ensuring their sustainability, about which more in a bit. Finally, club goods are those that are excludable but non-rivalrous -- goods that are not diminished through use, but that people can be prevented from using unless they pay for them.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The question, then, is what kind of goods higher education and the knowledge that it provides and creates are and should be. Knowledge is certainly nonrivalrous; if I have it, and I share it with you, I do not wind up with less of it as a result. The question lies in excludability: where once knowledge and the higher education that fosters it might have been seen as striving to be nonexcludable, making itself available to anyone desiring it, it has since the 1960s become increasingly excludable, restricted to those who can pay. Access to knowledge is today a club good, in other words, rather than the public good that was once imagined to best serve our society: supported by all for the benefit of all.
+
+Those ideals regarding public education were always flawed, even at their most promising moments: our system of land-grant universities was founded on the appropriation of land from indigenous nations, and the GI Bill supported rather than undermined racial inequities. But the underlying principle remains important: the understanding that the university's purpose is the broad education of the public. And that broad education has always been understood to have benefits beyond the directly economic, creating a world that is not just more prosperous but *better* in a much deeper sense.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@thirdserving
+
+Note: In order to focus on that *better*, however, we need collectively to rethink the systems through which we produce and share knowledge both with one another, with our students, and with the world. These platforms do not just host the results of our scholarly practices, but they are themselves the heart of our scholarly practices. These platforms, when treated as integral to scholarship, can ensure that we keep our focus on the larger project of collective understanding that is at the heart of the academic mission. That mission requires us to find ways to treat knowledge not as a club good, restricted to those on the inside, but as a public good, created for all, available to all.
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+--Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: And this, as Tressie McMillan Cottom reminds us in *Lower Ed*, "is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The university's present situation, after all, has its roots not just in economics, but in politics: the institutions that not too long ago aspired to serve as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, today face not just a drastic reduction in their affordability but an increasing threat to their very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@sbk202
+
+Note: And many of our students are just as embedded in this privileging of individual benefit as is the rest of our culture. They have been told repeatedly that the purpose of a college degree is developing the skill set that will lead directly to a lucrative career -- and given how much they and their families are paying, and indeed going into debt, for that degree, it's understandable that they feel that way. Preparing students to enter the workforce is not a bad thing, and I'm not arguing at all that we should wave that aside. But if the goal of the university should be producing graduates who are not just successful economic actors, but who are well-rounded humans, who are able to think creatively about the complex conditions in which we live today, and who are willing to contribute not just materially but socially, ethically, even morally to the improvement of the world around them, not just for themselves but for others -- if that's the goal, we need to transform our engagements with our students in order to show them another path.
+
+
+
+jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous-thinking
+
+Note: This is generous thinking: finding ways to use our collective knowledge for the public good, demonstrating our deep connections to -- indeed, our responsibility for -- the world around us. The university's educational mission is and should be cultivating that generous thinking, preparing our students not just for the professions that might lead to wealth production but for the "several pursuits" in life. We are educating the "leaders of tomorrow" not just in the conventionally understood political and business realms, but in the kinds of engagement that will help their communities grow from the grassroots up. And that mission demands that we focus on what is required to make a better world, both on campus and off. It requires that we think about our institutions' often unspoken structural biases, including that toward "economic impact"; it requires us to focus not just on making it possible for more kinds of people to achieve conventionally coded success, but on examining what constitutes success, how it is measured, and why. And that requires a values-first approach to higher education, and an ongoing examination of the ways that those values are instantiated in institutional structures and processes.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@john_cameron
+
+Note: So: if we understood the well-being of communities to lie not just in the individual economic prosperity that can result but in terms of individuals' ability to work together -- to engage in collective action -- toward a wide range of common goals, we might begin thinking about how the university might itself begin to rely on systems that support connection and collaboration. We might think about ways that scholarly infrastructure might be used to help shape a more richly understood public good. We have become dependent on a wide range of platforms that deliver our core services -- learning management systems, student information systems, publishing and communication systems, research information management systems -- but by and large these are platforms over which we have little control. They are vendor-owned, corporation-controlled, and as such far more responsible to their shareholders than they are to us. They appear to serve needs we cannot fill ourselves, and yet there is no sense of "service" in their relationship to our institutions. Only extraction. They take in our content, they take in our metrics, they take in our vast and growing annual fees, and they leave us dependent, privatized, beholden to economic forces that do not serve the public good.
+
+
+
+hcommons.org
+
+Note: This is just one of the reasons that my colleagues and I have been working to develop an open-source, open-access, non-profit, academy-owned and governed alternative to such extractive corporate platforms. *Humanities Commons* instantiates several key principles: first, that higher education will benefit from all of us doing more of our work together, in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions.
+
+And part of resisting privatization involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. This is true of a wide range of systems and platforms on which higher education relies, but perhaps nowhere has it become more pressing than in thinking about educational technology. We -- librarians, instructional technologists, and instructors -- need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education re-engage with the public good.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But developing the collaborative, community-supported infrastructure that can create the paradigm shift we need will require some careful thinking about the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable. And that includes not just financial and technical sustainability -- the forms of sustainability that we most often consider in this context. Most importantly, it includes social sustainability, a deep focus on the relationships required to build and maintain our shared infrastructure. Thinking about those relationships under the rubric of social sustainability directs our attention not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Collective action requires a kind of solidarity, in other words, a readiness to put the needs of the whole ahead of local demands, a determination to stand together in support of projects that may not necessarily seem to be our own top priority. And this form of solidarity, I am increasingly convinced, is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+ubs.com/microsites/nobel-perspectives/
+
+Note: The connection between sustainability and solidarity brings us back to the work of Elinor Ostrom, which focused on common-pool resource management. She argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability given what's been called the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to their upkeep, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without supporting them. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. Or so the conventional wisdom had it. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization of the resources involved. Ostrom, however, studied a wide range of community-held fisheries and demonstrated through them that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place. Relationships, in other words.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects that are seeking to provide community-based solutions that avoid the pitfalls of privatization, but all of them face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms often accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence. Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to use them. But this privatization is often the very problem that community-developed projects were developed in order to solve. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements. Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act locally in solidarity with that community. And this is why I argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+
+
+Note: After all, getting institutions to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside is a huge part of what the BIG Collection is working toward, and a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Our original business model focused on asking scholarly societies to work together to support a shared platform for communication with and among their members. However, we wanted to make it possible for anyone interested to join the network, without facing restrictions based on institutional affiliation, membership, or other credentials. The good news is that four years in we have nearly 30,000 registered users from across the humanities and around the world. But our partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in an exclusive benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But their focus on the network as a club good leads them to understand its openness as diminishing its value, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. Solidarity in the form of collective action is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. And it's at the heart of the platform as scholarly practice. All of our institutions of course have different structures, different requirements, different needs. And yet we share the same goals: the development, distribution, and preservation of new forms of knowledge. Sharing the platforms is another means of sharing the knowledge. And that the Canadian HSS community has been able to come together around the development of the HSS Commons, that you are all looking for ways to meet your shared goals despite your different local needs, gives me hope.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: It's a key form of generosity, and one that more institutions need to embrace in their engagements with one another. Because the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not _other institutions of higher education_, not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather, it is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to escape the bottom-line orientation of the neoliberal university to embrace instead the wide range of public goods that the university should serve, we must reclaim our public mission, and reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university. But we're going to have to do together, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward one another, toward our students, toward the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected, and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain the kinds of community-supported infrastructure that can enable open education, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+ Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I'm honored to have had this chance to talk with you as you continue the work of building that community. Thanks so much.
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+ Sustainability and Solidarity
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Public Good
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Dawn for inviting me to talk with you. I'm grateful for the opportunity, and I hope that what I have to share might provide some food for thought for your conversations over the course of today and tomorrow.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much what follows grows out of the work I did in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of the book's subtitle grows out of my increasing sense that this necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+> --Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be understood as evidence that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. The crisis in higher education today stems both from the incommensurability of these two paradigms and from the fact that _both of them are failing_, if in different ways.
+
+
+## Thomas Kuhn
+
+Note: As Thomas Kuhn noted in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, the failure of a scientific paradigm, as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account, throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely, one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the "period of pronounced professional insecurity" that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift, the cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. And my argument is that we are desperately in need of such a paradigm shift if higher education as we want it to be is to survive.
+
+
+
+
+Note: _Generous Thinking_ explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education -- faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more -- to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead focus on the university's role in building community, and on ways of encouraging a sense of public investment in and ownership of the university.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So some of my thoughts here today grow out of this aspect of _Generous Thinking_, but some stem more pragmatically from my work over the last several years on _Humanities Commons_, which is a non-profit, community-developed and governed network serving humanities scholars and organizations around the world.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of _Generous Thinking_: first, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation can allow us to build the kind of community that can sustain the university.
+
+
+## community-supported infrastructure
+
+Note: And part of resisting privatization, for both scholars and their institutions, involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving some portion of our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. Collectively we might turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education return to its mission of public service. But developing this form of community-supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it, and the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The world of scholarly communication provides some key examples of the importance of developing community-supported infrastructure, not least because of the extent to which major corporations have exploited library budgets for their own gain, trapping libraries in contracts that have destroyed their budgets and hampered their abilities to support their communities. Though the issues that I'm discussing of course long predate this particular moment, they came into stark visibility in August 2017, when bepress, a provider of services supporting open-access publishing and repositories used by many university libraries, announced that it had been purchased by the RELX Group, the multi-national parent company of publishing behemoth Elsevier. Bepress had of course been founded in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open-access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. Bepress thus grew out of the academy, and was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at its heart.
+
+
+
+
+Note: As the bepress website notes, over 500 institutions have purchased bepress services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly-accessible ways. And in one fell swoop, these 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing behemoths such as Elsevier.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure -- built and run by academics, for the academic community -- appeared to have been turned on that community. It's not as though anyone had been unaware that bepress was a commercial service all along, but they were one of the good guys, and the costs of outsourcing infrastructural needs to them had been balanced against the often impossible task of maintaining locally hosted repository and publishing systems. Bepress provided what many saw as best-of-breed functionality at a reasonable price, and it supported libraries' desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But the acquisition of bepress by RELX not only put libraries in the position of unintentionally supporting a growing corporate control not just of scholarly publishing but of the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery through production to communication; it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely in promoting greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. As a result, serious conversations have since focused on means of supporting open-source, academy-owned and -controlled infrastructure.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is not an impossible move, by any stretch, but it's harder than it might sound. Long-standing open-access, open-infrastructure projects like arXiv -- the preeminent pre-print service supporting a range of scientific fields -- might suggest some possible areas of concern.
+
+
+
+
+Note: By every reasonable measure, arXiv has been exemplary -- in its uptake, in its independence, and in the ways that it has helped to transform the fields that it serves. But in some crucial ways, arXiv has experienced what can only be called "catastrophic success" -- a crucial, paradigm-shifting project whose growing annual operating costs and mounting infrastructural requirements have demanded increasingly creative mechanisms for the platform's support.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So in 2010, the arXiv team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource. But our institutions, as we unfortunately know, are largely unaccustomed to this work of cross-institutional collaboration. For one thing, they're far more prone to understand such resources as terrain for competition, and for another, the community-building required becomes yet another form of labor added on top of maintaining the resources themselves.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I do not know the extent to which such difficulties may have played a role in arXiv's recent move from the Library to Cornell Computing and Information Science. It's entirely likely that the move is a matter of infrastructural pragmatics. But even so, the challenges of maintaining the kind of cross-institutional coalition necessary to sustain such a crucial resource remain.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Another example, with a different narrative, might be found in the Samvera project. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories rely, developers at a number of institutions have come together to create a collective solution. As the proverb and their website have it, if you want to go far, go together.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But this distributed developer community, like all such communities, has faced some challenges in coordination, challenges that have caused it, as the proverb also reminds us, to go more slowly than it might. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers involved in the project but of the institutions for which the developers actually work is not a simple matter.
+
+
+# sustainability
+
+Note: The foundation of the challenges that arXiv and Samvera have faced is the same challenge faced by any number of other projects and programs and initiatives: sustainability. This is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late, as my colleagues and I have been working to ensure that Humanities Commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And those attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point; they too would like to see the network thrive, but they cannot support it indefinitely. We need, they reasonably suggest, a plan for demonstrating that the network will, at some point in the future, be able to support itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models, in business plans, in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a non-profit entity forever tied to kinds of economic concerns that are very often divergent from, if not at odds with, the non-profit's primary mission. As a result, these non-profits remain forever precarious; one small miscalculation can make the difference between survival and collapse.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But sustainability broadly understood extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed -- or more waste produced -- than can be developed or managed in the near term.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There's technological sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects' future stability and growth.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All of these forms of sustainability are important, to varying degrees, to providing for the future of non-profit and open-source projects. But there's another form that gets a good bit less attention, and that I increasingly think precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability: social sustainability. The social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Ensuring that these commitments are sustained is, I increasingly think, a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward.
+
+
+# community
+
+Note: This notion -- of the role of "community" in community-supported software, and of the best ways of building and sustaining it -- raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. In an early chapter in _Generous Thinking_, I explore Miranda Joseph's argument that "community" is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life. In this sense, "community" becomes a relief valve of sorts for those structures, a way of mitigating the damage that they do. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network–based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises, rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education. "Community" becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: However, if we recognize that the communities that we form both on campus and off can be crucial organizing tools, ways of ensuring that our institutions meet their public obligations, we might start to think of the call to community as a form of coalition-building, of a developing solidarity. Solidarity itself is a concept that's been challenged, of course; there are important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom, and for whom. Women of color, for instance, have pointed out the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests. But I remain convinced that institutions of higher education must embrace forms of solidarity that do not demand that individuals seeking redress for institutionalized injustices drop their own issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those individuals are all of our issues too. This form of solidarity asks us to stand together in support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this form of solidarity, I am increasingly convinced, is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom was not just, as the UBS Nobel Perspectives website has it, the first female Nobel laureate in economics; she remains to date the _only_ female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place.
+
+
+## common-pool resources
+
+Note: It's important first to focus in a bit on what is meant by the notion of common-pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" -- the overuse of shared natural resources -- can apply.
+
+
+## the "free rider" problem
+
+Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization.
+
+
+## _Governing the Commons_
+
+Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book _Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action_, this model -- like other such models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
+
+
+> What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies. -- Elinor Ostrom
+
+Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned software projects -- like arXiv, like Samvera, like Humanities Commons -- on which they should be able to rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the problem that community-developed projects were developed to evade. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So last summer, Brett Bobley, CIO of the National Endowment for the Humanities and director of the Office of Digital Humanities, tweeted a question about ways of sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Cayless --
+
+
+
+
+Note: -- noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining such projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in _Generous Thinking_, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Which is to say not only that individual units on campus must understand themselves as working in collaboration with the rest of the campus, but also that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+# collaboration
+
+Note: But getting units, much less institutions, to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken institutions of higher education since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside, is a huge part of what I've tried to do in _Generous Thinking_, and it's a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: A bit of background, for those of you who may not be familiar with the project. The MLA is the largest scholarly society in the humanities, representing around 25,000 members across North America and around the world, members who teach and study a very wide range of languages, literatures, and cultures. (The MLA, full disclosure, is also my former employer.) With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 to provide members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching the platform, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with colleagues in other areas in the humanities, so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields.
+
+
+
+
+Note: With further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons spaces developed for the members of the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the College Art Association. But beyond working with these partners, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work, and so we made the decision to open the network's hub to anyone who wants to join -- across the disciplines, around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites, and they can deposit and share their work in the network's open-access repository. This fusion of a social network with a library-quality repository (adhering to commonly accepted metadata standards, employing digital object identifiers, and so on) means that not only is stuff being put into the repository, and not only can that stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used, as there's a community there with which it can be shared.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while fully opening the Humanities Commons hub to free participation by any interested scholar or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use -- a little over two years later, we have over 17,500 registered users -- it has created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms Humanities Commons from a common-pool resource into a club good, one whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the network if it were an exclusive service see the openness of the hub as diminishing the network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
+
+
+## sustainability and solidarity
+
+Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. My arguments to this end, probably needless to say, have a tough road ahead of them.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: I'm asking the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, fully aligning its internal processes and reward structures with the public mission it claims to espouse. And this is where the need for a paradigm shift -- for politics -- arises. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered -- from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press -- to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to "compete all the time" forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What I am arguing, both directly in _Generous Thinking_ and indirectly through Humanities Commons, is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not _other institutions of higher education_, not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather, it is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university, we're going to have to do it as a sector, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward both the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community-supported infrastructure, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community. None of this will be easy -- but the alternatives, which we have all seen building over the last several years, will be far worse.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: And with that cheery note, I'm going to say thanks, and open things up for discussion.
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+ Failures of Leadership
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+## Failures of Leadership
+---
+### Rethinking the University in the United States
+---
+
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/jfki.html
+
+Note: Thanks so much for that introduction, and thanks to Alexander for inviting me to participate in this workshop. When we first began talking about this, long before the pandemic, the idea of hopping on a plane to pop over to Berlin for a few days of scholarly conversation seemed not only plausible but normal. Two years later, finding myself actually here, I'm a bit stunned. Right up until I crawled inside the metal tube that brought me here I kept expecting the plan to fall through -- and it would have been fine, if less fun; as with so many things since the pandemic began, we'd have found ways to adjust, to make use of our networked tools, and to produce a conversation that might have been a little less satisfying but nonetheless sufficient.
+
+This is one of the things we've learned from the pandemic: that we can do a lot of things at a distance that we thought we had to travel for, and that we can include many more people in the process. There have been a lot of such lessons in all of our lives, some positive and some less so, but all of which I hope we can carry with us as we continue to emerge from our homes and return to our campuses. I want us to carry these things not least because returning to "normal," or seeking to create a "new normal," would be a costly mistake. We have an opportunity right now NOT to return to normal, and there are good reasons not to do so. But coming back better is going to require us to think pretty differently about the structures within which we work, and about how to change them to support the kind of world we want.
+
+
+# better
+
+Note: The project that I'm currently working on has that change as its explicit goal. It's tentatively entitled "Leading Generously: Rethinking the Future of the University," and it's meant to serve as a follow-up of sorts to my 2019 book *Generous Thinking*. Such a followup is necessary, I increasingly believe, because many many many of us working within the university system in the United States, and for that matter around the world, know that things need to change, and even have a good sense of *what* needs to change, but have far less of a grasp on *how* to make that change. *How* is really hard.
+
+For instance: it's clear to many of us, that creating better, more sustainable institutions requires us to move away from quantified metrics for meritorious production -- in fact to step off the Fordist production line that forever asks those of us working in higher education to do *more* -- and instead to think in a humane fashion about ways that we can do *better*. Better often in fact requires slowing down, talking with our colleagues and our communities, and most importantly, listening to what others have to say. Better requires engagement, connection, sharing, time, in ways that more nearly always encourages us to rush past. Turning from more to better can help us access the pleasures -- indeed, the joys -- of our work that life on the production line has required us to push aside. But given the ways that we've all been steeped in the *more* that is the heart of the neoliberal university, it's not at all clear how we might begin to slow down, to make a set of changes that go against the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us.
+
+
+# how
+
+Note: The gaps in thinking about *how* in *Generous Thinking* had already persuaded 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us — we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them — invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I do want the institution to survive, and I want to maintain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
+
+And I also know that however much I may want to keep the institution running, the institution is not thinking the same about me. Our institutions will not, cannot, love us back. However much we sacrifice for them, they will never sacrifice for us. As with so many of my thoughts, this understanding was clarified for me by Tressie McMillan Cottom, who posted a Twitter thread describing the advice she gives to Black scholars who ask her how to survive in the academy. (For those of you watching remotely, who may have little ones in the room with you, heads-up that there's a little language on the next slide.) Two tweets in particular stuck with me:
+
+
+
+
+Note: This place was fucked up when you got here, it will be fucked up when you leave here. All you can control is how much you let it fuck you up in the process. That is a pretty impolitic stance but I stand by it. I don't think these institutions can support us or love us. And I honor the many many people who work to make them more humane. But you, alone, cannot do that. And you cannot do it, ever, by killing yourself. (@tressiemcphd)
+
+
+# failure
+
+Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the last two years of the horrifying accuracy of this perspective -- 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, within the US context, 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?
+
+
+# collective action
+
+Note: One key thing that transforming the neoliberal university would require is collective action. Because McMillan Cottom is right: you, alone, cannot change things. Together we might: but first we have to build that together, build the spaces and places of supporting that notion of together, and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals. Because right now, the primary way that the idea of "together" gets invoked -- as in "we're all in it together" -- is not in the context of resource or power-sharing but of sacrifice. And sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and to accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
+
+
+# structures
+
+Note: The only way to prevent such 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 an academic leader I recently interviewed 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 toxic model is damaging not just to the institution, which lies at the mercy of such an individual's successful navigation of an increasingly complex economic, cultural, and political landscape, but also to the person in that role, who must convincingly appear omniscient and invulnerable, and who can only inevitably fail. What I hope to build instead is a model of academic leadership as collective and collaborative rather than individual, and therefore potentially originating anywhere within the org chart where someone has 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 create institutions that are not only more generous but also more resilient.
+
+
+# agency
+
+Note: Another bit of conventional wisdom that this project is working against, however, has to do with the relative powerlessness of individuals in their encounters with the structures and systems of contemporary life. This sense of our 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. And 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 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.
+
+It's a matter of where we locate agency, of who has the ability to make significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, or as the unique privilege of those with rank and status within those structures and systems, there is little agency left to the rest of us. And it's certainly true that the problems we face are enormous, and that one person without structural authority can't do much to change the world — but groups of people can. Building those groups starts with individuals who decide to do more, to put what agency they do have to work in solidarity with others. Those people are leaders, whatever their job title or position might suggest, and it's their leadership this project seeks to support.
+
+
+# leadership
+
+Note: And so this project has begun for me with an attempt to understand how we currently conceive, and misconceive, of leadership within the US academy, and has thus sent me in two odd methodological directions, for a scholar trained in literature: first, I'm reading recent writing in business and management that can show me something about how leadership is conceived of in the contemporary US, and how it got to be that way. And second, I'm doing interviews with a wide range of folks that I consider leaders in higher education, asking them to tell me about their experiences and challenges, and to help me understand how they think of leadership and why.
+
+My dive into the business literature grew out of my sense that the way we most often use the term "leadership" today -- to refer to the individuals at the top of an org chart -- is at best a misleading euphemism. In fact, most of what comes to us from above in our institutions and organizations is management rather than leadership. This sense was confirmed by a lot of the most interesting recent literature produced by experts in business and management.
+
+
+# change
+
+Note: For instance, John P. Kotter has argued in the _Harvard Business Review_ that management and leadership are distinct if complementary modes of organizational action. In his framework, management is focused on "coping with complexity," on organizing and directing the people and resources necessary to conduct an organization's work. Leadership, by contrast is about "coping with change," the more ambiguous processes of setting new directions and aligning people toward them. The distinction is significant for Kotter, not least because of his conviction that most organizations today are "over-managed and underled." In fact, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with — or worse, an inability to create — change.
+
+
+# learning
+
+Note: Similarly, Peter Senge, in _The Fifth Discipline_, notes that "the very word ‘leader' has come to refer largely to positional authority, a synonym for top management." The danger in this, for Senge, runs deep, not least because, as he argues, "the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best." His goal, in guiding institutions to become what he calls "learning organizations" is the development of "an alternative system of management based on love rather than fear, curiosity rather than an insistence on ‘right' answers, and learning rather than controlling." This alternative system of management, and its emphasis on learning — so completely at odds with what most of us experience in our organizational lives — has a lot in common with the kinds of leadership that institutions of higher education need today.
+
+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.
+
+
+# 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
+
+
+> adapt to changing circumstances, and … enable leaders to see the potential collaborations and benefits in diverse communities. This approach contrasts with the traditional gatekeeping 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 groundskeeping, in recognition of what we know about the conditions that plants need to successfully thrive.
+
——Beronda Montgomery
+
+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. Our leaders must work in concert with their ecosystems, rather than operating from the top-down management perspective to which we have become accustomed.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So here's a thought experiment: does your institution really need a president? What if the vice presidents were collectively charged as a true leadership team, dependent upon and responsible to one another for the organization's success?
+
+I can immediately hear the responses: "Have you met our vice presidents? Most of them despise each other, and at least a couple are only there because of their long-standing relationships with the president." This is exactly the problem that needs solving. If there were no president, those long-standing relationships would not be a factor — and if there were no presidency to ascend to, the stakes in battles among members of leadership teams would diminish. Deborah Ancona and her colleagues have described such a model in which a large Dutch consulting firm replaced its CEO with "a team of four managing directors who share leadership responsibilities"; as they note, in order for this model to work, "members must be skilled at engaging in dialogue together.... because each director can veto a decision, each must thoroughly explain [their] reasoning to convince the others that [their] perspective has merit."
+
+In such a shared leadership model, in other words, the team's interdependence requires each member to develop not just their relationship with the boss, but their mutual relationships with one another. And this so far has been the most significant finding from my interviews as well: that the most effective leaders are those who focus on building the relationships that form the basis of their institution's success. And this is true of all of us, at every level throughout our institutions: our collective success at the department level, the college level, the university level, all depends upon our ability to become and act as a collective, upon our developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear. But that process — determining what our shared goals are and should be, and how we should go about striving toward them — requires a kind of interrelation that is not merely personal but also, and of necessity, political.
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+
——Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: That studying academic leadership looped back around to studying the nature of the political shouldn't have come as a surprise to me; after all, I adopted this quotation from Tressie McMillan Cottom's _Lower Ed_ as an epigraph opening the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, which focused on the need for rethinking the university in order to make it a more just institution: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." We cannot simply innovate ourselves out of the problems we face in higher education today, but instead we must reckon with the systems that led us here, and that keep us here.
+
+
+# politics
+
+Note: This reckoning has led me back to Iris Marion Young, who, in her 1990 volume _Justice and the Politics of Difference_, defines politics as "all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decision-making." The word "potentially" is doing a lot of work here; in most of our lives, those structures, actions, practices, and meanings are not subject to a kind of decision-making in which we're encouraged to play a real role. However, Young later notes that "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.
+
+
+# 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.
+
+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:
+
+
+> 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 merit seeks to depoliticize the establishment of criteria and standards for allocating positions and awarding benefits.
+
——Iris Marion Young
+
+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.
+
+
+# values
+
+Note: Moreover, trying to change the rules and procedures to make them _more_ objective is laudable, but cannot help but introduce new areas in which objectivity is in question. Ultimately, as Young argues, the goal should be not to exclude subjectivity or "personal values" from decision-making, but rather to make that subjectivity and those personal values fully part of the decision-making process itself, as these values are "inevitably and properly part of what decisionmaking is about." So rather than trying to make peer review more bias-free — a worthy but ultimately fruitless process of depoliticization — what if we were instead to accept its deeply political nature, to make it more transparent and participatory, and to ask authors and reviewers alike to surface and contend with their values as a part of the process?
+
+
+# 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.
+
+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.
+
+
+# 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.
+
+
+# leadership
+
+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. And it's that work that we're starting to see emerge in labor movements across the US and elsewhere. I've got a ton of work ahead before this project will be ready to go, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to share a bit of it with you today, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/jfki.html
+
+Note: Thanks again for having me.
+
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+ Generous Thinking
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+## Toward a More Generous University
+---
+### (Even in Hard Times)
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://kfitz.info/presentations/ku.html
+
+Note: Thanks so much; I'm sorry not to be able to be with you in person today, but I'm delighted to have the opportunity to share some thoughts with you as you start this day of thinking about community-engaged learning and scholarship. A quick note that there's a bit of strong language on my first slide, but it represents a feeling that I think many of us share right now.
+
+
+
+
+Note: A little less than a year ago -- though it feels a lifetime -- sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread on Twitter thinking through the things she tells the Black scholars who seek her advice about surviving the academy. And these two tweets in particular caught my attention. (READ TWEETS)
+
+
+
+
+Note: These tweets prompted me to respond, saying (READ TWEET). This may be utterly quixotic on my part, but it's something I've been thinking about for a while: what would it be for us to remake the university -- or build a new one -- as an institution that was structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members, rather than seeking in a moment of crisis to minimize its obligations and make all of its relationships contingent?
+
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+
+
+Note: Much of what's ahead derives from the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves.
+
+
+## "radical approach"
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Cottom has noted in her book _Lower Ed_ of the crisis that she has seen growing in the financialization of higher education,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that exists too. But we need to consider the possibility that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, the paradigm under which higher education has operated in the United States is failing, and failing fast, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world. And this is true not least because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the decline in confidence in the university is not just caused by the public failing to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. What I'm asking for is a tall order -- in many ways swimming against the current of the neoliberal institution. But a large part of what I'm after is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions *as* communities, as well as *in interaction with* communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own: we need our publics' help as much or more as they need ours.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while the concept of generosity may seem too touchy-feely to represent the key to the future of the university, I hope, in the book, that I've put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole."
-- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
+
+
+# "them"
+
+Note: So it's important to be careful about how we define "us," precisely because every "us" implies a "them," and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly in service to the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other. Granted, sometimes "they" are imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that benefits from and takes in information we provide. But what might it mean if we understood ourselves, and our institutions, as embedded in and responsible to the complex collection of communities by which we are surrounded? How might we develop a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the institution itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: So the book overall makes the argument that the future of the university requires re-grounding the institution in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. And this requires concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as collective rather than individual.
+
+
+# listening
+
+Note: *Generous Thinking* asks us to consider how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+# reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that the critical reading practices we enact on campus might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged research, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns, as well as to transform those communities from passive recipients of the university's knowledge into active collaborators in shared projects.
+
+
+# the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and community engagement. The university must become the kind of institution that can focus less on individual achievement, on educating for individual leadership, and that instead focuses on building community, and indeed on educating for community-building. And this requires a radical rethinking of the reward structures of higher education: what we value and how we demonstrate that we value it.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: Our universities are in many ways structured as collectives, in which each member of the institution is charged with some part of the well-being of the whole. This is how we derive our principles of shared governance, that we each have a contribution to make to the operation of the institution. And yet: when we examine both the kinds of work for which we are actively rewarded, as well as the nature of the rewards themselves, we repeatedly find an emphasis on the individual rather than the whole. For instance, for faculty at an institution like this one the work for which we are most rewarded is our research -- which we pointedly refer to as our "own" work -- and the rewards we receive often pull us away from the collective. If I publish a well-received book or a an article published in a prestigious journal, I might be eligible for a course release or relief from service responsibilities. And all of the other possible rewards I can seek -- promotions, raises, and so forth -- encourage me to retreat from membership in the university community and instead focus on my own work. This is part and parcel of the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university, in which every form of merit -- including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and more -- is determined by what I individually have done, even where I've done it collaboratively.
+
+
+# zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. The result is that we find ourselves in zero-sum game in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+# institutions
+
+Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the structures within our institutions privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions are able to distance themselves from the rankings and the other quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that those of us who work for them will likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more generous.
+
+
+# culture change
+
+Note: And this is no easy task. Over the course of the last several years, both while *Generous Thinking* was in press and after it was published, I had the opportunity to speak on a number of college and university campuses where faculty, staff, students, and administrators were thinking about how to create and support a greater sense of connection between their campus communities and their public-facing mission. The folks who invited me -- ranging from the officers of campus AAUP chapters to university presidents and their advisors -- felt a connection with the arguments in *Generous Thinking* not least because they recognized that their institutions require not just better strategic plans but deep culture change. That culture change demands, among other things, a serious rethinking of how we work, why we work the ways we do, how we assess and reward that work, and how we recognize as work things that tend to get dismissed as service but that play a crucial role in building and sustaining collaborative communities. *Generous Thinking*, however, focused pretty tightly on the why and the what of the changes that our university cultures need to make, and spent a whole lot less time on how.
+
+
+# better
+
+Note: For instance: it's clear that making a better, more sustainable institution, in other words, requires us to move away from individualistic ideas of meritorious production -- in fact to step off the Fordist production line that forever asks us to do *more* -- and instead to think in a humane fashion about ways that we can do *better*. Better often in fact requires slowing down, talking with our colleagues and our communities, and most importantly, listening to what others have to say. Better requires engagement, connection, sharing, in ways that more nearly always encourages us to rush past. Turning from more to better can help us access the pleasures -- indeed, the joys -- of our work that life on the production line has required us to push aside. But making that change goes against some of the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us within the university setting, and it's super unclear how we might even begin to make such a change.
+
+
+# generosity in hard times
+
+Note: So I was already thinking that I needed to follow up *Generous Thinking* with something that would dig a bit further into the how of transformation. And then after one of the talks I gave, an attendee asked me a question that made the stakes of thinking about how painfully clear. Her question has been stuck in my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that it's relatively easy to embrace when resources are plentiful, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to think generously 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 saying "you're completely right; that's the real question" and pointing out that 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. But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us -- we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them -- invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I do want the institution to survive, and I want to sustain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
+
+
+# sacrifice
+
+Note: And I also know that however much I may want to keep the institution running, the institution is not thinking the same about me. Our institutions will not, cannot, love us back. However much we sacrifice for them, they will never sacrifice for us. This returns me to Tressie McMillan Cottom's point: you, alone, cannot make the institution more humane, and especially not by killing yourself in the process. This is especially true for members of minoritized groups working within the academy; it's especially true for faculty without tenure; it's especially true for staff; it's especially true for scholars working in contingent positions; it's especially true for everyone whose positions in the hierarchies of prestige and comfort leave them vulnerable, especially at moments when "we're all in it together" is invoked not in the context of resource-sharing but of sacrifice. Sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and to accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time as we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
+
+
+# big structural change
+
+Note: The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. And this is the deepest goal of _Generous Thinking_, and by extension of the followup project I'm now working on, entitled _Leading Generously_. In this project I'm focusing on how we can work collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. What kinds of leadership are required for us remake the university into an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members, in good times and bad? _Leading Generously_ is in some ways intended to be a practical handbook for putting the ideas of _Generous Thinking_ into action. But in doing so it asks its readers to reconsider some basic concepts that underwrite big structural change. It proposes that, despite the enormity of the transformation that higher education needs today -- large enough to require a revolution -- local changes can begin to make a difference, and that we are capable of making those local changes.
+
+
+# leadership
+
+Note: Among the concepts that demand reconsideration, however, is the very notion of leadership itself. We conventionally associate leadership with the folks at the top of an institutional hierarchy, those with the authority to steer the ship. While I hope that *Leading Generously* might speak to them, the project addresses everyone on campus, beginning with the argument that everyone in an institution has the potential to be a leader, to create local transformative change that can model ways of being that others might learn from and join in with. This conviction places a lot of emphasis on individual actors, however, in ways that may seem a bit at odds with some of today's most important ideas about how power operates. Those critical ideas -- including arguments about race and racism; about sex, gender, and misogyny; about class and power -- understand the issues they explore to be *systemic* rather than *individual*. That is to say, they argue that real change requires social transformation. It requires building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, transforming economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. I am convinced by those arguments, and I have that same end goal: building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world. But the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
+
+
+# agency
+
+Note: The key to this problem is where we locate agency: who has the power to start the process of making significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, there is little agency left to the individual. And it's unquestionably true that the structural problems we face are enormous, and that one individual can't do much to reshape the world. But groups of individuals can. And building those groups starts with individuals who decide to do more, to put what individual agency they do have to work in solidarity with others.
+
+
+# you
+
+Note: And so *Leading Generously* begins with you, where you are. It starts from the position that each of us is equipped to make change in the aspects of our institutions over which we have influence, and that these changes can model new modes of being within our communities.
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: But it recognizes as well that none of us can get far alone. To transform a complex organization, we need to build coalitions, and we need to act with the collective firmly in view. Because of this requirement, it's important to recognize that the object of leadership is not institutions, but people, bringing them together and organizing for change. Building a more generous, deeper sense of "us" asks us to focus our attention on our relationships with our colleagues and with our broader communities, ensuring that we maintain the humanity not just of those we work with and for, but of the structures through which all of us connect.
+
+
+# transformation
+
+Note: The key to transforming our institutions, then, is shoring up the means of moving from "you" to "us," the means of building the coalitions and collectives required to transform our institutions and make them capable of the kinds of community-oriented thinking we most need today. Along the way, we need to consider what we can gain from becoming better listeners, from learning to sit with difficult conversations and even criticism, from assessing our work and the work of those around us based on our deepest values, from cultivating an atmosphere of mutual and renewable trust, and so on. Each of the key concepts I explore in *Leading Generously* -- listening, vulnerability, values, trust, support and more -- is deceptively simple, but with careful consideration can become the foundation for a practice of community building, for thinking through institutional policies and processes and ensuring that they serve the people for whom the institution operates.
+
+
+# people
+
+Note: The necessity of that practice is clear: our institutions cannot survive the crises they currently face unless the people and the relationships that make up the institution thrive. Budgets and bottom lines matter, but without its people -- the students, the staff, the faculty, the community -- the university is nothing. And that's the thing that we need to understand now more than ever, and the thing that the amazing program you have in front of you today is working toward: the recognition that the primary work of the university is connection, and that in hard times the most generous thing we can do is to connect with ourselves and everyone we work with, so that we all might develop the collective strength necessary to return and rebuild.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
+
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+## Engaged Leadership
+---
+### in Disengaged Times
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thank you so much. I'm really happy to have the opportunity to talk with you and the rest of the folks on this panel about a few ideas that I've been working on recently. I'm going to start today with a quotation:
+
+
+> I really believe that 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.
+
+Note: This clear articulation of an idea that I’d spent months fumbling my way toward was presented to me by one of the folks who responded to a call I disseminated for interviews about academic leadership. This respondent, who chose to remain anonymous, is by any estimation a leader within the higher education universe, but one who has spent a great deal of time and energy and influence trying to create an alternative to that model of the singular individual steering the ship. That respondent is far from alone, either in their assessment of the toxicity of what we understand leadership to be within colleges and universities today, or in their determination to find a better way. But we can all look around at our institutions — not to mention the broader culture in which they are embedded — and recognize how ingrained the individualist model of leadership is, and how hard it will be to change.
+
+
+## failed model of leadership
+
+Note: Our campuses and our fields, however, are experiencing a series of crises that are bound up in that failed model of leadership. And all of us who care about the future of our colleges and universities need to reconsider that model and our role in it. We need to find new ways of imagining what leadership on campus could look like, and new ways of cultivating and empowering new kinds of leaders, if we want the missions of our institutions — the projects of knowledge creation and dissemination, of research and education in service to a better world — to thrive.
+
+
+## individual
+
+Note: The project I'm currently engaged in is thus working to counter several pieces of conventional wisdom about leadership — not least that toxic model described by my respondent: the leader as singularly powerful individual, setting the institution’s course from atop the org chart. That model is damaging not just to the institution, which lies at the mercy of such an individual’s successful navigation of an increasingly complex economic, cultural, and political landscape, but also to the person in that role, who must convincingly appear omniscient and invulnerable, and who can only inevitably fail. What I hope to inspire instead is a way of understanding leadership as collective and collaborative rather than individual, and therefore potentially originating anywhere within the org chart where someone has ideas about how to make things better and a willingness to build the coalitions necessary to make change. If we can come to appreciate and authorize the collective potential that exists within our institutions, we can begin to create institutions that are not only more generous but also more resilient.
+
+
+## together
+
+Note: A commitment to working together, in fact, is the key to undoing the toxic model of singular leadership. That model is entirely focused on the power of the individual, and the assumption that the individual’s reach becomes greater as you climb the org chart. Of course, power does grow in that direction: with the elevation produced by a new job title comes an expansion in sphere of influence and institutional authority. But the other thing that often happens is that the connections available to the position narrow, until you find yourself at the pinnacle of the institution: you’re at the center of power, but you’re teetering there alone. Success in such a leadership role — in any leadership role, really, whether one labeled such by the institution or one emerging from a grassroots project — requires developing the relationships that can sustain the work, not least by ensuring that the vision you hold for the future of the institution or the project is not yours alone, but is instead shared.
+
+
+## shared
+
+Note: That collective vision is one key to institutional transformation, but of course there’s an enormous amount of work involved in bringing together the people required to develop such a collective vision, much less to work together toward it. The process may not come naturally for leaders who’ve been steeped in conventional hierarchies and workflows, but a new generation of leaders is emerging today and bringing with them what Helen Berry described to me as a new style of what she called “multinuclear leadership.” Berry noted that she has seen it in use in community organizations, and that it has often been adopted by women leaders within the academy. This leadership style works to empower the entire community that will be affected by a decision, not by creating a single forum or feedback session in which the loudest voices can dominate, but rather by organizing that community into working groups charged with particular tasks, and then sharing the work done by each group with the community as a whole. A process like this used in the context of strategic planning, for instance, has the potential to create a form of communal ownership of the outcomes, but this kind of facilitative, bottom-up process must be accompanied by a positional leader willing to step out of the center and allow collective leadership to emerge from multiple points within the community.
+
+
+## power
+
+Note: This mode of multinuclear leadership is a form of sharing power. And a big part of why I'm talking about this today is that building an engaged community requires empowering that community, especially at a moment when their disengagement has been exacerbated by conditions that leave them feeling deeply disempowered. That disengagement may lead many to assume that any attempt to create the working groups necessary to multinuclear leadership will go nowhere — that it will be busy work, with no appreciable positive outcomes. And this is where real transformation asks the most of you: in building the trust, the relationships, the coalitions that will encourage others to get involved. In building the solidarity that makes clear that we have one another's backs, even (or perhaps especially) when we're standing up for one another's causes rather than our own. Building that solidarity is crucial, because institutional transformation is a heavy lift — but we can lift far more together than any of us can alone.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+ Building a More Generous Institution
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+## Building a More Generous Institution
+---
+### Collaboration, Community, Solidarity
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thank you for that introduction, and for inviting me to join you here for this talk! This is once of the first in-person talks that I've given since the pandemic began, and it's just delightful to be here with you. This is one of the double-edged things we've learned from the pandemic: on the one hand, we can do a lot of things remotely that we thought we had to travel for, and we can include many more people when we do. But on the other hand, there's something special about our ability to be together, and that specialness makes it all the more important that we use the time and space well. There have been a lot of lessons like this in all of our lives over the last couple of years, some of them positive and some of them much less so, but all of which I hope we can carry with us in the years ahead. I want us to carry these things not least because returning to "normal," or seeking to create a "new normal," is almost always a costly mistake. We have the opportunity right now to avoid normal and build something better, something more fluid and capable of growth. But doing so is going to require us to think pretty differently about the structures within which we work, and about how we might reshape them to help create the kind of institution we genuinely want to be part of.
+
+So that's my focus for today. But before I move on, a couple of warnings. The first is that there's a little language coming up -- I usually include this warning for the Zoom crowd, in case there are little ones in the background, but I do feel a bit self-conscious about the language I'm about to use on a Jesuit campus! But the second warning is, quite frankly, that I'm pretty pissed off right now. I have the joy and the privilege of working in a college that is genuinely trying to build a culture of care for everyone that works for or with it, but that college is embedded in a university that is filled with mistrust, that is replacing transparency with obfuscation, and that is actively undermining the care we all need in order to function. I'll hope that in what's ahead I can work through some of the anger and come back around to thinking generously with you about the possibilities ahead.
+
+So, in 2020, just before everything began shutting down, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread on Twitter in which she talked about the things she tells early career Black scholars who seek her advice on surviving in the academy. These two tweets in particular caught my attention:
+
+
+
+
+Note: "This place was fucked up when you got here, it will be fucked up when you leave here. All you can control is how much you let it fuck you up in the process. That is a pretty impolitic stance but I stand by it. I don't think these institutions can support us or love us. And I honor the many many people who work to make them more humane. But you, alone, cannot do that. And you cannot do it, ever, by killing yourself."
+
+
+
+https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry
+
+Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the last two-plus years of the horrifying accuracy of this perspective -- that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. Institutions are 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?
+
+
+# collective action
+
+Note: One key thing that it would require is collective action. Because McMillan Cottom is right: you, alone, cannot change things. Together we might: but first we have to build that "together," build the spaces and places of supporting that together, and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what follows develops out of the arguments in _Generous Thinking_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle, as I originally conceived it, had to do with my conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education in the United States required those of us who work on campus to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the many publics that it serves.
+
+
+# "radical approach"
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part, though, grew out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, and that it can't be made incrementally but instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no easy path or simple tool that can readily take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American university system that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the purpose of our institutions from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated population ready to participate in building a better world -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed described FOUR YEARS AGO as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." That decline has only accelerated since, and we can no longer simply dismiss it as evidence of an entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that exists. Rather, we need to consider the possibility that the very paradigm under which higher education has operated in the United States is failing, and failing fast, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world. And this is true not least because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the decline in confidence in the university is not just caused by the public failing to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. What I'm asking for is a tall order -- in many ways swimming against the current of the neoliberal institution. But a large part of what I'm after is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions *as* communities, as well as *in interaction with* communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own: we need our publics' help as much or more as they need ours.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education has always been of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments and other institutions for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while the concept of generosity may seem too touchy-feely to represent the key to the future of the university, I hope, in the book, that I've put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole."
-- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the institution itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests and excludes a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: So the book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves requires re-grounding the institution in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It requires concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+# listening
+
+Note: *Generous Thinking* asks us to consider how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+# reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that the critical reading practices we enact on campus might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged research, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns, as well as to transform those communities from passive recipients of the university's knowledge into active collaborators in shared projects.
+
+
+# the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, our institutions of higher education must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of structure that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and community engagement. Colleges and universities must become the kind of institutions that can focus less on individual achievement, on educating for individual leadership, and that instead focuses on building community, and indeed on educating for community-building. And this requires a radical rethinking of the reward structures of higher education: what we value and how we demonstrate that we value it.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: Our institutions are in many ways structured as collectives, in which each member is charged with some part of the well-being of the whole. This is how we derive our principles of shared governance, that we each have a contribution to make to the operation of the institution. And yet: when we examine both the kinds of work for which we are actively rewarded, as well as the nature of the rewards themselves, we repeatedly find an emphasis on the individual rather than the whole. For instance, for faculty at an institution like mine the work for which we are most rewarded is our research -- which we pointedly refer to as our "own" work -- and the rewards we receive often pull us away from the collective. If I publish a well-received book or a an article published in a prestigious journal, I might be eligible for a course release or relief from service responsibilities. And all of the other possible rewards I can seek -- promotions, raises, sabbaticals, and so forth -- encourage me to retreat from membership in the university community and instead focus on my own work. This is part and parcel of the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university, in which every form of merit -- including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and more -- is determined by what I individually have done, even where I've done it collaboratively.
+
+
+# zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. The result is that we find ourselves in a zero-sum game in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+# institutions
+
+Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Budget models such as responsibility center management promote competition among academic units for majors and enrollments, and actively discourage any attempts to think across units, whether to develop new interdisciplinary collaborations or to support connections and resource-sharing across larger university structure. And insofar as these sorts of budgetary structures within our institutions drive us all toward competition, our institutions as a whole are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time," seeking to distinguish themselves from other institutions by promoting their own interests. We need our institutions to distance themselves from the rankings and the other quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another, in order for those institutions to promote more generous, more collaborative internal structures, as well as a work environment in which each of us who work for them can move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more collective.
+
+
+# culture change
+
+Note: And this is no easy task. Before the pandemic shut down our ability to travel, I had the opportunity to speak on a number of college and university campuses where faculty, staff, students, and administrators were thinking about how to create and support a greater sense of connection between their campus communities and their public-facing mission. The folks who invited me -- ranging from the officers of campus AAUP chapters to university presidents and their advisors -- felt a connection with the arguments in *Generous Thinking* not least because they recognized that their institutions require not just better strategic plans but deep culture change. That culture change demands, among other things, a serious rethinking of how we work, why we work the ways we do, how we assess and reward that work, and how we recognize as work things that tend to get dismissed as service but that play a crucial role in building and sustaining collaborative communities. *Generous Thinking*, however, focused pretty tightly on the why and the what of the changes that our university cultures need to make, and spent a whole lot less time on how.
+
+
+# better
+
+Note: For instance: it's clear that making a better, more sustainable institution requires us to move away from individualistic ideas of meritorious production -- in fact to step off the Fordist production line that forever asks us to do *more* -- and instead to think in a humane fashion about ways that we can do *better* . Better often in fact requires slowing down, talking with our colleagues and our communities, and most importantly, listening to what others have to say. Better requires engagement, connection, sharing, time, in ways that more nearly always encourages us to rush past. Turning from more to better can help us access the pleasures -- indeed, the joys -- of our work that life on the production line has required us to push aside. But given the ways that we've all been steeped in *more*, it's not at all clear how we might begin to slow down, to make a set of changes that go against the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us.
+
+
+# generosity in hard times
+
+Note: So I was already thinking that I needed to follow up *Generous Thinking* with something that would dig a bit further into the how of transformation. And then after one of the talks I gave, an attendee asked me a question that made the stakes of thinking about how painfully clear. Her question has been stuck in my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that it's relatively easy to embrace when resources are plentiful, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to think generously 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 saying "you're completely right; that's the real question" and pointing out that 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. But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us -- we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them -- invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I do want the institution to survive, and I want to sustain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
+
+
+# sacrifice
+
+Note: And I also know that however much I may want to keep the institution running, the institution is not thinking the same about me. However much we sacrifice for them, they cannot sacrifice for us. This returns me to Tressie McMillan Cottom's point: you, alone, cannot make the institution more humane, and especially not by killing yourself in the process. This is especially true for members of minoritized groups working within the academy; it's especially true for faculty without tenure; it's especially true for staff; it's especially true for scholars working in contingent positions; it's especially true for everyone whose positions in the hierarchies of prestige and comfort leave them vulnerable, especially at moments when "we're all in it together" is invoked not in the context of resource-sharing but of sacrifice. Sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and to accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time as we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
+
+
+# big structural change
+
+Note: The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. And this is the deepest goal of _Generous Thinking_, and by extension of the followup project I've been working on, entitled _Leading Generously_. In this project I'm focusing on how we can work collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. What kinds of leadership are required for us remake the university into an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members, in good times and bad? _Leading Generously_ is in some ways intended to be a practical handbook for putting the ideas of _Generous Thinking_ into action. But in doing so it asks its readers to reconsider some basic concepts that underwrite big structural change. It proposes that, despite the enormity of the transformation that higher education needs today, local changes can begin to make a difference, and that we are capable of making those local changes, which can network out into something larger.
+
+
+# leadership
+
+Note: Among the concepts that demand reconsideration, however, is the very notion of leadership itself. We conventionally associate leadership with the folks at the top of an institutional hierarchy, those with the authority to steer the ship. While I hope that *Leading Generously* might speak to them, the project addresses everyone on campus, beginning with the argument that everyone in an institution has the potential to create local transformative change that can model ways of being that others might learn from and join in with. This conviction places a lot of emphasis on individual actors, however, in ways that may seem a bit at odds with some of today's most important ideas about how power operates. Those critical ideas -- including arguments about race and racism; about sex, gender, and misogyny; about class and power -- understand the issues they explore to be *systemic* rather than *individual*. That is to say, they argue that real change requires social transformation. It requires building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, transforming economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. I am convinced by those arguments, and I have that same end goal: building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world. But the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
+
+
+# agency
+
+Note: The key to this problem is where we locate agency: who has the power to start the process of making significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, there is little agency left to the individual. And it's unquestionably true that the structural problems we face are enormous, and that one individual can't do much to reshape the world. But groups of individuals can. And building those groups starts with individuals who decide to do more, to put what individual agency they do have to work in solidarity with others.
+
+
+# you
+
+Note: And so *Leading Generously* begins with you, where you are. It starts from the position that each of us is equipped to make change in the aspects of our institutions over which we have influence, and that these changes can model new modes of being within our communities. But there's a second part to the question of agency: how to multiply it. One of the deepest flaws in contemporary models of leadership is the assumption that our reach becomes bigger as we climb the org chart. And of course power does grow in that direction, but what also happens is that you narrow your connections, until you find yourself at the pinnacle of the institution: you're at the center of power, but you're teetering there alone.
+
+
+> "retreating from the center of things -- both in reality and in one's self-conception -- is inseparable from forging connections that expand the boundaries of one's self."
-- Sarah Buss
+
+Note: And as Sarah Buss notes in the introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled *Radical Humility*, it's through connections that we become larger, not through ego, and building those connections requires a willingness to step out of the singular position of power and to work on coalition-building instead. We need those coalitions to transform a complex organization, and we need to act in solidarity in order for those coalitions to succeed.
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: Because of this requirement, it's important to recognize that the object of leadership is not institutions, but people, bringing them together and organizing for change. Building a more generous, deeper sense of "us" asks us to focus our attention on our relationships with our colleagues and with our broader communities, ensuring that we maintain the humanity not just of those we work with and for, but of the structures through which all of us connect.
+
+
+# how
+
+Note: How we begin transforming our institutions, then, is shoring up the means of moving from "you" to "us," the means of building the coalitions and collectives required to transform our institutions and make them capable of the kinds of community-oriented thinking we most need today. There are aspects of this transformation that require high-level administrative intervention: developing the post-RCM budget model that rewards collaboration and contributions to the collective success of the institution rather than competition among units. (And honestly, any institution that can successfully develop and implement such a model could become a shining example for other to learn from.) But beyond these high-level administrative aspects of transformation, there are more local aspects as well, aspects that each of your units can take on. Many of our units are governed by bylaws or other policy documents, and the thing about those documents is that they can be revised. It's often a messy process, but bringing together the members of a department to articulate their values and then rewrite their bylaws to align with those values can foster deep cultural change, by looking hard at the discrepancy between, for instance, our desire for transparency and equity and our policies limiting who gets to participate in and vote on departmental processes. Or, by looking hard at the conflict between our desire for innovation and impact in scholarly work and our policies defining what counts as "research" in highly limited ways.
+
+
+# change
+
+Note: None of this is easy, not least because it requires us to do some deep self-examination, questioning both the ways our policies have become established and our attachments to them. As an expert in organizational change has put it, "People don't resist change. They resist being changed." We need to think hard about what the kinds of cultural change we'd like to see in our institutions will ask of us. We need to consider how we might become better listeners, how we might learn to sit with difficult conversations and even criticism, how we might commit to assessing our work and the work of those around us based on our deepest values, how we might cultivate an atmosphere of mutual and renewable trust, and so on. Each of these ideas -- listening, vulnerability, values, trust, support and more -- is deceptively simple, but with careful consideration can become the foundation for a practice of community building, for thinking through institutional policies and processes and ensuring that they serve the people for whom the institution operates.
+
+
+# people
+
+Note: The necessity of that practice is clear: our institutions cannot survive the crises they currently face unless the people and the relationships that make up the institution thrive. Budgets and bottom lines matter, but without its people -- the students, the staff, the faculty, the community -- the university is nothing. And that's the thing that we need to understand now more than ever: the recognition that the primary work of colleges and universities is connection, and that in hard times the most generous thing we can do is to connect with ourselves and everyone we work with, so that we all might develop the collective strength necessary to build a better future.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+## Generous Argument
+---
+### Critique, Community, Pedagogy
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+##### http://kfitz.info/presentations/mla20.html
+
+Note: Ethical questions with respect to pedagogy abound, and more seem to crop up every day. For instance: how do the technologies that claim to make our teaching lives easier -- learning management systems, plagiarism checkers, attendance and attention monitors -- subject our students to non-stop surveillance, and what can we do to counteract such surveillance? How does our departments' reliance on contingent teaching labor -- which, at institutions like mine, frees tenured and tenure-track faculty from undesirable burdens by shifting them onto others -- not only subject our colleagues to untenable working conditions but also leave our students insufficiently connected to the institution in ways that will impact their future prospects, and what can we do to rectify things?
+
+
+## pedagogy
+
+Note: But the ethical questions that we must address aren't driven solely by new technologies or by neoliberal economics. There are aspects of our most basic pedagogies -- assumptions that are at the heart of professionalization in our fields -- that it would be worth asking ourselves some hard questions about, to ensure that the goals and outcomes we're working toward in our teaching actually align with the values we'd like to espouse and world we hope to create.
+
+
+## seminar
+
+Note: Here's the scene that first got me thinking in this direction, a moment in a graduate seminar I taught years ago, a moment that for me came to feel emblematic of the situation of the contemporary university. I want to preface the story by saying that I offer it not as an indictment of the kids today, but rather of the m.o. of higher education since the last decades of the 20th century. So here's the scene: the seminar is in cultural studies, and is meant to provide an overview of some current questions in critical theory. I do not now remember what article it was we'd read for that class session, but I opened our discussion by asking for first responses. And three students in a row issued withering takedowns of the article, pointing to the author's methodological flaws and ideological weaknesses. After the third, I said okay, that's all important and I definitely want to dig into it, but let's back up a bit: what is the author's argument here? What is she trying to accomplish?
+
+
+## silence
+
+Note: Nothing. "It's not a trick question," I said. "What is this article about?" Now, I was a fair bit younger and less sure of myself at that point, and I immediately began wondering whether I'd asked a stupid question, whether the sudden failure to meet my gaze was a sign that I, like the author, was now being dismissed as having pedestrian interest in neoliberal forms of meaning-making that demonstrated my complicity with the systems of oppression within which I worked. But it gradually dawned on me -- and then was confirmed over the course of the semester -- that the problem with the question wasn't its stupidity but its unfamiliarity. The students were prepared to dismantle the argument, but not to examine how it was built.
+
+
+## they say / i say
+
+Note: The students in this seminar, like so many of us, had learned all too well one of the lessons often extrapolated from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's _They Say, I Say_: that the key move in academic argumentation is from what others have previously said to one's own -- almost always contrasting, and inevitably more interesting or correct -- contribution. That is to say, that the goal of critical thinking is to expose the flawed arguments of others in order to demonstrate the inherent rightness of our own.
+
+
+## conversation
+
+Note: The larger point that Graff and Birkenstein make in _They Say, I Say_ is in fact a good and important one: that scholarship proceeds through conversation, and thus that scholarly argument begins with engaging with what others have said and then develops through one's own individual contribution to the discussion. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first part is that we are -- and when I say we, I mean human beings at this hour of the world -- we are by and large TERRIBLE at conversation. Witness any set of talking heads on television, or any Thanksgiving dinner table, or any department meeting: more often than not, we spend the time when other people are talking waiting for our own turn to speak, and we take what's being said to us mostly as a means of formulating our own response. We do not genuinely *listen*, but instead *react*. And the same is too often true of scholarly conversation: the primary purpose of engaging with what "they" have said is to get to the important bit -- what I am saying.
+
+
+## individualism
+
+Note: That's the first problem. The second is the assumption that what I am saying, my own individual contribution to the discussion, is genuinely individual, that it is my own. In no small part this stems from the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university -- an orientation inseparable from the individualism of the surrounding culture -- in which the entire institutional reward structure, including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and every other form of merit is determined by what I individually have done. Every tub sits on its own bottom, in other words, and if I am to succeed it must be based on my own individual accomplishments.
+
+
+## zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. We all find ourselves in an environment in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time.
+
+
+## competitive thinking
+
+Note: As a result, the mode of conversation promoted by _They Say, I Say_ has become less about the most important forms of critical thinking on which our work focuses -- engaging with what has been said before us and adding to the discussion -- than about competitive thinking. Competitive thinking is a hyperindividualistic mode of debate that suggests that we are in an endless struggle with one another, in which there is only room for so much success, for so much attention. In competitive thinking, the quest for academic and professional success requires us to defend our own positions, and attack others. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+## institutions
+
+Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the institutional reward structures within which we operate privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions separate themselves from quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that we'll likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more productive.
+
+
+## teaching
+
+Note: But in the meantime, one of the places where we can begin to create a new ethics and transform the values that structure our institutions is in teaching. This is not to say that such transformation will be easy. We are working within a system that instills these notions of competition and individual achievement earlier and earlier, of course, as students come to us from elementary and secondary institutions increasingly structured around testing. Perhaps students aren't competing directly against one another in the moment of testing, but they are nonetheless being inculcated into at least two of competitive thinking's underpinnings: the responsibility of the individual for demonstrating mastery, and the significant consequences of being wrong.
+
+
+## wrong
+
+Note: Wrong means failure. Wrong brings shame. And so as Kathryn Schulz has explored, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid acknowledging their wrongness. But of course there is no real thinking without the possibility -- indeed, somewhere along the line, the inevitability -- of being wrong. Without being willing to be wrong, we can't hypothesize, we can't experiment, we can't create. We can't imagine new possibilities. We can't dream. But we are hard-wired not to admit the possibility that we might be wrong.
+
+
+## you're wrong
+
+Note: And one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong -- and again, by "we" here, I mean both to point to academics in particular and to humans living at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century in general -- again, one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong is by demonstrating the inherent wrongness in everyone else's ideas. In the academy, and perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, this takes the form of critique: if I can demonstrate what's wrong with your ideas, it must mean that my ideas are better.
+
+
+## critique
+
+Note: This is the upshot of our misapplication of _They Say, I Say_, and it's what leads to the situation I faced in my graduate seminar: we have armed our students with all the most important tools of critique. They are ready to unpack and dismantle. They are well-trained, that is to say, in playing what Peter Elbow once referred to as the doubting game, in which they focus on the parts of an idea that could be wrong and what it might mean if they were. But they have -- and if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we all have -- a tendency to skip the half of the game that's supposed to come first: the believing game, in which we focus on what it might mean if the idea were right. Our reading of _They Say, I Say_, in other words, encourages us to dismiss what "they say" as quickly as possible, in order to get on to the more crucial "I say," the part for which we will actually get credit.
+
+
+## critical thinking
+
+Note: I want to be clear here: there is a LOT of what "they say" that in fact should be pushed back against. There's a lot out there worth doubting. I'm not asking us not to disagree, not to push new ideas forward, not to think critically. I am, however, hoping that we might find ways to remember that critical thinking requires deep understanding and even generosity as a prerequisite.
+
+
+## generosity
+
+Note: So what I want to ask today is what we and our students might gain from slowing the process down, from emphasizing the believing game before leaping to the doubting game, from lingering a bit longer in the "they say." We might, just as a start, find that we all become better listeners. We might open up new ground for mutual understanding, even with those with whom we most disagree.
+
+
+## we say
+
+Note: And we might find ourselves moving less from "they say" to "I say" than instead to "we say," thinking additively and collaboratively about what we might build together rather than understanding our own ideas to require vanquishing everyone else's. A more generous model of argument might emerge, one based on building something collective rather than tearing down our predecessors in order to promote our own ideas. Generous argument might help us frame ways of thinking that focus on higher education as a means of fostering community rather than providing individual benefit.
+
+
+## generous assessment
+
+Note: Of course, if we are really going to effect this transformation -- what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about the values that underwrite higher education -- we're going to have to think differently about how we measure our success as well. About what success means in the first place. If we're going to move away from the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom, hyper individualistic, competitive mode of achievement, in which all outcomes are understood to be individual and are therefore assessed at that level, and instead foster more collective goals, we're going to need to think carefully about what we're assessing and why. How might we instead focus our modes of assessment at all levels, and the rewards that follow, on collaboration, on process?
+
+
+## us
+
+Note: If we're going to bring this mode of generous thinking, of generous argument, of generous assessment to bear on our classrooms, of course, we'd be well served by bringing it to bear on our work together first. We need to think seriously about how all of the processes that structure our professional lives -- not least our processes of hiring, of retention, of tenure and promotion -- might help to instantiate the values we want to bring to the work we do, rather than fostering the culture of competition, of invidious distinction, that colors all of the ways that we work today, and the environment within which our students learn.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
+
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+
+ Writing in Public
+
+
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+## Writing in Public
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://kfitz.info/presentations/mla21.html
+
+Note: Thank you. I would like to begin with a collective acknowledgment that Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. In particular, the University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. I want to take a moment before I start here today to note that I wrote this talk before yesterday's events, and it's hard not to return to it today and feel the utter narcissism involved in focusing in on my own experiences with writing in public. My hope, though, is that by forging ahead and doing the work we'd originally planned for today, we might be able to open a conversation about the relationship between openness in scholarly communication and the work required to build a more just civil society for us all. So:
+
+
+# limits
+
+Note: Conversations about opening publishing to the public often get caught up in questions about the ontological or epistemological limits of what we consider scholarship: Do openly shared works, whether posted on personal websites or deposited in institutional or disciplinary repositories, "count" as publications? Can they be trusted to have the same integrity and authority as publications that have been through traditional editorial and peer review processes? How can we *know*?
+
+
+# possibilities
+
+Note: I want instead to turn to a set of questions about possibilities: What could scholarship become if we were to embrace the kinds of openness that websites and repositories offer? What kinds of work could that scholarship do -- for individual scholars, but also for the academy as a whole -- if such sharing became a default mode in which work circulates?
+
+
+# my story
+
+Note: I'm going to begin the process of opening up these questions by unrolling a bit of my own story with respect to these practices. As I do, though, I want to note that I don't see my example as a model for new ways of working that can simply be applied to any scholar's situation; in fact, my own narrative is idiosyncratic enough that it might point the way toward an embrace of nimbleness, flexibility, and improvisation in exploring the possibilities that the always changing modes of working in public might offer.
+
+
+# 2002
+
+Note: So: I'm going to start the story in 2002, when I was an assistant professor in a tiny but highly privileged bubble on the eastern edge of the west coast. I'd spent the previous four years doing the thing I was supposed to do: revising my dissertation into a book manuscript and publishing a few journal articles along the way. I'd made contact with a few presses about the book manuscript during the revision process, and three of them had expressed a desire to see more when I was done. // And now, in 2002, I was done. I was beginning the process of getting the manuscript to a press, which would of course lead to a lot of waiting: waiting for the acquisitions editor's response, waiting for the peer reviews to come in, waiting for the editorial board's vote. It could be as long as two years before the book came out, I thought. (Incorrectly, as it turns out: it was over FOUR years before the thing was finally published, for a host of reasons I've written about elsewhere.) Anyhow, the main thing I felt in 2002 was *stifled*: I wanted so badly to be in communication with other scholars about this work, and it seemed entirely plausible that the thing might languish unread on my hard drive.
+
+
+# "weblog"
+
+Note: And so I found myself, on one of my procrastination-driven afternoons, googling -- did we google in 2002? -- googling old friends from grad school, to find out what they were up to now. And one of them, it turned out, had started this thing called a *weblog*, in which he posted more or less daily about the things he was reading, the questions that were cropping up around him, whatever happened to capture his attention. This friend was now working outside the academy, so there wasn't a scholarly project per se behind this blog, but there was a rich *intellectual* project there, a funny, erudite one that was actively drawing an audience into conversation with him. They left comments, they asked questions, they argued, they made jokes. They were reading and engaging with what he wrote, and they were writing in response. And I thought: holy moly, that's *it*.
+
+
+
+(http://plannedobsolescence.net 2002)
+
+Note: So I started a blog. I didn't originally have a sense of the thing as a scholarly project, though I did see it as an outgrowth of the book project, a place where all the stuff that didn't make it into the manuscript could go, as well as a place where the ideas from the manuscript could continue to develop. Mostly, the blog was for me an exercise in immediate gratification: I could ponder an idea and at least potentially get feedback on that idea right away. But getting that feedback required some work: even in those early days, a blog was not a *Field of Dreams* style if-you-build-it-they-will-come space; that work had to be brought to the attention of potential readers first. And, it turned out, the best way of doing that was to read and comment on the work being done by other bloggers, and especially other bloggers writing about similar kinds of issues, both in the comments on their blogs and in new posts on my own.
+
+
+# discourse network
+
+Note: On the scholarly level, what this post-and-comment engagement did was build a discourse network through which the circulation of ideas could lead to their advancement.
+
+
+# community
+
+Note: But beyond that, on the human level, these connections produced a community, a group of writers and readers working together on their shared concerns. That community worked to build out the discourse network, developing a lot of the conventions that mark our systems of scholarly communication, including expectations of the relative stability of published texts (by marking revisions as they occur), of the use of citation (through links and hat-tips), and of peer review (though post-publication comment and response). But the community was more than just its publications and the rules for producing them; it was a network of support that enabled the development of its members and of the relationships among them. And it was an open network, one that defined a community of peers not through some set of pre-existing roles or credentials but instead through participation in and contribution to the community's processes.
+
+
+# growth
+
+Note: That said, all of this writing in public that began with the baldest desire to get someone, somewhere, to read and engage with something I wrote, wound up producing for me not just a group of deep and abiding friendships but also the first forms of conventional scholarly recognition of my career. My first citations, my first lecture invitations, my first solicited pieces of writing, all stemmed from work I was doing on the blog. Doing that work in public -- breaking away from the isolation-driven anxieties and doubts that had been so much a part of the academic thinking I'd been trained in, and focusing on the idea that scholarship was always intended to be part of an ongoing conversation within a community of practice -- helped my writing grow, helped my confidence grow, and helped my sense of scholarly community grow.
+
+
+
+(http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/introduction/undead/)
+
+Note: So in 2009, when I asked NYU Press to allow me to conduct an open review process with the manuscript of my second book, *Planned Obsolescence*, it was with both community and scholarly goals in mind. Posting the manuscript online for comment made sense to me, both as a means of getting feedback from the community of practice that I'd worked so closely with as I'd gathered the ideas and drafted the project, and as a means of creating a kind of accountability to its audience. 40ish readers left more than 350 comments on the manuscript, discussing its strengths and its flaws both with me and with one another, and creating a rich, broad sense of the revision path ahead of me.
+
+
+
+(https://generousthinking.hcommons.org)
+
+Note: I repeated that process in 2018 with the open review of *Generous Thinking*, and I've done something similar over the last few months with the serial release of a very early draft of the followup project, *Leading Generously*. These have all been enormously productive experiences overall, but they haven't been all rainbows and unicorns.
+
+
+# peer review
+
+Note: One of the concerns commonly raised about open peer review processes is that the absence of anonymity and the visibility of the process might cause some reviewers to pull their punches, going easier on poor work than they should. I want to approach this concern, first, by noting that peer reviewers *should not be punching anyone*. The purpose of peer review is not just to determine whether a text is worthy of being published but in fact to help the author figure out what needs to be done in order to make it as strong as it can be -- and that process requires a kind of collegiality, a kind of generosity, that benefits from a direct, open, scholar-to-scholar connection between author and reviewer. And we all know how to do that work of presenting critical responses in a supportive way: we do it with our students every day.
+
+
+# constructive
+
+Note: And the colleagues who've contributed feedback to my projects online have done just that with me: they've found overwhelmingly constructive ways to push me forward, to get me to rethink, to encourage me to revise. Some of their comments have been stickier than others, and every once in a while one points out a flaw in my thinking that I might wish were a little bit less publicly visible. But one of my goals in doing so much of my writing in public has been precisely to accept my own vulnerability and put it aside in favor of the possibilities that making my sometimes messy early work visible presents.
+
+
+# showing our work
+
+Note: Those possibilities include allowing others to see inside what are otherwise black-boxed processes. Making the processes of review more transparent and dialogic benefits not only the author, who like me will have the opportunity to understand more about the contexts of the critiques brought to bear on the work, but also future scholars, who might be able to trace the lineage of the ideas contained in final publications, seeing how they arise out of the conversations between author and reviewers. Beyond that, however, making the processes of writing and revision more transparent presents enormous potential benefits for our students, who otherwise only ever get to see final products, and may well be left with the impression that our journal articles spring from our heads fully-formed. *Showing our work* will enable us to demonstrate to our students what we mean when we talk about revision, what it means to really revisit an argument in response to feedback on it.
+
+
+
+GDJ (https://pixabay.com/vectors/social-media-connections-networking-3846597)
+
+Note: And then there are the benefits for ourselves: writing in public can demonstrate to editors, for instance, our ability to build and connect with an audience. It can draw in potential collaborators working on similar or related questions. And it can help us develop a generous scholarly community -- indeed, a generous scholarly commons, where we all work together for the benefit of the whole.
+
+
+
+hcommons.org
+
+Note: And so, Humanities Commons. I worked with my colleagues at the MLA to launch the network, first as MLA Commons and then opening up our colleagues across the humanities in December 2016. Four years on, over 25,000 scholars and practitioners worldwide have joined us, building out their scholarly profiles, sharing their work via the repository, discussing that work in groups, and, of course, blogging. This is networked scholarly communication at its finest -- less focused on products than on processes, understanding publishing as one aspect of an ongoing, wide-ranging conversation. It's a scholar-governed, academy-owned platform that is committed to transparency, to equity, to openness, and to remaining not-for-profit. If you're not already working in public there, I hope you'll come join our community, and see for yourselves the ways that opening your conversations to broader publics might help the work we do reach beyond the academy and create the possibility of a better world.
+
+
+# thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/mla21.html
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+ Leading Generously
+
+
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+# Leading Generously
+---
+### The Liberal Arts and Tools for Transformation
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Here we are. MLA 2023.
+
+
+## crisis
+
+Note: At this hour of the world, at this particular convention, beginning a paper with an invocation of crisis is hardly unusual. In fact, it veers dangerously into the territory of the cliché, so expected as to say absolutely nothing. And yet, given recent events at my own institution -- as well, I imagine, as events at all of our institutions, not to mention events surrounding those of us here without the privilege of institutional affiliation -- to speak of the state of things without reference to crises feels all but impossible.
+
+
+## permanent crisis
+
+Note: Many of the kinds of crises we talk about at the MLA have been with us for quite some time, and particularly those we experience in our corner of campus, where the humanities in particular and the liberal arts more broadly seem to have been forgotten. The enduring nature of these crises has been described by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon in *Permanent Crisis*, which traces the long history of the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities back to the establishment of the German university system, which of course gave shape to much of the structure of research universities in the contemporary United States. Reitter and Wellmon argue, in fact, that the existence of the humanities in the modern era is dependent upon that sense of crisis:
+
+
+> “For nearly a century and a half, claims about a 'crisis of the humanities' have constituted a genre with remarkably consistent features: anxiety about modern agents of decay, the loss of authority and legitimacy, and invocations of 'the human' in the face of forces that dehumanize and alienate humans from themselves, one another, and the world. These claims typically lead to the same, rather paradoxical conclusion: modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities. Without a sense of crisis, the humanities would have neither purpose nor direction.” (Reitter and Wellmon 132)
+
+Note: (**READ SLIDE.**) And perhaps it is true that we rely on our sense of crisis, our sense of marginalization within our institutions and of swimming against the larger cultural tides, to give us purpose. Much of the work that we do, after all, is structured by critique, and without our distance from the cultural and institutional center we can neither obtain the perspective nor sustain the motivation necessary to studying the ways that our world structures and is structured by its representations.
+
+On the other hand. There are some particularities to the situation of the humanities today -- the threats that our colleges, our departments, our fields, and our researchers and instructors face -- that are not simply rhetorical, and it's worth paying some careful attention to the specifics of these crises, which include:
+
+
+- the labor crisis
+- the economic crisis
+- the political crisis
+
+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 in humanities departments have the benefits of tenure, and thus the voice in campus 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 -- 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 the humanities bring to bear.
+
+
+
+
+Note: 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.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So part of my goal today is to demonstrate that we have at hand some of the means of responding to the crises faced by our fields and our institutions, and that we can demonstrate through the ways that we do our work a better path for the future of the university at large. I argued in Generous Thinking for the ways that stronger connections between our institutions and the many publics that we serve might help facilitate a renewed sense of higher education as a public good, and I discussed a range of forms of public scholarship, including community-engaged research and open publishing processes, that might help us build those connections.
+
+
+## change
+
+Note: But for individual scholars to engage in more open, connected forms of work requires deep institutional change, in order to ensure that work is valued and supported. And we need not only to transform the ways that we value and reward public work, but we also need to create the policies that can help us account for and support public work, and we need to adopt the processes and platforms that can bring public work to life. And all of this will require us to get active on campus, and to begin developing a new model for academic leadership via collective action.
+
+
+## leadership
+
+Note: We need that new model for academic leadership not least because the crises in which we 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 structure are doing grave damage to the purposes of higher education.
+
+
+## "like a business"
+
+Note: This is why our mission statements die a little every time that someone says that the university should be run more like a business: because all of our institutions already *are* being run like businesses, and long have been. Of course, what that someone means when they say that the university should be run more like a business is that we should be keeping a closer eye on the bottom line, we should be relentless in our pursuit of innovation, we should be eliminating the product lines that aren't producing sufficient revenue, we should be keeping our front-line labor in check, and so on. All of which we've been subjected to for decades now, and all of which has contributed to the sorry state we're in.
+
+
+## competitive
+
+Note: Even worse, however, the unspoken parts of "like a business," the individualist, competitive models for success that are foundational to corporate structures, are actively preventing our institutions from flourishing. This is true not just at the micro-level, where each individual student and employee is required to compete for resources, but also at the macro-level, where our institutions are required to square off in the marketplace rather than develop any kinds of cross-institutional collaborations that could lift the entire sector rather than creating the rankings-driven lists of winners and losers that surround us today.
+
+So here's the core of my argument: universities are not meant to be profit centers, and shouldn't be run that way. They are rather shared infrastructures dedicated to a form of mutual aid, in which those who have -- in this case, knowledge -- support those who need, with the goal of producing a more just and equitable society.
+
+
+## mutual aid
+
+Note: Dean Spade defines mutual aid as "collective coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse." And as Peter Kropotkin argued at the turn of the 20th century, mutual aid, mutual protection, and mutually beneficial cooperation have been as important to the development of both animal and human societies as the Darwinian mode of competition for survival. In fact, though history focuses on the role of conflict in societies -- it makes for a more thrilling narrative than does cooperation -- Kropotkin indicates the significance of mutual aid for our subjects of study:
+
+
+> 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 arts, knowledge, and intelligence; 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 arts, industry, and science. (Kropotkin 296)
+
+Note: (**READ SLIDE**) The development, then, not just of the softer, more aesthetic subjects that we in the humanities study, but of the broader 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 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
+
+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.
+
+"Coalition" and "leadership" may not seem to go together well, I'll acknowledge; our ideas about what it is to lead have largely come to us from the corporate universe, as filtered through our business schools. A leader in that model is a strong, visionary individual capable of seeing the future and pressing an institution toward it. But if you've been paying attention to the higher education press for the last several months, you might already have a sense of why, coming from my own institutional perspective, I am somewhat less than sanguine about the transformative potential embodied in the folks that our campuses designate as "leaders." In fact, referring to our upper administrations, our boards, and so on as "leadership" is a profound misnomer. They are, more properly, "management," charged with keeping the institution running in accordance with the status quo.
+
+Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of creating change, and not only can that work be done anywhere within the org chart, it's in fact most effective when it emerges through a grass-roots process of coalition building rather than via top-down mandate.
+
+
+## "over-managed and under-led"
+
+Note: It's not for nothing that John Kotter has argued that most organizations today are **"over-managed and under-led,"** and academia is no exception. In fact, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with -- and worse, an inability to create -- change.
+
+
+## re-organize
+
+Note: So how do we re-organize ourselves in ways that will enable us to create the change that our campuses so desperately need? I've been working on a project for the last few years focused on exactly that question, a question that I left wide-open at the end of *Generous Thinking*. For this new project, in addition to more standard forms of research, I've conducted interviews with a number of people, mostly mid-level managers within their institutions, whom I consider to be leading the process of transformative change. Nearly all of them point to the need for collaboration, for listening, for mutual support, and so on, in order to create the ground on which transformation can grow. Or, as Chris Bourg said to me, “The leadership skills for the future of higher education are 100% coalition-building and relationships.” And this is true at every level throughout our institutions: our collective success at the department level, the college level, the university level, all depends upon our becoming and acting as a collective, upon our developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear. And that process -- determining what our shared goals are and should be, and how we should go about striving toward them -- requires a kind of interrelation that is not merely personal but also, and of necessity, political.
+
+
+## politics
+
+Note: When I talk about politics in this context, I do not mean to point to any of the politician-driven shenanigans taking place in Washington, in our state capitols, 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
+
+
+> “all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings 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 (34). Just institutions require political action, but the ways that "collective evaluation and decisionmaking" have been trammeled on our campuses by the erosion of shared governance into bureaucratic busywork has left most of us feeling less than enthusiastic about the prospects. And, in fact, that kind of depoliticization is a core principle of management: getting things done by minimizing input and eliminating controversy.
+
+
+## how the liberal arts works
+
+Note: So to come back around to the focus of our panel: what does this have to do with how the liberal arts works? What I want to suggest here is that the liberal arts as broadly understood, and the humanities in particular, are the areas on campus that are simultaneously the most dependent on mutual aid in order to flourish and that have the most to gain from its full realization. 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 begin with us. This is not to say that we need more academic leaders to rise out of our fields, but rather that our fields 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 for academic leadership and its basis the individualist 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.
+
+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 have some concrete examples that I can discuss in the Q&A. In the meantime, however, 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.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+ The Humanities, the Commons, and What We Have to Share
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+## The Humanities the Commons
+---
+### and What We Have to Share
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Thank you so much for that introduction! I'm of course sorry that we're not all together today, but I'm delighted to have this opportunity to talk with you about some of the work that we're doing at Humanities Commons, about the motivations for and implications of that work, and about what it all might mean for the history and future of the humanities.
+
+
+
+
+Note: A bit of background as I begin: Humanities Commons was launched in late 2016 by the Modern Language Association, with support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a platform for interdisciplinary communication among scholars and practitioners across humanities fields. It extended the model established in 2013 by MLA Commons by adding proprietary instances for a small group of scholarly societies who served as pilot partners, and it connected those instances to a central hub that anyone could join, free of charge, all linked by a shared identity management system that allows users access to the parts of the network where they have active memberships.
+
+
+# NSF FAIROSRCN
+
+Note: A couple of months ago, the Commons team was awarded a significant grant from the National Science Foundation in order to further extend that model. We're part of the inaugural cohort of the NSF's FAIROS RCN grantees -- which is how I discovered that the NSF loooooooves acronyms even more than my institution does. This one is composed of three key parts: (CLICK) first, FAIR, which stands for "findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable," a set of principles guiding data sharing; (CLICK) second, OS, or open science; (CLICK) and third, RCN, or research coordination networks. So the goal for this grant program is to foster networks that coordinate open research according to FAIR principles, all of which aligns quite well with the structures and goals of the Commons. What is especially unusual about this grant is that our team, which has "Humanities" right there in the name, was approached by a group of STEM education researchers who wanted to use our platform in order to build their RCN.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are at least a couple of things that make this surprising: first, that the usual narrative about innovation in scholarly communication is that it begins in the sciences and only gradually makes its way into the stodgy print-oriented humanities, where our elbow-patched blazers and dusty archives encourage us to resist everything technical. And second, that this particular group of STEM folks defied their own usual narrative about the sciences' technological superiority and empirical rationality in recognizing that we've figured out something that they can learn from -- that the values-based approach to building participatory communities we've taken with the Commons is what they need to make their work successful.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The usual narratives have played themselves out time and again in scholarly communication. You might see the history of the open access movement, for instance, which began with the recognition among scientists of the damage that major corporate publishers and their exorbitant journal subscription rates were doing to the dissemination of knowledge. In an effort to create greater equity in access to scientific developments -- and, not at all incidentally, to increase the global impact of work being done in the sciences -- researchers began pressing for alternatives to traditional journal publishing models, such that folks without access to well-funded research libraries would still be able to learn from new publications.
+
+The open-access movement has been driven since the beginning by an astonishingly utopian goal. As the signatories to the Budapest Open Access Initiative claimed in 2002, "Removing access barriers to (scientific and scholarly) literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge." The idealism that drove this initiative is deeply moving, and it's had a significant effect in changing the ways that scholarly communication operates. Especially in the sciences.
+
+That it's had less impact, and far slower impact, in humanities fields is often read as a sign of our recalcitrance, our backwardness, our refusal to engage with new systems, our desire to keep our conversations exclusive, our grasping after prestige, our general irrelevance to public discourse.
+
+
+
+
+Note: While there may well be some elements of truth in some of those assessments, what they leave out is a rather stark economic reality: that by and large humanities scholars and humanities publications simply could not afford to take up the call to open access, at least not as it began to manifest itself in actual publications that sought to make work openly available. A huge percentage of those publications managed the transition to open access by shifting the costs from the consumer side, where they had long relied on library subscription fees, to the producer side, where they instead asked authors for article processing charges. This was arguably all well and good in the sciences, where researchers had long written publishing costs into their grants, and where nearly all research is not only grant-funded but funded by grants sizable enough to accommodate such costs. As we know all too well, the vast majority of research done in the humanities is done without grant-based support, and where grants do exist they're usually too tiny to accommodate publishing charges. And while some institutions are able to provide some support for APCs, that funding is neither universally available nor sufficient to accommodate all the researchers that might benefit from it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So the situation in the humanities, looked at just a little harder, reveals itself not to be exclusive to our fields at all. In fact, the rise of APC-driven business models in scholarly publishing has created new kinds of barriers, preventing many researchers at underfunded institutions, in underfunded areas of research, and in underfunded areas of the world, from contributing to the conversations that open access can foster. In other words, in shifting the costs of publishing from the consumer side to the producer side, the dominant model for open-access publishing didn't eliminate inequities but instead just shifted them, too, turning barriers to access to the products of scholarly research into barriers to participation. (Even more dismayingly, the corporate behemoths that the open access movement rose up against have only seen their profit margins increase during this time, as they've figured out that they can create hybrid journals for which they can *both* charge libraries subscription fees for the journal as a whole *and* charge authors with the ability to pay APCs to make their work openly available.)
+
+
+
+
+Note: Now, I don't want to suggest that we in the humanities, thanks to our highly developed powers of critical foresight, knew that this situation was coming, and thus that any resistance to open access publishing we might have put up was born out of a principled demand for equity and inclusion. But I will venture that the minimal availability of funding to support this shift to APCs, and thus the less-than-lucrative prospects for publishers who might have hoped to enact the same business model flip in our fields, encouraged those of us who want to promote open access scholarly communication in the humanities to begin thinking about workarounds -- and at least some of those workarounds are potentially more subversive to the business of scholarly communication altogether.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is where Humanities Commons came from: a desire to promote more open, more public, more universally accessible scholarly communication for everyone. I'll come back in a bit to talk more about the Commons and what it makes possible -- and why you should consider making active use of it -- but first I want to dig a bit further into what else we might learn from the economic situation of the humanities, both within the federal and foundation funding landscapes and within our institutions. After all, the dearth of financial resources available in the humanities is part and parcel of a set of problems we face, all of which might be collectively lumped in under the rubric of the ongoing "crisis in the humanities."
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: This sense of crisis is in many ways our constant companion, and has been for long enough that Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon have traced the long history of its rhetoric back to the establishment of the German university system as we know it. In their book, *Permanent Crisis*, they argue in fact that the existence of the humanities is in the modern era dependent upon that sense of crisis:
+
+
+> “For nearly a century and a half, claims about a 'crisis of the humanities' have constituted a genre with remarkably consistent features: anxiety about modern agents of decay, the loss of authority and legitimacy, and invocations of 'the human' in the face of forces that dehumanize and alienate humans from themselves, one another, and the world. These claims typically lead to the same, rather paradoxical conclusion: modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities. Without a sense of crisis, the humanities would have neither purpose nor direction.” (Reitter and Wellmon 132)
+
+Note: (READ SLIDE.) And perhaps it is true that we rely on our sense of crisis, our sense of marginalization within our institutions and of swimming against the larger cultural tides, to give us purpose. Much of the work that we do, after all, is structured by critique, and without our distance from the cultural and institutional center we can neither obtain the perspective nor sustain the motivation necessary to studying the ways that our world structures and is structured by its representations.
+
+On the other hand. There are some particularities to the situation of the humanities today -- the threats that our colleges, our departments, our fields, and our researchers and instructors face -- that are not simply rhetorical, and it's worth paying some careful attention to the specifics of these crises, which include:
+
+
+- the labor crisis
+- the economic crisis
+- the political crisis
+
+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 casualization of labor 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 their academic careers. The effects of this labor crisis are manifold: as fewer and fewer faculty in humanities departments have the benefits of tenure, and thus the voice in campus 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 institutions in the United States are mired in, and that has begun spreading to other national systems as well. As Eric mentioned yesterday, one key turning point in this crisis was the decision made by Ronald Reagan as governor of California to institute fees, both as a means of minimizing public responsibility for higher education and as a means of controlling the student population by keeping "undesirable" elements out. As public funding in the United States has come to provide 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 -- 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 as Eric discussed yesterday 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 in many states, the growing interference of trustees in the curriculum -- all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that the humanities 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. So what I'm arguing today is in part that we have at hand some of the means of responding to these crises, and that we can demonstrate through the ways that we do our work a better path for the future of the university at large. I do want to be cautious, of course, about one particular pitfall that Reitter and Wellmon point out,
+
+
+> “the crisis discourse in the humanities has promoted overpromising -- the framing of the modern humanities as the redemptive solution to a larger crisis routinely referred to as modernity” (285)
+
+Note: that “the crisis discourse in the humanities has promoted overpromising—the framing of the modern humanities as the redemptive solution to a larger crisis routinely referred to as modernity” (285). I do not mean to suggest that research in our fields can *by itself* be anything like redemptive in the face of climate change, of rising fascism, of deepening racial and religious hatred, or growing economic inequity. But I do want to say that our fields have provided us with some tools that can help us make change, if we're willing to use them.
+
+
+# community-engaged research
+
+Note: Included in this toolkit are the practices of public scholarship, which include several different modes of connection between the work that we do as scholars in the humanities and the publics that we might want to reach. We might, for instance, think about **community-engaged research**, which brings scholars into active collaboration with community groups in seeking solutions to shared problems and improvements in public life. In this category I might think about the work that my colleague Kristin Arola in MSU's department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures has done with colleagues at Michigan Technological University and with two Anishinaabe tribes in the Upper Peninsula, investigating the potential for developing renewable energy sovereignty for these communities. Or the work that my colleague Julian Chambliss has done in partnering with Black communities in central Florida to document and preserve their histories. Community-engaged research projects like these present the opportunity for building close collaborative relationships between a broad range of publics and university-based scholars, opening the door to deeper understandings among scholars of public concerns, as well as a deeper sense among members of the public about what the university can do in the world.
+
+
+# public intellectuals
+
+Note: In addition to community-engaged research, we might also think about the work of **public intellectuals**, who bring the ideas and the methods and the critical sensibilities of scholarly research to bear in writing for broader audiences. The public intellectual as a concept tends, on the one hand, to be stereotyped with the New-York-intelligentsia vibe (just as erudite and out of touch with middle America as scholars are, if with far better book sales figures) or, on the other hand, to be associated with the flighty superficiality of bloggers (compelled to publish ill-thought-through hot takes on every passing aspect of current affairs, regardless of how unimportant). But there are numerous well-trained, careful researchers who have begun publishing in online venues like *Public Books* and in book series like *Object Lessons*, or who are creating podcasts and other popular media forms. These modes of public discourse enable the arguments and ideas that might have an impact in contemporary culture to do that work in places and forms that facilitate engagement with broader publics.
+
+
+# open access
+
+Note: And then of course there's **open access** -- simply ensuring that the work that we do, in whatever form we currently do it, can be found and read by any potentially interested member of the public. I've already talked a bit about the financial reasons that open access publishing as it is most commonly practiced hasn't taken root in the humanities; few of us have the wherewithal to pay the APCs required to publish our journal articles in gold OA venues, much less our books. But of course there are other forms of open access beyond the pay-to-play platforms; there are a growing number of "platinum" or "diamond" OA venues that do not require author-side fees. And beyond that, there are many "green" routes to open access, including institutional and disciplinary repositories (including Humanities Commons, which I'll return to shortly).
+
+But it's not just the economic aspect that stops many humanities scholars from opening up our work. Many of us shrug off the power of making our work publicly available, assuming that we're already reaching the audiences we want to reach through our journal articles and our university press books, and that we don't need our work to circulate any further. This is one of the modes of thinking that gets misinterpreted as a kind of elitism at the gnarled heart of the humanities -- that we want to keep our conversations exclusive and out of the reach of the hoi polloi. More often than not, though, we turn away from making our work more publicly available for other reasons:
+
+
+
1. because of the mistaken assumption that anyone in the field will have access to a research library
+2. because of the equally mistaken assumption that no one who isn't in the field could possibly want to read our work
+3. because of the fear that making our work more public will open it up to bad actors who only want to use it as ammunition in their attacks on us, our fields, and our institutions
+
+Note: (READ SLIDE.) The fact is that there are many, many people in our fields -- faculty at regional state institutions and community colleges, program officers at many granting agencies, and a wide range of our former students who move out of the academy into what we might think of as the humanities workforce -- who do not have access to research libraries, and thus have great difficulty obtaining many of the publications that we produce. And even beyond those scholars, there are way more people than you think with the potential for interest in the work that we do -- but, of course, no one can be interested in it if they don't know it exists.
+
+That third concern, however, is a real one. We've seen way too many instances of late of scholars being targeted by political agitators -- or even politicians -- because of their public-facing work. And I want to acknowledge that greater visibility is not without risks. But right now, we desperately need *more* scholars willing to take those risks, to face down the threats posed to academic freedom and to critical inquiry and say publicly the things that need to be said. That kind of risk-taking requires careful preparation, however, both at the personal and at the institutional level. After several of my MSU colleagues, notably those appointed in African American and African Studies, faced public harassment and even violent threats,
+
+
+
+
+Note: my dean's office developed a guidance document for supporting faculty and staff targeted by online attacks, including specific actions that administrators can take to support their colleagues. There are also steps that individual scholars can take, including ensuring that administrators know when publications that might generate attacks are forthcoming, that colleagues are ready to help monitor your social media accounts, and so forth. I point all of this out not to make you worry more about the potential risks involved in making your work public, but rather to point out that those risks can be managed, and to indicate the importance of doing so, because the work that all of us do, done publicly, has the potential to help us all fight back against one of the key crises that face the humanities right now: the assumption that our work is irrelevant in the contemporary world.
+
+
+# credit
+
+Note: But demonstrating our relevance going to require us to be willing to take risks, and to be more generous in sharing our ideas with the public rather than releasing them only in the forms for which we get credit. That last is significant; it's worth considering the recent outcry against certain well-placed political journalists who have withheld crucial information from the public about the activities of the previous administration in order keep those tidbits for publication in their books. These journalists, apparently more concerned about publishing bestsellers, have failed in their crucial duty of informing the public and making potential crimes known. Though the stakes of our work may be not be quite that extreme, we similarly fail in this duty all the time, by reserving our ideas for the kinds of publications that most readily slot into the annual review form. For us to do more public-facing work, however, will require us to change that form. That is, it will require us to think not just about how we need to change our approaches and attitudes, but also about how our institutions and their assumptions need to change in order to support our work.
+
+
+
We not only need to transform the ways we value and reward public work, but we also need to create the policies that can help us account for and support public work, and we need to adopt the processes and platforms that can bring public work to life.
+
+Note: (READ SLIDE) And all of this will require us to get active on campus, and to begin developing what I think of as a new model for academic leadership via collective action. For starters, making it possible for all of us to do the publicly-engaged work that can help shape a better world will require us to make significant changes to the reward structures that govern so much of our lives on campus. We have to press for real change in our processes for hiring, retention, tenure, promotion, and more, not just in order to support our own work done in public but to support that of our colleagues, allowing all of us to produce the engaged research that might help us have the greatest potential impact on the culture within which we work.
+
+These personnel evaluation processes often feel out of our control, handed down from above and subject to the capriciousness of deans and provosts, but the faculty has far more influence over those processes than we think. The documents that define our departmental policies and processes can, with the consent of the faculty, be revised. My own department, a few years back, undertook a top-to-bottom revision of our bylaws, which included far-reaching changes to our definitions of things like "publication" and "peer review" in ways that established our support for the many different forms in which our colleagues today are working, as well as our recognition that our future colleagues will be working in ways that we cannot fully imagine. Our chair started this revision process by dividing the entire department into working groups tasked with taking on particular sections of the bylaws, and then those working groups brought their proposed revisions to the department as a whole for discussion and approval. As a result, the revisions involved all of us in a process in which we proposed and debated and ultimately assented to a set of collective values that have the potential to open up the department's work in exciting ways.
+
+
+# academic leadership
+
+Note: This is a model I would like to see more of us espouse for the future of **academic leadership**. Those of you who have been paying attention to the higher education press for the last couple of months might already have a sense of why I am somewhat less than sanguine about the transformative potential embodied in the folks we commonly describe as our leaders -- our upper administrations, our boards, and so on. In fact, I think referring to these folks as "leadership" is a profound misnomer. They are, more properly, "management," charged with keeping the institution running in accordance with the status quo. Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of creating change, and not only can that work be done anywhere within the org chart, it's in fact most effective when it emerges through a grass-roots process of coalition building rather than via top-down mandate.
+
+
+**"over-managed and under-led"**
+
+Note: It's not for nothing that John Kotter has argued that most organizations today are **"over-managed and under-led,"** and academia is no exception. In fact, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with -- and worse, an inability to create -- change.
+
+Developing this facility for transformative change within our institutions and our profession at large has been at the heart of my last several projects. In my most recent book, ***Generous Thinking***, I tried to prepare the ground for better connections among scholars on campus, as well as better connections with our broader communities, in order to create the kinds of caring mutual engagements that change requires. In my current project, tentatively entitled ***Leading Generously***, I'm working to think with folks on campus who want to change things about the values and qualities that leadership based in collective action requires.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And through **Humanities Commons**, my colleagues and I have been working to create a space in which new kinds of communities can form, and new kinds of collaborations can take shape.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Humanities Commons is built by and for scholars. It's a **values-enacted** project, meaning that, among other things, (1) we have put in place a participatory governance structure that enables users to have a voice in the project's future, (2) we have developed network policies that emphasize inclusion and openness, and (3) we are committed to transparency in our finances, and most importantly to remaining not-for-profit in perpetuity. Account creation is open to any interested user regardless of institutional affiliation, professional status, or organizational membership, and accounts are and will remain free of charge. More than 30,000 users across the humanities and around the world have created accounts and are using them to build professional profiles, to participate in group discussions, to develop and publish a wide range of web projects, and to deposit and share their work in our open-access repository.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The Commons is designed, in other words, to facilitate **community-building**. Its emphasis on member-to-member connections and communication is a significant component of why our STEM education colleagues came to us, rather than selecting another platform on which they could build their research coordination network -- because while there are a ton of well-funded platforms that can host and preserve the data and publications that scientists produce, many of them are operated without academic values in mind, and none of them focus on the *people* doing the work, or on the ways that discussion and collaboration amongst those people might lead to transformative change.
+
+
+# what the humanities have to share
+
+Note: And this, more than anything, is what I think **the humanities have to share**. We have a wealth of research and inquiry that we should make more openly available, of course. We have field-based knowledge and ways of reading, writing, and thinking that contemporary culture light learn from, absolutely. But we also have access to other ways of working, ways of understanding and connecting with one another that our colleagues in other fields, our institutions, and the world beyond could benefit from. We're not all community organizers -- far from it. But the work we do can provide insight into the ways that communities come into being, the ways they communicate, the ways they can connect and grow. And that, at this hour of the world, is something we desperately need.
+
+
+**hcommons.org**
+
+Note: So I'll conclude with an invitation to come join us at **hcommons.org**. Create an account, build a profile, join discussion groups or create new ones. Find new work in the repository, and deposit work of your own. Demonstrate what the humanities can do when we have the space and the support and the community we need.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+ The Humanities, the Commons, and What We Have to Share
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+## The Humanities the Commons
+---
+### and What We Have to Share
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Thank you so much for that introduction! I'm really grateful for the opportunity to talk with you about some of the work that we're doing at Humanities Commons, about the motivations for and implications of that work, and about what it all might mean for the history and future of the humanities.
+
+
+
+
+Note: A bit of background as I begin: Humanities Commons was launched in late 2016 by the Modern Language Association, with support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a platform for interdisciplinary communication among scholars and practitioners across humanities fields. It extended the model established in 2013 by MLA Commons by adding proprietary instances for a small group of scholarly societies who served as pilot partners, and it connected those instances to a central hub that anyone could join, free of charge, all linked by a shared identity management system that allows users access to the parts of the network where they have active memberships.
+
+
+# NSF FAIROSRCN
+
+Note: A couple of months ago, the Commons team was awarded a significant grant from the National Science Foundation in order to further extend that model. We're part of the inaugural cohort of the NSF's FAIROS RCN grantees -- which is how I discovered that the NSF loooooooves acronyms even more than my institution does. This one is composed of three key parts: (CLICK) first, FAIR, which stands for "findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable," a set of principles guiding data sharing; (CLICK) second, OS, or open science; (CLICK) and third, RCN, or research coordination networks. So the goal for this grant program is to foster networks that coordinate open research according to FAIR principles, all of which aligns quite well with the structures and goals of the Commons. What is especially unusual about this grant is that our team, which has "Humanities" right there in the name, was approached by a group of STEM education researchers who wanted to use our platform in order to build their RCN.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are at least a couple of things that make this surprising: first, that the usual narrative about innovation in scholarly communication is that it begins in the sciences and only gradually makes its way into the stodgy print-oriented humanities, where our elbow-patched blazers and dusty archives encourage us to resist everything technical. And second, that this particular group of STEM folks defied their own usual narrative about the sciences' technological superiority and empirical rationality in recognizing that we've figured out something that they can learn from -- that the values-based approach to building participatory communities we've taken with the Commons is what they need to make their work successful.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The usual narratives have played themselves out time and again in scholarly communication. You might see the history of the open access movement, for instance, which began with the recognition among scientists of the damage that major corporate publishers and their exorbitant journal subscription rates were doing to the dissemination of knowledge. In an effort to create greater equity in access to scientific developments -- and, not at all incidentally, to increase the global impact of work being done in the sciences -- researchers began pressing for alternatives to traditional journal publishing models, such that folks without access to well-funded research libraries would still be able to learn from new publications.
+
+The open-access movement has been driven since the beginning by an astonishingly utopian goal. As the signatories to the Budapest Open Access Initiative claimed in 2002, "Removing access barriers to (scientific and scholarly) literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge." The idealism that drove this initiative is deeply moving, and it's had a significant effect in changing the ways that scholarly communication operates. Especially in the sciences.
+
+That it's had less impact, and far slower impact, in humanities fields is often read as a sign of our recalcitrance, our backwardness, our refusal to engage with new systems, our desire to keep our conversations exclusive, our grasping after prestige, our general irrelevance to public discourse.
+
+
+
+
+Note: While there may well be some elements of truth in some of those assessments, what they leave out is a rather stark economic reality: that by and large humanities scholars and humanities publications simply could not afford to take up the call to open access, at least not as it began to manifest itself in actual publications that sought to make work openly available. A huge percentage of those publications managed the transition to open access by shifting the costs from the consumer side, where they had long relied on library subscription fees, to the producer side, where they instead asked authors for article processing charges. This was arguably all well and good in the sciences, where researchers had long written publishing costs into their grants, and where nearly all research is not only grant-funded but funded by grants sizable enough to accommodate such costs. As we know all too well, the vast majority of research done in the humanities is done without grant-based support, and where grants do exist they're usually too tiny to accommodate publishing charges. And while some institutions are able to provide some support for APCs, that funding is neither universally available nor sufficient to accommodate all the researchers that might benefit from it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So the situation in the humanities, looked at just a little harder, reveals itself not to be exclusive to our fields at all. In fact, the rise of APC-driven business models in scholarly publishing has created new kinds of barriers, preventing many researchers at underfunded institutions, in underfunded areas of research, and in underfunded areas of the world, from contributing to the conversations that open access can foster. In other words, in shifting the costs of publishing from the consumer side to the producer side, the dominant model for open-access publishing didn't eliminate inequities but instead just shifted them, too, turning barriers to access to the products of scholarly research into barriers to participation. (Even more dismayingly, the corporate behemoths that the open access movement rose up against have only seen their profit margins increase during this time, as they've figured out that they can create hybrid journals for which they can *both* charge libraries subscription fees for the journal as a whole *and* charge authors with the ability to pay APCs to make their work openly available.)
+
+
+
+
+Note: Now, I don't want to suggest that we in the humanities, thanks to our highly developed powers of critical foresight, knew that this situation was coming, and thus that any resistance to open access publishing we might have put up was born out of a principled demand for equity and inclusion. But I will venture that the minimal availability of funding to support this shift to APCs, and thus the less-than-lucrative prospects for publishers who might have hoped to enact the same business model flip in our fields, encouraged those of us who want to promote open access scholarly communication in the humanities to begin thinking about workarounds -- and at least some of those workarounds are potentially more subversive to the business of scholarly communication altogether.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is where Humanities Commons came from: a desire to promote more open, more public, more universally accessible scholarly communication for everyone. I'll come back in a bit to talk more about the Commons and what it makes possible -- and why you should consider making active use of it -- but first I want to dig a bit further into what else we might learn from the economic situation of the humanities, both within the federal and foundation funding landscapes and within our institutions. After all, the dearth of financial resources available in the humanities is part and parcel of a set of problems we face, all of which might be collectively lumped in under the rubric of the ongoing "crisis in the humanities."
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: This sense of crisis is in many ways our constant companion, and has been for long enough that Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon have traced the long history of its rhetoric back to the establishment of the German university system as we know it. In their book, *Permanent Crisis*, they argue in fact that the existence of the humanities is in the modern era dependent upon that sense of crisis:
+
+
+> “For nearly a century and a half, claims about a 'crisis of the humanities' have constituted a genre with remarkably consistent features: anxiety about modern agents of decay, the loss of authority and legitimacy, and invocations of 'the human' in the face of forces that dehumanize and alienate humans from themselves, one another, and the world. These claims typically lead to the same, rather paradoxical conclusion: modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities. Without a sense of crisis, the humanities would have neither purpose nor direction.” (Reitter and Wellmon 132)
+
+Note: (READ SLIDE.) And perhaps it is true that we rely on our sense of crisis, our sense of marginalization within our institutions and of swimming against the larger cultural tides, to give us purpose. Much of the work that we do, after all, is structured by critique, and without our distance from the cultural and institutional center we can neither obtain the perspective nor sustain the motivation necessary to studying the ways that our world structures and is structured by its representations.
+
+On the other hand. There are some particularities to the situation of the humanities today -- the threats that our colleges, our departments, our fields, and our researchers and instructors face -- that are not simply rhetorical, and it's worth paying some careful attention to the specifics of these crises, which include:
+
+
+- the labor crisis
+- the economic crisis
+- the political crisis
+
+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 casualization of labor 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 their academic careers. The effects of this labor crisis are manifold: as fewer and fewer faculty in humanities departments have the benefits of tenure, and thus the voice in campus 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 institutions in the United States are mired in, and that has begun spreading to other national systems as well. One key turning point in this crisis was the decision made by Ronald Reagan as governor of California to institute fees, both as a means of minimizing public responsibility for higher education and as a means of controlling the student population by keeping "undesirable" elements out. As public funding in the United States has come to provide 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 -- 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 in many states, the growing interference of trustees in the curriculum -- all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that the humanities 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. So what I'm arguing today is in part that we have at hand some of the means of responding to these crises, and that we can demonstrate through the ways that we do our work a better path for the future of the university at large. I do want to be cautious, of course, about one particular pitfall that Reitter and Wellmon point out,
+
+
+> “the crisis discourse in the humanities has promoted overpromising -- the framing of the modern humanities as the redemptive solution to a larger crisis routinely referred to as modernity” (285)
+
+Note: that “the crisis discourse in the humanities has promoted overpromising—the framing of the modern humanities as the redemptive solution to a larger crisis routinely referred to as modernity” (285). I do not mean to suggest that research in our fields can *by itself* be anything like redemptive in the face of climate change, of rising fascism, of deepening racial and religious hatred, or growing economic inequity. But I do want to say that our fields have provided us with some tools that can help us make change, if we're willing to use them.
+
+
+# community-engaged research
+
+Note: Included in this toolkit are the practices of public scholarship, which include several different modes of connection between the work that we do as scholars in the humanities and the publics that we might want to reach. We might, for instance, think about **community-engaged research**, which brings scholars into active collaboration with community groups in seeking solutions to shared problems and improvements in public life. In this category I might think about the work that my colleague Kristin Arola in MSU's department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures has done with colleagues at Michigan Technological University and with two Anishinaabe tribes in the Upper Peninsula, investigating the potential for developing renewable energy sovereignty for these communities. Or the work that my colleague Julian Chambliss has done in partnering with Black communities in central Florida to document and preserve their histories. Community-engaged research projects like these present the opportunity for building close collaborative relationships between a broad range of publics and university-based scholars, opening the door to deeper understandings among scholars of public concerns, as well as a deeper sense among members of the public about what the university can do in the world.
+
+
+# public intellectuals
+
+Note: In addition to community-engaged research, we might also think about the work of **public intellectuals**, who bring the ideas and the methods and the critical sensibilities of scholarly research to bear in writing for broader audiences. The public intellectual as a concept tends, on the one hand, to be stereotyped with the New-York-intelligentsia vibe (just as erudite and out of touch with middle America as scholars are, if with far better book sales figures) or, on the other hand, to be associated with the flighty superficiality of bloggers (compelled to publish ill-thought-through hot takes on every passing aspect of current affairs, regardless of how unimportant). But there are numerous well-trained, careful researchers who have begun publishing in online venues like *Public Books* and in book series like *Object Lessons*, or who are creating podcasts and other popular media forms. These modes of public discourse enable the arguments and ideas that might have an impact in contemporary culture to do that work in places and forms that facilitate engagement with broader publics.
+
+
+# open access
+
+Note: And then of course there's **open access** -- simply ensuring that the work that we do, in whatever form we currently do it, can be found and read by any potentially interested member of the public. I've already talked a bit about the financial reasons that open access publishing as it is most commonly practiced hasn't taken root in the humanities; few of us have the wherewithal to pay the APCs required to publish our journal articles in gold OA venues, much less our books. But of course there are other forms of open access beyond the pay-to-play platforms; there are a growing number of "platinum" or "diamond" OA venues that do not require author-side fees. And beyond that, there are many "green" routes to open access, including institutional and disciplinary repositories (including Humanities Commons, which I'll return to shortly).
+
+But it's not just the economic aspect that stops many humanities scholars from opening up our work. Many of us shrug off the power of making our work publicly available, assuming that we're already reaching the audiences we want to reach through our journal articles and our university press books, and that we don't need our work to circulate any further. This is one of the modes of thinking that gets misinterpreted as a kind of elitism at the gnarled heart of the humanities -- that we want to keep our conversations exclusive and out of the reach of the hoi polloi. More often than not, though, we turn away from making our work more publicly available for other reasons:
+
+
+
1. because of the mistaken assumption that anyone in the field will have access to a research library
+2. because of the equally mistaken assumption that no one who isn't in the field could possibly want to read our work
+3. because of the fear that making our work more public will open it up to bad actors who only want to use it as ammunition in their attacks on us, our fields, and our institutions
+
+Note: (READ SLIDE.) The fact is that there are many, many people in our fields -- faculty at regional state institutions and community colleges, program officers at many granting agencies, and a wide range of our former students who move out of the academy into what we might think of as the humanities workforce -- who do not have access to research libraries, and thus have great difficulty obtaining many of the publications that we produce. And even beyond those scholars, there are way more people than you think with the potential for interest in the work that we do -- but, of course, no one can be interested in it if they don't know it exists.
+
+That third concern, however, is a real one. We've seen way too many instances of late of scholars being targeted by political agitators -- or even politicians -- because of their public-facing work. And I want to acknowledge that greater visibility is not without risks. But right now, we desperately need *more* scholars willing to take those risks, to face down the threats posed to academic freedom and to critical inquiry and say publicly the things that need to be said. That kind of risk-taking requires careful preparation, however, both at the personal and at the institutional level. After several of my MSU colleagues, notably those appointed in African American and African Studies, faced public harassment and even violent threats,
+
+
+
+
+Note: my dean's office developed a guidance document for supporting faculty and staff targeted by online attacks, including specific actions that administrators can take to support their colleagues. There are also steps that individual scholars can take, including ensuring that administrators know when publications that might generate attacks are forthcoming, that colleagues are ready to help monitor your social media accounts, and so forth. I point all of this out not to make you worry more about the potential risks involved in making your work public, but rather to point out that those risks can be managed, and to indicate the importance of doing so, because the work that all of us do, done publicly, has the potential to help us all fight back against one of the key crises that face the humanities right now: the assumption that our work is irrelevant in the contemporary world.
+
+
+# credit
+
+Note: But demonstrating our relevance going to require us to be willing to take risks, and to be more generous in sharing our ideas with the public rather than releasing them only in the forms for which we get credit. That last is significant; it's worth considering the recent outcry against certain well-placed political journalists who have withheld crucial information from the public about the activities of the previous administration in order keep those tidbits for publication in their books. These journalists, apparently more concerned about publishing bestsellers, have failed in their crucial duty of informing the public and making potential crimes known. Though the stakes of our work may be not be quite that extreme, we similarly fail in this duty all the time, by reserving our ideas for the kinds of publications that most readily slot into the annual review form. For us to do more public-facing work, however, will require us to change that form. That is, it will require us to think not just about how we need to change our approaches and attitudes, but also about how our institutions and their assumptions need to change in order to support our work.
+
+
+
We not only need to transform the ways we value and reward public work, but we also need to create the policies that can help us account for and support public work, and we need to adopt the processes and platforms that can bring public work to life.
+
+Note: (READ SLIDE) And all of this will require us to get active on campus, and to begin developing what I think of as a new model for academic leadership via collective action. For starters, making it possible for all of us to do the publicly-engaged work that can help shape a better world will require us to make significant changes to the reward structures that govern so much of our lives on campus. We have to press for real change in our processes for hiring, retention, tenure, promotion, and more, not just in order to support our own work done in public but to support that of our colleagues, allowing all of us to produce the engaged research that might help us have the greatest potential impact on the culture within which we work.
+
+These personnel evaluation processes often feel out of our control, handed down from above and subject to the capriciousness of deans and provosts, but the faculty has far more influence over those processes than we think. The documents that define our departmental policies and processes can, with the consent of the faculty, be revised. My own department, a few years back, undertook a top-to-bottom revision of our bylaws, which included far-reaching changes to our definitions of things like "publication" and "peer review" in ways that established our support for the many different forms in which our colleagues today are working, as well as our recognition that our future colleagues will be working in ways that we cannot fully imagine. Our chair started this revision process by dividing the entire department into working groups tasked with taking on particular sections of the bylaws, and then those working groups brought their proposed revisions to the department as a whole for discussion and approval. As a result, the revisions involved all of us in a process in which we proposed and debated and ultimately assented to a set of collective values that have the potential to open up the department's work in exciting ways.
+
+
+# academic leadership
+
+Note: This is a model I would like to see more of us espouse for the future of **academic leadership**. Those of you who have been paying attention for the last couple of months to the higher education press coverage of things going on at my MSU might already have a sense of why I am somewhat less than sanguine about the transformative potential embodied in the folks we commonly describe as our leaders -- our upper administrations, our boards, and so on. In fact, I think referring to these folks as "leadership" is a profound misnomer. They are, more properly, "management," charged with keeping the institution running in accordance with the status quo. Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of creating change, and not only can that work be done anywhere within the org chart, it's in fact most effective when it emerges through a grass-roots process of coalition building rather than via top-down mandate.
+
+
+**"over-managed and under-led"**
+
+Note: It's not for nothing that John Kotter has argued that most organizations today are **"over-managed and under-led,"** and academia is no exception. In fact, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with -- and worse, an inability to create -- change.
+
+Developing this facility for transformative change within our institutions and our profession at large has been at the heart of my last several projects. In my most recent book, ***Generous Thinking***, I tried to prepare the ground for better connections among scholars on campus, as well as better connections with our broader communities, in order to create the kinds of caring mutual engagements that change requires. In my current project, tentatively entitled ***Leading Generously***, I'm working to think with folks on campus who want to change things about the values and qualities that leadership based in collective action requires.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And through **Humanities Commons**, my colleagues and I have been working to create a space in which new kinds of communities can form, and new kinds of collaborations can take shape.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Humanities Commons is built by and for scholars. It's a **values-enacted** project, meaning that, among other things, (1) we have put in place a participatory governance structure that enables users to have a voice in the project's future, (2) we have developed network policies that emphasize inclusion and openness, and (3) we are committed to transparency in our finances, and most importantly to remaining not-for-profit in perpetuity. Account creation is open to any interested user regardless of institutional affiliation, professional status, or organizational membership, and accounts are and will remain free of charge. More than 30,000 users across the humanities and around the world have created accounts and are using them to build professional profiles, to participate in group discussions, to develop and publish a wide range of web projects, and to deposit and share their work in our open-access repository.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The Commons is designed, in other words, to facilitate **community-building**. Its emphasis on member-to-member connections and communication is a significant component of why our STEM education colleagues came to us, rather than selecting another platform on which they could build their research coordination network -- because while there are a ton of well-funded platforms that can host and preserve the data and publications that scientists produce, many of them are operated without academic values in mind, and none of them focus on the *people* doing the work, or on the ways that discussion and collaboration amongst those people might lead to transformative change.
+
+
+# what the humanities have to share
+
+Note: And this, more than anything, is what I think **the humanities have to share**. We have a wealth of research and inquiry that we should make more openly available, of course. We have field-based knowledge and ways of reading, writing, and thinking that contemporary culture light learn from, absolutely. But we also have access to other ways of working, ways of understanding and connecting with one another that our colleagues in other fields, our institutions, and the world beyond could benefit from. We're not all community organizers -- far from it. But the work we do can provide insight into the ways that communities come into being, the ways they communicate, the ways they can connect and grow. And that, at this hour of the world, is something we desperately need.
+
+
+**hcommons.org**
+
+Note: So I'll conclude with an invitation to come join us at **hcommons.org**. Create an account, build a profile, join discussion groups or create new ones. Find new work in the repository, and deposit work of your own. Demonstrate what the humanities can do when we have the space and the support and the community we need.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+ Generous Thinking
+
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+
+# Better
+---
+### Thoughts Toward a More Generous Future
+---
+
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/muse.html
+
+Note: Thanks so much for that introduction, and thanks to Wendy and her team for inviting me to participate in this event. When we first began talking about this, before the pandemic, the plan was for an in-person gala celebration, but as with so many things over the last 14 months, we delayed and we adjusted, we made new uses of our networked tools, and we're here now with an event that's perhaps a bit shorter on champagne but that is able to draw many, many more people into conversation.
+
+This is one of the things we've learned from the pandemic: that we can do a lot of things at a distance that we thought we had to travel for, and that we can include many more people in the process. There have been a lot of such lessons in all of our lives, some positive and some less so, but all of which I hope we can carry with us as we begin -- whenever we begin -- to emerge from our homes and return to campus. I want us to carry these things not least because returning to "normal," or seeking to create a "new normal," would be a costly mistake. We have an opportunity right now NOT to return to normal, and there are good reasons not to do so. But coming back better is going to require us to think pretty differently about the structures within which we work, and about how to change them to support the kind of world we want. (So that's my focus for today. A quick warning that there's a little bit of language coming up, in case you've got little ones around.)
+
+So last year, just before everything began shutting down, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread on Twitter in which she talked about the things she tells early career Black scholars who seek her advice on surviving in the academy. These two tweets in particular caught my attention:
+
+
+
+
+Note: "This place was fucked up when you got here, it will be fucked up when you leave here. All you can control is how much you let it fuck you up in the process. That is a pretty impolitic stance but I stand by it. I don't think these institutions can support us or love us. And I honor the many many people who work to make them more humane. But you, alone, cannot do that. And you cannot do it, ever, by killing yourself."
+
+
+
+https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry
+
+Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the last year-plus of the horrifying accuracy of this perspective -- 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?
+
+
+## collective action
+
+Note: One key thing that it would require is collective action. Because McMillan Cottom is right: you, alone, cannot change things. Together we might: but first we have to build that together, build the spaces and places of supporting that together, and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of the thinking that I'm going to unfold in what's ahead stems from the work I did in _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves requires regrounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. And part of that work must include rethinking the nature of institutional responsibilities at a broad level, rethinking the relationship between institutional structures and institutional values, and rethinking the ways that we assess whether our institutions are meeting their missions.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of the book's subtitle grows out of my sense that the necessary changes in front of us are HUGE, that they can't be made incrementally, that they instead require -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no simple path that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. We cannot simply install new leaders atop the same hierarchies and expect anything to be different. Instead, we need to rethink the nature of leadership itself: leadership as a collective practice. This is a massive structural shift in how we understand our work together, but the failures of our current structures make the need clear. As McMillan Cottom noted in _Lower Ed_,
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+--Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The failures of our current structures, after all, begin with politics: the public colleges and universities that not too long ago served as highly accessible engines of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, today face not just a drastic reduction in basic affordability but an increasing threat to their very public orientation, as rampant privatization has not only shifted the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but has also turned the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+## the public good
+
+Note: And the impact of that individualism across our culture has progressively and intentionally undermined our possibilities for collective action. In _Generous Thinking_, I asked the university as an institution to undergo a fairly significant transformation, by returning its attention to the publics, and the public good, that it is intended to serve. But that shift in perspective must be accompanied by a radical shift in understanding of where leadership lies in our organizations, how it should be fostered, and to what ends. And that's the key opportunity we have in front of us as we return to campus, if we're willing to commit ourselves to collective action: we can work together to ensure that the actual priorities and reward structures within our institutions are made to better align with our most important communal goals, precisely by acting with the collective at the forefront.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: The status quo, of course, is that those priorities and reward structures overwhelmingly foster the competition in which our culture is mired. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered -- from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press -- to promote a form of competitiveness that relies on prestige. What Newfield has described as the mandate to "compete all the time" forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, and for those who work within them, making it impossible for us to contemplate any other approach.
+
+
+
+
+Note: _Generous Thinking_ explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead open the gates and focus on the university's role in building and supporting an open knowledge commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But my colleagues and I have also been trying to think through this problem in a more pragmatic, applied form through _Humanities Commons_, a non-profit, academy-owned and governed network serving scholars and organizations from across the humanities and around the world. It may seem a bit of a leap, to move from transforming our institutions such that they can live up to their missions of public service to the development of academy-owned infrastructure for scholarly communication, but these projects are tied together by a few of the key principles on which Humanities Commons operates: first, that higher education will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can not only see the significance of what we do but also participate in that work's development; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them if they are to restore service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions.
+
+
+## community-supported infrastructure
+
+Note: And part of resisting privatization involves turning away from some of the proprietary systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. This is true of a wide range of systems and platforms on which higher education relies, but perhaps nowhere has it become more pressing than in thinking about libraries and scholarly communication, both because these are the systems through which the work of the academy is made public and because these are the systems that have been most deeply privatized at the direct expense of the academy. We -- libraries, publishers, and scholars -- need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education re-engage with the public good.
+
+
+
+http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/
+
+Note: We need to think about these platforms precisely because of the extent to which the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery, data gathering and analysis, through writing, submission, and publishing, to dissemination, evaluation, and reporting, is increasingly concentrated in a very limited number of corporate hands. (In case you don't recognize this graphic, it's a map of Elsevier's holdings circa 2017, as they acquired a range of tools that allow them to create a fully enclosed research ecosystem.)
+
+
+
+
+Note: Countering this trend, and developing the collaborative, community-supported infrastructure that can support the paradigm shift we need will require some careful thinking about the work that will be necessary to make an open knowledge commons sustainable. And that includes not just financial and technical sustainability -- the forms of sustainability that we most often consider in this context.
+
+
+
+
+Note: We need, rather, to focus in on social sustainability, on the relationships required to build and maintain our shared infrastructure. Thinking about those relationships under the rubric of social sustainability directs our attention not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to understand and support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Collective action in developing platforms, just as much as in transforming institutions, requires solidarity: a readiness to put the needs of the whole ahead of local demands, a determination to stand together in support of projects that may not necessarily seem to be our own top priority. This form of solidarity is a necessary prerequisite for the successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms, the kinds of platforms than can transform the ways the academy works.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Sustainability and solidarity connect in the work of Elinor Ostrom, whose research focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place. Relationships, in other words.
+
+
+
+
+Note: A bit of background on her argument: Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods, like cable service, are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous -- that are capable of being "used up" but that are not fenced in -- are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" can apply.
+
+
+## the free-rider problem
+
+Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to their upkeep, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without supporting them. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization of the resources involved.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book _Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action_, the model of the tragedy of the commons -- like other such economic models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
+
+
+> "What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies."
-- Elinor Ostrom
+
+Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education, as well as with the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned platforms on which they should be able to rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of platforms like Humanities Commons, all of which face a similar problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms often accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the very problem that community-developed projects were developed in order to solve. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's crucial that we find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Deep collaborations among many institutions are required to keep such open-access, open-source platforms sustainable, but our institutions are not typically organized to support collaboration. Too often, the labor contributed to shared projects by institutional staff is invisible at best, and seen as a drain on local resources at worst. When things get difficult at home, those staff members are often asked to put the collaboration aside and focus instead on institutional priorities, undermining the potential for collective action that the collaboration can serve. If we are to sustain the kinds of cross-institutional collaborations that can free the entire higher-education sector from the forces of privatization, our institutions must come to understand themselves as part of an interdependent community of institutions, and they need to act locally in solidarity with that community. And this is why I argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+
+
+Note: After all, getting institutions to recognize and act upon their interdependence, to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside is no small task.
+
+
+## culture change
+
+Note: It requires a serious culture change, and one that isn't going to come easily. Over the course of the last several years, I've had the opportunity to speak on a number of college and university campuses where faculty, staff, students, and administrators have been thinking about how to create and support a greater sense of connection between their campus communities and their public-facing mission. The folks who invited me -- ranging from the officers of campus AAUP chapters to university presidents and their advisors -- felt a connection with the arguments I made in *Generous Thinking* not least because they recognized that their institutions require not just better strategic plans but something deeper. The culture change that they need, that we all need, demands among other things a serious rethinking of how we work, why we work the ways we do, how we assess and reward that work, and how we recognize as work things that tend to get dismissed as service but that play a crucial role in building and sustaining collaborative communities. *Generous Thinking*, however, focused pretty tightly on the what and the why of the changes that our university cultures need to make, and spent a whole lot less time on how.
+
+
+# better
+
+Note: For instance: it's clear that making a better, more sustainable institution requires us to move away from individualistic ideas of meritorious production -- in fact to step off the Fordist production line that forever asks us to do *more* -- and instead to think in a humane fashion about ways that we can do *better*. Better often in fact requires slowing down, talking with our colleagues and our communities, and most importantly, listening to what others have to say. Better requires engagement, connection, sharing, in ways that more nearly always encourages us to rush past. Turning from more to better can help us access the pleasures -- indeed, the joys -- of our work that life on the production line has required us to push aside. But making that change goes against some of the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us within the university setting, and it's super unclear how we might even begin.
+
+
+## generosity in hard times
+
+Note: So I was already thinking that I wanted to follow up *Generous Thinking* with something that would dig a bit further into the how of transformation. And then after one of the talks I gave, an attendee asked me a question that made the stakes of thinking about how painfully clear. Her question has been stuck in my head for the last year: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that's relatively easy to embrace when resources are plentiful, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to think generously 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 saying "you're completely right; that's the real question" and pointing out that 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. But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our deepest values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us -- we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them -- invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the university running. I don't know because I do want the university to survive, and I want to sustain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
+
+
+## sacrifice
+
+Note: And I am also certain that however much I may want to keep the university running, the university is not thinking the same about me. Our institutions do not love us back. However much we sacrifice for them, as currently constituted they will never sacrifice for us. This returns me to Tressie McMillan Cottom's point: you, alone, cannot make the institution more humane, and especially not by killing yourself in the process. This is especially true for members of minoritized groups working within the academy; it's especially true for faculty without tenure; it's especially true for staff; it's especially true for scholars working in temporary positions; it's especially true for everyone whose positions in the hierarchies of prestige and comfort leave them vulnerable, especially at moments when "we're all in it together" is invoked not in the context of resource-sharing but of sacrifice. Sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and to accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time as we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
+
+
+## big structural change
+
+Note: The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build the structures that channel it otherwise. And this is the deepest goal of the project I'm now working on, which is tentatively entitled _Leading Generously_. In this project I'm focusing on how we can work collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. How we can develop the kinds of leadership are required for us remake the university into an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members, in good times and bad. _Leading Generously_ is in some ways intended to be a practical handbook for putting generous thinking into action. But in doing so it asks its readers to reconsider some basic concepts that underwrite big structural change. It proposes that, despite the enormity of the transformation that higher education needs today, local changes can begin to make a difference, and that we are capable of making those local changes, which can network out into something larger.
+
+
+## leadership
+
+Note: Among the concepts that demand reconsideration in the process is the very notion of leadership itself. We conventionally associate leadership with the folks at the top of an institutional hierarchy, those with the authority or the power to steer the ship. While I hope that *Leading Generously* might speak to them, the project addresses everyone on campus, beginning with the argument that everyone in an institution has the potential to create transformative change that can model ways of being that others might learn from and join in with. This conviction places a bit of emphasis on individual actors, in ways that may seem at first to contradict some of today's most important ideas about how power operates. Those critical ideas -- including arguments about race and racism; about sex, gender, and misogyny; about class and power -- understand the issues they explore to be *systemic* rather than *individual*. That is to say, they argue that real change requires social transformation. It requires building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, transforming economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. I am convinced by those arguments, and I have that same end goal: building institutions that are committed to supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world. But the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
+
+
+## agency
+
+Note: The key to this problem is where we locate agency: who has the power to start the process of making significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, there is little agency left to the individual. And it's unquestionably true that the structural problems we face are enormous, and that one individual can't do much to reshape the world. But groups of individuals can. And building those groups starts with people who decide to do more, to put what individual agency they do have to work in solidarity with others.
+
+
+# you
+
+Note: And so *Leading Generously* begins with you, where you are. It starts from the argument that each of us is equipped to make change in the aspects of our institutions over which we have influence, and that these changes can model new modes of being within our communities.
+
+But there's a second part to the question of agency: how to multiply it. One of the deepest flaws in contemporary models of leadership is the assumption that our reach becomes bigger as we climb the org chart. And of course power does grow in that direction, but what also happens is that you narrow your connections, until you find yourself at the pinnacle of the institution: you're at the center of power, but you're teetering there alone.
+
+
+> "retreating from the center of things -- both in reality and in one's self-conception -- is inseparable from forging connections that expand the boundaries of one's self."
-- Sarah Buss
+
+Note: And as Sarah Buss notes in the introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled *Radical Humility*, it's through connections that we become larger, not through ego, and building those connections requires a willingness to step out of the singular position of power and to work on coalition-building instead. We need those coalitions to transform a complex organization, and we need to act in solidarity in order for those coalitions to succeed.
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: Because of this requirement, it's important to recognize that the object of leadership is not institutions, but people, bringing them together and organizing for change. Building a more generous, deeper sense of "us" asks us to focus our attention on our relationships with our colleagues and with our broader communities, ensuring that we maintain the humanity not just of those we work with and for, but of the structures through which all of us connect.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The key to transforming our institutions, then, is shoring up the means of moving from "you" to "us," the means of building the coalitions and collectives required to transform our institutions and make them capable of the kinds of community-oriented thinking we most need today. Developing these connections is a big part of what we're trying to do with Humanities Commons, but as Ostrom argues, sustaining a common-pool resource like the Commons requires the network's community to become self-governing. So we're paying a lot of attention to the governance model that supports our collective, ensuring that it enables and encourages participating organizations and institutions to act together in the interests of the whole, and ensuring that the network continues to serve the people for whom it operates.
+
+
+# people
+
+Note: The necessity of that focus for the Commons is clear, but it should also be clear to institutions of higher education at this hour of the world: they cannot survive the crises they currently face unless the people and the relationships that make up the institution thrive. Budgets and bottom lines matter, but without its people -- the students, the staff, the faculty, the community -- the university is nothing. And that's the thing that we need to understand now more than ever: that the primary work of the university, like the Commons, is connection, and that in hard times the most generous thing we can do is to connect with ourselves and everyone we work with, so that we all might develop the collective strength necessary to return better.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/muse.html
+
+Note: I'm honored to have had this chance to talk with you today as you continue the work of building that community. Thanks so much.
+
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+ Working in Public
+
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+## Working in Public
+---
+### Better Structures for Better Institutions
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thanks so much to Shannon for inviting me to talk with you today, and to all of you for bearing with my needing to be on the other side of the globe this week. Part of what interested me in this conference, however, is the ways that you're experimenting with the combination of in-person and remote participation, and so what better time to have a keynote who's nine time zones away?
+
+
+
+
+Note: The thoughts that I'm presenting today largely develop out of my recent book _Generous Thinking_, which makes the overall argument that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and perhaps especially _public_ institutions of higher education, but other kinds of institutions as well -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves. I want to focus in this talk on the good of those public connections, which are crucial both for the publics with whom we work and for us as well. I include within those publics both the folks who appear in our classrooms and the other folks we work with through our research and outreach. We can help support those publics in thinking through the pressing issues that they face in their communities and in the world today, and they can help support our ability to keep doing that work. By working in public, we can demonstrate the good of the humanities to voters who elect legislators and other representatives who determine budgets and set policies that govern our institutions; with parents who encourage or discourage our students in various directions in their educational choices; with employers who hire our students.
+
+
+# background
+
+Note: I come to this argument through a slightly idiosyncratic path. Back in 2002, I’d just finished the process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and it seemed entirely possible that no one else might ever read it. And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience in active discussion with him. And I thought, wow, that’s it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: My blog, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up helping me build a small community of other scholars working online, a community that was crucial to helping alleviate the isolation I'd been feeling. The connections I forged there helped my writing develop, and the work I published drew the first bits of scholarly recognition my work received.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I’d just finished the draft of my second book and decided (with my press's blessing) to post it online for open review. I get asked a lot what made me take the risk of releasing something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth is that I ignored those risks with privileged abandon. What I knew from my blog was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, whose thoughts I wanted to hear, and who I trusted to help me make the book better. And happily, it worked.
+
+
+# 2009
+
+Note: It's important to acknowledge the entire boatload of privilege not-thinking about the risks requires; I was writing from a sufficiently safe position that allowing the flaws in my work-in-progress to be publicly visible wasn't a real threat. It's also not incidental that this was 2009, not 2019. The last few years have made the risks of working in the open impossible to ignore. And yet my experiences leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kinds of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work’s development. And -- perhaps most importantly today -- willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I tested that belief in 2018 by opening the draft of _Generous Thinking_ to a similar open review. Between early February and the end of March, I staged a process in which I first invited a group of readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, after which I opened the project to the world. In the end, 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own). The comments are not all rainbows and unicorns: a few of them sting, and there are a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking had been a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is better for having gone through this public process.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: So my focus today is on the ways that working in public can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that don't just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
+
+
+# challenges
+
+Note: There are real challenges to that process, however. Some of them have to do with today's communication platforms. Blogs don't readily produce the same level of engagement that they did in the early 2000s. In part this has to do with their massive proliferation, and in part it has to do with the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks. As a result, online communities of readers and writers are unlikely to develop spontaneously; instead, building community around online work has to be far more deliberate, reaching out to potential readers and participants and finding ways to draw them, and ourselves, back into sustained conversation.
+
+
+# trolls
+
+Note: And then there are the trolls -- not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one’s work public today can involve real risk -- especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
+
+
+# no easy answers
+
+Note: These problems don't have easy answers. I don't have a perfect platform to offer, and I don't know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. Countering these destructive forces requires advance preparation and focused responses. Ensuring that public discourse about scholarly work remains productive requires a tremendous amount of collective labor, and the careful development and maintenance of trust, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But there are several other challenges that I want to explore a bit today, challenges that are about the ways that we as scholars do our work, the ways that we can draw a range of broader publics to that work, and the ways that we can ensure that the work we do together is supported in an ongoing way.
+
+
+# publics
+
+Note: None of what I'm about to say is meant to imply that there isn't room for internal exchange among academics; there is, and should be. But there should also be means for the results of those exchanges to become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. And by talking about "publics," I mean to indicate that our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone, all the time; rather, different aspects of our work might reach different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences -- and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors -- is a crucial skill for the 21st century scholar.
+
+
+# access
+# accessibility
+# participation
+
+Note: So I want to consider three issues in thinking about how those publics might interact with our work. The first is ensuring that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it's impossible for anyone to care about our work if they can't see it. The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to see it, but enabling them to see IN it things that they might care about. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural work by more kinds of public thinkers.
+
+
+# access
+
+Note: So, starting with access. Mobilization around open access began in the scientific community more than twenty years ago and has since spread, with varying degrees of uptake, across the disciplines. I dig into the history and particulars of open access in the book, but the key point is that establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge turns out to increase the impact of work so published. In other words, what's good for the public turns out to be good for research, too, not least because making even the most highly specialized work openly available gives it the greatest opportunity to be found and built upon.
+
+
+# economic model
+
+Note: That said, it's important to note that there are some significant challenges to enabling and supporting open access. Freeing journal articles from barriers to access is a relatively attainable goal, but as we know, in many humanities fields the most important work done takes the shape of books rather than articles, and the technologies and economics of book publishing are quite different. Moreover, the economic model into which much open access publishing has settled in the last decade, in which the exchange has bee "flipped" from reader-pays to author-pays, presents problems of its own. This flip has worked in the sciences, where grants are able to cover publication costs, but it's a model that's all but impossible to make work in the humanities. Moreover, the move from reader-pays to author-pays risks shifting the inequities in access from the consumer side to the producer side of the equation, such that researchers in fields without significant grant funding, or at underfunded institutions, can't get their work into circulation in the same way that their more privileged colleagues can.
+
+
+# engagement
+
+Note: So I don’t want to suggest that creating public access is easy, but I don’t want to restrict our sense of the possibilities either, because the public engagement that we have the opportunity to create has enormous potential. Making our work more openly available enables many more scholars, instructors, and students world-wide to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. Expanding our readership in these ways would seem an unmitigatedly good thing.
+
+
+# resistance
+
+Note: And yet, it's clear that we often resist opening our work to broader publics, for a variety of reasons. Many of us keep our work restricted to our own discourse communities because we fear the consequences of making it available to broader publics--and not without justification. The public often seems determined to misunderstand us, to interpret what we say with focused hostility or, nearly as bad, utter dismissiveness. Because the subject matter of much of the humanities and social sciences seems as though it should be accessible, our determination to wrestle with difficult or highly politicized questions and our use of expert methods and vocabularies can feel threatening to many readers. They fail to understand us; we take their failure to understand as an insult. (Admittedly, sometimes it is, but not always.) Given this failure to communicate, we see no harm in keeping our work closed off from the public, arguing that we're only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter?
+
+
+# why
+
+Note: It matters because the more we close our work away from the public, and the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of the academy, the more we undermine the public's willingness to support our research and our institutions. As numerous public humanities scholars including Kathleen Woodward have argued, the major crisis facing the funding of higher education is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good. We wind up strengthening that conviction and worsening the crisis when we treat our work as private. Closing our work away from non-scholarly readers might protect us from public criticism, but it can't protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous in the current economic and political environment. The risks are real, especially for scholars working in politically engaged fields, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public, including our governments, of the relevance of what we do on campus.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: And of course engaging readers in thoughtful discussions about the important issues we study lies at the core of the academic mission. It is at the heart of our values. We don't create knowledge in order to hoard it, but instead, every day, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and in our writing, we embrace an ethic of generosity, of paying forward knowledge that we have received as a gift. We teach, as we were taught; we publish, as we learn from the publications of others. We cannot pay back those who came before us, but we can and do give to those who come after. Our participation in an ethical, voluntary scholarly community is grounded in the obligations we hold for one another, obligations that derive from the generosity we have received.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: We work, however, in an environment that often privileges prestige over all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for that bias toward prestige in another part of the book, but I want to think briefly about its effects on us. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily bleeds into a sense that the more exclusive a publication’s audience, the higher its value. Needless to say, this is a self-defeating attitude; if we privilege exclusivity, we can't be surprised when our work fails to make its importance clear to the public.
+
+
+# access
+
+Note: There's much more to be said here, especially about the erasure of labor inherent in assuming that all publications should simply be made available for free online. But the thing that I'm asking us to consider is whether those of us who can afford to be generous -- those fully-employed members of our professions who can and should make a gift of our work to the world -- might be willing to take on the work of creating greater public engagement for our fields by understanding our work as a public good, by creating the greatest possible public access to it.
+
+
+# accessibility
+
+Note: But creating that public good requires more than simply making our work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn’t possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that’s fine, to an extent: there should always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But we've privileged that inwardly-focused sharing of work to our detriment. Scholars are too often not rewarded -- and in fact are at times actively punished -- for publishing in popular venues. And because the values instantiated by our rewards systems have a profound effect on the ways we train our students, we build the wall between academic and public discourse higher and higher with every passing cohort.
+
+
+# public-facing
+
+Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing venues and projects that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, venues like the _Los Angeles Review of Books_ and _Public Books_. There are also a host of other kinds of digital projects that demonstrate the ways many scholars are already working in multiple registers, engaging with multiple audiences. These venues open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture. But in order to open up those concerns, we need to give some serious thought to the ways we write as well. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn’t restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many mainstream publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to highlight complexity and nuance, and the result is often lines of argumentation, and lines of prose, that are far from straight-forward.
+
+
+# public register
+
+Note: This is not to say that all academic writing should be done in a public register. But I do want to argue that we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible. After all, our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus. But for that project to be successful, we need to hone our ability to alternate speaking with one another and with different audiences.
+
+
+# learn
+
+Note: So we need to think about what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work, which by and large is not something scholars are trained to do. There are initiatives that are working to help scholarly authors focus and express the ideas contained in their scholarly publications in ways that help broader audiences engage with them. Ideally, this kind of writing should become part of graduate training across the university.
+
+
+# public / intellectual
+
+Note: We also need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. University processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don’t meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, public work is frequently underrewarded. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it’s likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must “dumb down” key ideas in order to do so. We need to recognize and appropriately value the work required to make room for the general reader in our arguments, and in our prose.
+
+
+# participation
+
+Note: But we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having worked to engage the public, how can we activate that public to work with us? This is where creating public access and valuing public accessibility transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, work not simply performed for the public but that includes the publics with whom we work, inviting our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants.
+
+
+# citizen humanities
+
+Note: Recent experiments in "citizen science" provide some potentially interesting examples, projects like Galaxy Zoo that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. But what might the citizen humanities look like? It might look like museum exhibits such as Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California, which engaged members of local Pacific communities in the planning and development processes. It might look like The September 11 Digital Archive, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project, which presents first-hand accounts of the events of that day, along with photos, emails, and other archival materials from more than 150,000 participants. It might look like the Baltimore Stories project at UMBC, which used humanities scholarship as a convening force to bring community organizers, educators, and non-profit organizations together to explore narratives of race in American life. What these projects have in common is that each of them explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern belongs to them. The work involved is theirs not just to learn from but to shape and define as well. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
+
+
+# peers
+
+Note: By working in publicly engaged ways, and by bringing those publics into the self-reflexive modes of humanities- and social science-based critique, we have the potential to produce a renewed conception of how intellectual life operates in contemporary culture -- but that renewed conception is going to require us to be open to a new understanding of the notion of our "peers." Open, public scholarship might lead us to understand the peer not as a pre-existing credential but instead as a status that emerges through participation in the processes of a community of practice. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we address within that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening the notion of the intellectual, or the peer, to a much broader range of forms of critical inquiry and active project participation has the potential to reshape relations between town and gown, to lay the groundwork for more productive conversations across the borders of the campus, and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work of the academy matters for our culture as a whole.
+
+
+# networks
+
+Note: And much of that work begins with establishing the networks through which new forms of collaborative, public scholarship can be realized. New networked structures -- including conferences like this one -- might enable us to ask what would be possible if we were to open up our scholarly practices up to real public engagement, to deep interdisciplinarity, to new modes of working. How can new networks enable public universities to more genuinely focus on the mission of bringing knowledge to the people of the state? How might such a network draw public support back to the institution by demonstrating the extent to which the work done here is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public? For public universities to win back public support, they must find ways like this -- structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just the mission statement but of the actual mission -- to place publicly engaged work at the top of its priorities. And that starts in conversations like this, where scholars can come together to explore new work in and with the public.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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+ What We Could Be
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+# What We Could Be
+---
+### The University After the Crisis
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Thank you!
+
+
+## crisis
+
+Note: Though I invoke the notion of "crisis" in my title, it's only to point to its inevitability: conversations about the university that could be are in large part driven by the state of the university today,
+
+
+## permanent crisis
+
+Note: which, as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon suggest, is in a state of "permanent crisis," and has been more or less since its inception. In fact, they argue that we rely on that sense of crisis, and in particular of the ways in which we are swimming against the larger cultural tides, to give us purpose.
+
+
+- the labor crisis
+- the economic crisis
+- the political crisis
+
+Note: On the other hand, there are some particularities to our situation today that it's worth paying attention to, including (**CLICK**) **The labor crisis**, as more and more good positions -- with job security, adequate salaries, full benefits, and above all academic freedom -- are being sucked into the gig economy.
+- (**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.
+- (**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 the university serves.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So what I'm hoping to bring to the table today is the idea that we have at hand some of the means of responding to the crises faced by our fields and our institutions, and that we can demonstrate through the ways that we do our work a better path for the future of the university at large. I've argued at length for the ways that stronger connections between our institutions and the many publics that we serve might help facilitate a renewed sense of higher education as a public good, and I discussed a range of forms of public scholarship, including community-engaged research and open publishing processes, that might help us build those connections. But all of this requires deep institutional change, and in particular a new model for academic leadership via collective action.
+
+
+## leadership
+
+Note: We need that new model for academic leadership not least because 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 with the structures within and through which they work. That's the model 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"
+
+Note: This is why our mission statements die a little every time that someone says that the university should be run more like a business: because all of our institutions already *are* being run like businesses, and long have been. Of course, what that someone means when they say that the university should be run more like a business is that we should be keeping a closer eye on the bottom line, we should be relentless in our pursuit of innovation, we should be eliminating the product lines that aren't producing sufficient revenue, we should be keeping our front-line labor in check, and so on. All of which we've been subjected to for decades now, and all of which has contributed to the sorry state we're in.
+
+
+## competitive
+
+Note: Even worse, however, the unspoken parts of "like a business," the individualist, competitive models for success that are foundational to corporate structures, are actively preventing our institutions from flourishing. This is true not just at the micro-level, where each individual student and employee is required to compete for resources, but also at the macro-level, where our institutions are required to square off in the marketplace rather than develop any kinds of cross-institutional collaborations that could lift the entire sector rather than creating the rankings-driven lists of winners and losers that surround us today.
+
+So here's the core of my argument: universities are not meant to be profit centers, and shouldn't be run that way. They are rather shared infrastructures dedicated to a form of mutual aid, in which those who have -- in this case, knowledge -- support those who need, with the goal of producing a more just and equitable society.
+
+
+## mutual aid
+
+Note: Dean Spade defines mutual aid as "collective coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse." And as Peter Kropotkin argued at the turn of the 20th century, mutual aid, mutual protection, and mutually beneficial cooperation have been as important to the development of both animal and human societies as the Darwinian mode of competition for survival. In fact, though history focuses on the role of conflict in societies -- it makes for a more thrilling narrative than does cooperation -- Kropotkin indicates the significance of mutual aid for our subjects of study:
+
+
+> 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 arts, knowledge, and intelligence; 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 arts, industry, and science. (Kropotkin 296)
+
+Note: (**READ SLIDE**) The development, then, not just of the softer, more aesthetic subjects that we in the humanities study, but of the broader 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 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
+
+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.
+
+"Coalition" and "leadership" may not seem to go together well, I'll acknowledge; our ideas about what it is to lead have largely come to us from the corporate universe, as filtered through our business schools. A leader in that model is a strong, visionary individual capable of seeing the future and pressing an institution toward it. But if you've been paying attention to the higher education press for the last several months, you might already have a sense of why, coming from my own institutional perspective, I am somewhat less than sanguine about the transformative potential embodied in the folks that our campuses designate as "leaders." In fact, referring to our upper administrations, our boards, and so on as "leadership" is a profound misnomer. They are, more properly, "management," charged with keeping the institution running in accordance with the status quo.
+
+Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of creating change, and not only can that work be done anywhere within the org chart, it's in fact most effective when it emerges through a grass-roots process of coalition building rather than via top-down mandate.
+
+
+## "over-managed and under-led"
+
+Note: It's not for nothing that John Kotter has argued that most organizations today are **"over-managed and under-led,"** and academia is no exception. In fact, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with -- and worse, an inability to create -- change.
+
+
+## re-organize
+
+Note: So how do we re-organize ourselves in ways that will enable us to create the change that our campuses so desperately need? As Chris Bourg told me in an interview, “The leadership skills for the future of higher education are 100% coalition-building and relationships.” At every level throughout our institutions, our collective success depends upon our becoming and acting as a collective, upon our developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear. And that process -- determining what our shared goals are and should be, and how we should go about striving toward them -- requires a kind of interrelation that is not merely personal but also, and of necessity, political.
+
+
+> “all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decisionmaking" (Young 9)
+
+Note: When I point to the political, I mean to point to Iris Marion Young's definition of politics, which she uses to describe (**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 (34). Just institutions require political action, but the ways that "collective evaluation and decisionmaking" have been trammeled on our campuses by the erosion of shared governance into bureaucratic busywork has left most of us feeling less than enthusiastic about the prospects. And, in fact, that kind of depoliticization is a core principle of management: getting things done by minimizing input and eliminating controversy.
+
+
+## what we could be
+
+Note: So to come back around to the focus of our panel: what could the university become? What I want to suggest here is that our institutions are wholly dependent on mutual aid in order to flourish, and that they have enormous amounts to gain from its full realization. We have all suffered enormously under the competitive corporate regimes to which we've been subjected. And if there's going to be change, we're going to need to make it happen, by modeling better paths.Our fields -- the critical, the creative, the humanistic -- might develop a new structures of cooperation that can serve as a starting point for the radical undoing of academic hierarchies.Our training, our ways of working, our understanding of the always-already political, and even our outsider status in the current regime can allow us to create alternatives to the failed model for academic leadership and its basis in the individualist 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.
+
+This all sounds super pie-in-the-sky, I recognize, 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 university that works toward transformation of society as a whole.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+ Generous Argument
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Argumentation and Collaboration
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thanks so much; I'm delighted to have the chance to talk with you a bit today. Much of what follows builds on the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. My focus in the book is particularly on the future of the American university, but I think most of it holds for those other nations that seem to be following our relentless course toward austerity and privatization.
+
+
+
+##### http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
+
+Note: Evidence of the need for rebuilding trusting relationships between universities and the public might be found in an increasing number of reports and studies such as this one, released in 2017 by the Pew Research Center, showing a precipitous decline in the esteem colleges and universities are held in in the United States, primarily on the political right. One frequent on-campus reaction to this kind of report, understandably, is to decry the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture, to turn inward, and to spend more time talking with those who understand us — meaning us. But in that reaction we run the risk of deepening the divide, allowing those who want to argue that today’s colleges and universities are not only irrelevant but actively detrimental to the well-being of the general public to say, “see? They’re out of touch. Who needs them anyway?” Because this shift in public opinion didn’t just happen; it was made to happen, part of a decades-long program of defunding a wide range of public-serving institutions in the US.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So the 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves, building relationships of trust that encourage those publics to understand that our institutions belong to them.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of the subtitle, thought, grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization has not only shifted the burden of paying for higher education in the US from the state to individual students and families, but it has also turned the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit. Rather than thinking of higher education as a preparation for a lifetime of learning, students in the US today are overwhelmingly encouraged to understand a university degree as a necessary credential leading to a specific career outcome.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And so we see what Inside Higher Ed reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be examined as evidence that something in the paradigm under which higher education has for the last several decades been operating is failing. In fact, part of the problem is precisely that our institutions operate simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. Even worse than the conflict between these paradigms, however, is that both of them are failing, if in different ways. If our American higher education is to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
+
+
+## generous thinking
+
+Note: The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It's going to require concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+## listening
+
+Note: In that process, I ask us to think about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand what we're hearing as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+## reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that our critical reading practices might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+## working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged projects, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and public engagement. The university must become the kind of institution that can focus less on individual achievement, on educating for individual leadership, and that instead focuses on building community, and indeed on educating for community-building. And this, perhaps needless to say, will require rethinking a lot about the ways we engage with our students.
+
+
+## students
+
+Note: Our students, after all, are our first and most important point of contact with the publics that institutions of higher education serve. Students in the US come to our colleges and universities from a very wide range of backgrounds and with a very wide range of interests. Ensuring that we connect with them, that we work with them in creating the university's future, is job one. But I also want to suggest that some of our students are learning habits of mind from us that ultimately work to undermine the future that we want to build.
+
+
+## seminar
+
+Note: So, _Generous Thinking_ had several points of inception over the years, one of which was a moment in a graduate seminar I taught years ago, a moment that has come to feel emblematic of the situation of the contemporary university. I want to preface the story by saying that I offer it not as an indictment of the kids today, but rather of the m.o. of higher education since the last decades of the 20th century. So here's the scene: the seminar is in cultural studies, and is meant to provide an overview of some current questions in critical theory. I do not now remember what article it was we'd read for that class session, but I opened our discussion by asking for first responses. And three students in a row issued withering takedowns of the article, pointing to the author's methodological flaws and ideological weaknesses. After the third, I said okay, that's all important and I definitely want to dig into it, but let's back up a bit: what is the author's argument here? What is she trying to accomplish?
+
+
+## silence
+
+Note: Nothing. "It's not a trick question," I said. "What is this article about?" Now, I was a fair bit younger and less sure of myself at that point, and I immediately began wondering whether I'd asked a stupid question, whether the sudden failure to meet my gaze was a sign that I, like the author, was now being dismissed as having pedestrian interest in neoliberal forms of meaning-making that demonstrated my complicity with the systems of oppression within which I worked. But it gradually dawned on me that the problem with the question wasn't its stupidity but its unfamiliarity. The students were prepared to dismantle the argument, but not to examine how it was built.
+
+
+## they say / i say
+
+Note: The students in this seminar, like so many of us, had learned all too well the lessons of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's _They Say, I Say_: that the key move in academic argumentation is from what others have previously said to one's own -- almost always contrasting, and inevitably more interesting or correct -- contribution. That is to say, that the goal of critical thinking is to expose the flawed arguments of others in order to demonstrate the inherent rightness of our own.
+
+
+## conversation
+
+Note: The larger point that Graff and Birkenstein make in _They Say, I Say_ is a good and important one: that scholarship proceeds through conversation, and thus that scholarly argument begins with engaging with what others have said and then develops through one's own individual contribution to the discussion. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first part is that we are -- and when I say we, I mean human beings at this hour of the world -- we are by and large TERRIBLE at conversation. Witness any set of talking heads on television, or any large holiday dinner table, or any department meeting: more often than not, we spend the time when other people are talking waiting for our own turn to speak, and we take what's being said to us mostly as a means of formulating our own response. We do not genuinely *listen*, but instead *react*. And the same is too often true of scholarly conversation: the primary purpose of engaging with what "they" have said is to get to the important bit -- what I am saying.
+
+
+## individualism
+
+Note: That's the first problem. The second is the assumption that what I am saying, my own individual contribution to the discussion, is genuinely individual, that it is my own. In no small part this stems from the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university -- an orientation inseparable from the individualism of the surrounding culture -- in which the entire institutional reward structure, including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and every other form of merit is determined by what I individually have done. However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives -- on campus and off -- are overdetermined by highly individualistic processes of selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which applicants are measured, and the best -- whatever that might mean in a given context -- are rewarded. In actual practice, however, those metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. Always, in the unconscious of the academy, there is competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can't ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we're working together. The competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed individually. Every tub sits on its own bottom, in other words, and if I am to succeed it must be based on my own individual accomplishments.
+
+
+## zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. We all find ourselves in an environment in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time.
+
+
+## competitive thinking
+
+Note: As a result, the mode of conversation promoted by _They Say, I Say_ has become less about the most important forms of critical thinking on which our work focuses -- engaging with what has been said before us and adding to the discussion -- than about competitive thinking. Competitive thinking is a hyperindividualistic mode of debate that suggests that we are in an endless struggle with one another, in which there is only room for so much success, for so much attention. In competitive thinking, the quest for academic and professional success requires us to defend our own positions, and attack others. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+## institutions
+
+Note: It's important for me to note that in _Generous Thinking_ I apply this analysis as much to institutions as I do to the individuals who work within them. The competitive individualism under which we all operate contradicts -- and in fact undermines -- all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning. In actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly the province of administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. And that last is crucial: insofar as the institutional reward structures within which we operate privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." This is no way to run a collective. It's also no way to structure a fulfilling life: this disengagement from community and race for individual distinction is a key factor in the extremely high risk of burnout among college faculty and other intellectual workers. It is all but impossible for us to structure our lives around the things that are most in line with our deepest personal values when we are driven to focus on those things that will allow us to compare ourselves -- or our institutions -- favorably with one another. This individualistic, competitive requirement is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social. And no amount of trying to persuade ourselves, or our administrations, or our governing bodies of the public good that we, our fields, and our institutions serve will take root unless we figure out how to step off the competitive track, to insist upon living our academic lives another way.
+
+
+## teaching
+
+Note: But in the meantime, one of the places where we can begin to create a new ethos and transform the values that structure our institutions is in teaching. This is not to say that such transformation will be easy. Those of us teaching in the US are working within a system that instills these notions of competition and individual achievement earlier and earlier, of course, as students come to us from elementary and secondary institutions that are increasingly structured around testing. Those students aren't competing directly against one another in the moment of testing, but they are nonetheless being inculcated into at least two of competitive thinking's underpinnings: the responsibility of the individual for demonstrating mastery, and the significant consequences of being wrong.
+
+
+## wrong
+
+Note: And perhaps it's here that we see the origins of at least some of our students' -- and our -- terror at the idea of being wrong. Wrong means failure. Wrong brings shame. But wrong is inevitable, a horrible thought. And so if we can't avoid being wrong, we can certainly refuse to acknowledge when we're wrong; as Kathryn Schulz has explored, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid recognizing their wrongness. But of course there is no real thinking without the possibility of being wrong. Without being willing to be wrong, we can't hypothesize, we can't experiment, we can't create. We can't imagine new possibilities. We can't dream. But we are hard-wired not to admit the possibility that we might be wrong.
+
+
+## you're wrong
+
+Note: And one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong -- and again, by "we" here, I mean both to point to academics in particular and to humans living at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century in general -- again, one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong is by demonstrating the inherent wrongness in everyone else's ideas. In the academy, and perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, this takes the form of critique: if I can demonstrate what's wrong with your ideas, it must mean that my ideas are better.
+
+
+## critique
+
+Note: This is the upshot of _They Say, I Say_, and it's what leads to the situation I faced in my graduate seminar: we have armed contemporary American students with all the most important tools of critique. They are ready to unpack and dismantle. They are well-trained, that is to say, in playing what Peter Elbow once referred to as the doubting game, in which they focus on the parts of an idea that could be wrong and what it might mean if they were. But they have -- and if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we all have -- a tendency to skip the half of the game that's supposed to come first: the believing game, in which we focus on what it might mean if the idea were right. The m.o. of _They Say, I Say_, in other words, encourages us to dismiss what "they say" as quickly as possible, in order to get on to the more crucial "I say," the part for which we will actually get credit.
+
+
+## critical thinking
+
+Note: I want to be clear here: there is a LOT of what "they say" that in fact should be pushed back against. There's a lot out there worth doubting. I'm not asking us not to disagree, not to press new ideas forward, not to think critically. Critical thinking is in fact at the heart of what scholars do. Not only would we be justified in rejecting any suggestion that we abandon it, or abandon the commitments that underwrite it, in favor of an approach that might be more friendly, but we'd also be well within reason if we were to point out that the critique of critique _is still critique_, that it makes use of criticism's negative mode in the very act of negating it. Moreover, the critique of critique is too often driven either by a disdain for difficulty or by a rejection of the political in scholarly work, neither of which do I want to support. I am, however, hoping that we might find ways to remember that critical thinking requires deep understanding and even generosity as a prerequisite.
+
+
+## generosity
+
+Note: So what I want to ask this evening is what we and our students might gain from slowing the process down a bit, from emphasizing the believing game before leaping to the doubting game, from lingering a bit longer in the "they say." We might, just as a start, find that we all become better listeners. We might open up new ground for mutual understanding, even with those with whom we most disagree.
+
+
+## we say
+
+Note: And we might find ourselves moving less from "they say" to "I say" than instead to "we say," thinking additively and collaboratively about what we might build together rather than understanding our own ideas to require vanquishing everyone else's. We might, as Lakoff and Johnson have suggested, move away from understanding argument through the metaphor of war and instead think of it as a dance, in which two creative individuals come together to produce something that neither could do alone.
+
+
+## asset
+
+Note: We might learn from contemporary theories of community engaged scholarship, which have recognized the damage that a deficit model of engagement has produced -- saying to the community, in effect, you have a problem and we're here to fix it -- and instead focus on an asset model: your community has these strengths, and we as scholars have these others, and together we might do something remarkable.
+
+
+## improv
+
+Note: Or we might think of ways that the work that we do together in the classroom could learn from improvisational comedy, which operates within an ethos of "yes, and." Saying "no" to an improv partner can derail a scene in progress; contradicting what's already happened in order to go a different direction fragments the scenario and shuts down possibility. "Yes, and" instead builds on what's been established, even if in order to go somewhere entirely new.
+
+
+## generous argument
+
+Note: All of these models begin to suggest what a more generous model of argument might provide, one based on building something collective rather than tearing down our predecessors in order to promote our own ideas. Generous argument might help us frame ways of thinking that focus on higher education as a means of fostering community rather than providing individual benefit. And this, as I argue at length in _Generous Thinking_, is key to the future of the university: we have to find our way back to an understanding of the university's work as grounded in service to a broadly construed public, and that requires all of us -- faculty, students, staff, administrators, trustees -- reframing the good that higher education provides as a social good, a collective and communal good, rather than a personal, private, individual one.
+
+
+## generous assessment
+
+Note: Of course, if we are really going to effect this transformation -- what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about the values that underwrite higher education -- we're going to have to think differently about how we measure our success as well. About what success means in the first place. If we're going to move away from the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom, hyper individualistic, competitive mode of achievement, in which all outcomes are understood to be individual and are therefore assessed at that level, and instead foster more collective goals, we're going to need to think carefully about what we're assessing and why. How might we instead focus our modes of assessment at all levels, and the rewards that follow, on collaboration, on process?
+
+
+## us
+
+Note: If we're going to bring this mode of generous thinking, of generous argument, of generous assessment to bear on our classrooms, of course, we'd be well served by bringing it to bear on our work together first. We need to think seriously about how all of the processes that structure our professional lives -- not least our processes of hiring, of retention, of tenure and promotion -- might help to instantiate the values we want to bring to the work we do, rather than fostering the culture of competition, of invidious distinction, that colors all of the ways that we work today, and the environment within which our students learn.
+
+
+## critique
+
+Note: One cautionary note, however: I do not mean this emphasis on generosity, on a supportive engagement with the work that has gone before us, to be used as a means of defusing the important work that critique actually does in helping make ideas better. In the early days of working on _Generous Thinking_, I gave an invited talk in which I tested out some of its core ideas. In the question-and-answer period that followed, one commenter pointed out what he saw as a canny move on my part in talking about generosity: no one wanted to be seen as an ungenerous jerk in disagreeing with me. It was a funny moment, but it gave me real pause; I did not at all intend to use generosity as a shield with which to fend off the possibility of critique. Generosity, in fact, requires remaining open to criticism -- in fact, it requires recognizing the generous purposes that critique can serve. So in pressing for more generous modes of argument and more generous modes of assessment, I do not mean to impose a regime that is all rainbows and unicorns on us. Instead, what I'm hoping to ask is how we might all benefit from thinking *with* rather than *against* one another, *with* rather than *against* the arguments of our predecessors, and *with* rather than *against* our students in developing the knowledge that might make all of us better contributors to the social good.
+
+
+## questions
+
+Note: I've asked a lot of questions about what we might do and how it might work, and I'm not sure how many answers I have for them. In part, that's by design: the problems facing universities today are larger and more complicated than can be solved by any one mind working alone. They're going to require all of us, thinking together, building one one another's ideas, in order to create something new. And so I'm going to stop here, in the hopes that we might use the rest of this time to move from what *I say* to what *we say.* I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we might encourage more generous forms of argument in our classrooms, and how we might use that generosity to encourage new ways of being within the university.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
+
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+ Open Access
+
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+
+# Open Access
+---
+
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/oa.html
+
+Note: I've been asked to give a brief overview of the issues surrounding open access publishing, and want to start by noting that what I'm presenting here is highly abbreviated; there's a lot of excellent scholarly work that digs much further into these issues, including Peter Suber's _Open Access_, and Martin Eve's _Open Access and the Humanities_, both of which I highly recommend.
+
+
+## Budapest-Bethesda-Berlin
+
+Note: The open access movement is generally described as coalescing around three key statement that appeared in fairly rapid succession, each of which sought to define the future of open scholarship.
+
+
+> By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
+
+Note: The first of these, the Budapest declaration, which was originally released in 2002, established the first of the formal definitions. (READ SLIDE)
+
+
+> Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
+
+Note: The declaration included an extremely idealistic statement of the authoring group's goals: (READ SLIDE).
+
+
+- self-archiving ("green")
+- open-access journals ("gold")
+
+Note: The declaration further went on to note that there were two strategies that would help scholarly communication achieve these goals:
+- self-archiving, or what became known as the "green" road to open access, in which researchers share work in open archives, and preferably archives that can be made interoperable; and
+- open-access journals, or what became known as the "gold" road to open access, in which work is made open by the publisher at the point of publication.
+
+
+## messy
+
+Note: This is where things started to get messy, however, as the gold-ness of gold led many to believe that there was a hierarchy being declared between green and gold, which several of the original signatories tried unsuccessfully to refute. Beyond this, however, was a bit of a subversion in the the original *reason* that the open access movement came together: around the unsustainable economics of scholarly publishing. Major corporate publishers had worked to consolidate their ownership over top-tier publications in ways that permitted them to charge research libraries exorbitant subscription fees, thus making access to scholarship dependent on access to an institution with the ability to pay -- and of course thus charging institutions to purchase access to the work done by their own faculty members.
+
+
+## impact
+
+Note: And even more, limiting access to the products of research undermines the reason we do the work: to develop new knowledge and share it with the world so that more such knowledge can be built upon it. By publishing in venues that very few can access, we limit the impact of that work -- and so open access advocates pushed for new modes of publishing that could increase the impact of research by providing unfettered access to everyone.
+
+
+## consumption
+
+Note: However, because of the emphasis on the consumption end of "access," the same publishers that had been keeping research limited to those institutions that could afford to pay realized that if they shifted their business model such that researchers or their institutions paid to publish, they could maintain their income while making the work free to read online.
+
+
+## scarcity
+
+Note: But what that flipped model does, of course, is shift the scarcity from the consumer side to the producer side, creating a crisis in access for researchers without major grants or institutional support for publication fees, and ultimately leaving the economics of scholarly communication unchanged. A few major corporate publishers are still in control of the processes of scholarly communication, and are still profiting extravagantly from the work done on our campuses.
+
+
+## "predatory" journals
+
+Note: Moreover, this pay-to-publish model has produced a great deal of concern among researchers about so-called "predatory journals," publications that have sprung up solely for the purpose of pulling in those author-side fees but that don't provide adequate editorial control, peer review, or scholarly impact. This concern, while real, has been a bit overblown: not all gold open access journals are predatory -- far from it -- and it's easy enough to uncover which journals are, by looking at the work they publish.
+
+
+## peer review
+
+Note: There are also a lot of concerns circulating about the state of peer review in open access publishing, but honestly, there needn't be: open access is perfectly compatible with any form of peer review.
+
+
+## other models
+
+Note: However, there are a wide range of other economic models available to support open-access publishing, including grant-based support for publishers, as well as subscribe-to-open models, in which libraries maintain reasonably priced subscriptions to non-profit journal platforms in exchange for the promise that the platforms will be and remain open access. There are also a wide range of library-supported publishing programs and platforms, but the ease and the visibility of the flip of conventional journals to article processing fees has left these new options a bit underexplored.
+
+
+## repositories
+
+Note: One key option that's on the horizon, however, includes rethinking the processes of publication altogether. The Coalition of Open Access Repositories has begun working on a project called Notify, which will allow researchers to deposit work -- whether manuscripts or datasets or other kinds of projects entirely -- and then alert their communities of practice that the work is ready for peer review. This will allow work to be open from the start, and allow particular subfields to determine the best means of review, accreditation, and dissemination, and it will allow the academy to maintain ownership of the platforms and processes through which the work it facilitates is made public.
+
+
+## MSU Commons
+(commons.msu.edu)
+
+Note: We've been working here at MSU to expand open-access publishing opportunities, both through MSU Commons, which provides the MSU community with an open-access repository for sharing a wide variety of kinds of work, as well as through PubHub, a developing platform for open-access publishing hosted by the library.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/oa.html
+
+Note: I'd be happy to address any questions about these platforms, or about other issues related to open access.
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+ Humanities Commons
+
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+# Humanities Commons
+---
+## What We Have to Share
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thank you so much. I'm really happy to have the opportunity to talk with you about some of the work we've been doing with Humanities Commons and about the expansion we have ahead.
+
+
+
+
+Note: HC is an open-source, open-access, academy-owned, community-governed infrastructure supporting collaboration and communication among more than 31,000 researchers and practitioners across the humanities and around the world
+- platform began as MLA Commons in 2013, developed by the MLA in order to provide space for member-to-member sharing and communication; built on CBOX and committed to open-source development
+
+
+
+
+Note: in 2015, expanded functionality to include a Fedora/SOLR-based repository with a WP frontend, allowing members to deposit and share work and receive DOIs, etc
+
+
+
+
+Note: launched Humanities Commons pilot to include other scholarly societies in 2016, as well as an open hub permitting anyone to create an account and use all of the network's features
+- three things this pilot surfaced:
+ - scholarly society budgets aren't sufficiently robust to be able to support the kind of shared infrastructure that might most benefit them
+ - many (though not all) societies see a space like the Commons as a nice-to-have, rather than a core function -- and having it connected to an open hub makes them less likely to want to support it financially
+ - reliance on grant funding rapidly leads to significant technical debt, as well as an inability to develop new functionality that users require
+
+
+
+
+Note: completed the move to a new fiscal host, Michigan State University, in 2020, and began work developing the first institutional node on the network, MSU Commons
+- received two significant investments of multi-year support from the NEH and Mellon, allowing us to staff up, to remediate our technical debt, and to develop a forward-looking roadmap toward a sustainable future
+
+
+
+
+Note: part of sustainability includes shifting our thinking to focus on institutions of higher education and the ways they might be encouraged to support open-source, academy-owned alternatives to the commercial data capture platforms on which they currently rely
+ - the Commons can provide a campus-wide blogging platform, a rich scholarly profile system, and a connected repository
+ - and it can do so in a space that allows scholars to connect with others in their fields, thus making the potential for uptake greater
+- but bringing the Commons to institutions requires us to serve the entirety of the campus, and so we're now thinking beyond the humanities
+
+
+
+
+Note: recently awarded a multi-year grant through the National Science Foundation's new FAIROS RCN program (findable accessible interoperable reusable open science) to modernize our repository platform and create new integrations with key services and tools such as GitHub, as part of establishing DBER+ Commons, a new node on the network intended to support discipline-based education researchers across STEM fields
+- there are several components of this project that are not technical in nature, however, but instead focus on improving the standards and practices through which open science is conducted
+
+
+
+https://datascience.codata.org/articles/10.5334/dsj-2020-043/
+
+Note: the most important to note is that we have added "CARE" to "FAIR"
+ - CARE is a set of principles developed for Indigenous data governance
+ - Adding CARE to FAIR makes it incumbent on us to ensure that data shared and stored through the Commons are not just findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, but are also used for the Collective benefit of those participating in the research, that the communities in which the data are gathered have the Authority to control their use, that the researchers recognize their Responsibility to those communities, and that the relationships, the data, and the platform are all developed with Ethics in mind
+
+
+
+
+Note: DBER+ Commons is an unusual project, not least in that innovations in scholarly communication are typically imagined to originate in STEM fields and from there gradually make their way into the humanities
+- we are instead sharing the lessons learned in the humanities -- about the centrality of community-building, about the need for ethical privacy and data reuse policies, and about the significance of strong community governance -- in developing this new platform for scientific communication
+- I'm going to stop there, and will look forward to discussing as we go forward!
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+ Open Infrastructure for Open Education
+
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+## Open Education
+---
+### Infrastructure for the Common Good
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+#OpenEd21
+19 October 2021
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Regina for inviting me to talk with you and Nicole Allen and the rest of the OpenEd team for making it possible. I'm delighted to have this opportunity to get to share this session with Leslie and to talk a bit with you about a few issues that have been worrying me with respect to the present course of higher education, as well as what my colleagues and I have been trying to do about it.
+
+
+
+mlive.com
+
+Note: All of this starts, alas, with economics, and the lock it has on contemporary ideas about the public good. In June 2021, an independent economic group released a report indicating that the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University together boosted the state economy by $19.3 billion in 2019 -- a figure that they went on to note is *more than 20 times* the funding provided to them by the state. This is an extraordinary report, which confirms what we all know: public research universities are crucial contributors to the economic well-being of their communities. Our universities not only conduct the research and development that leads to new business opportunities in the state, but they also build an educated workforce ready to take on the challenges our communities face now and into the future.
+
+This is great news, and it's particularly great to have numbers that can be used in arguments about the value of public investment in institutions of higher education, especially at a moment when relationships between legislatures and boards of trustees and universities are strained. But I want to spend a bit of time today talking about why reports like this make me nervous. It may sound odd, but frankly it's because they do *too good a job* of tying the public vision of the value of the university to its economic impact, and in the process they inadvertently run the risk of undermining the purpose of the university as a broad service to the public rather than an engine of economic growth, and thus the ways that investments in the *non-money-making parts* of the university pay off in the public good.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@m_b_m
+
+Note: In other words, the danger of a report like this one, as positive as its results are, is that it speaks to a particular mindset in American culture that is primed to hear it, with the result that it completely overshadows all of the good that the university does in areas other than the economic. That focus on economic impact may be fine in good times, when taxpayers and legislators feel like they can afford to invest in a broad range of kinds of exploration and education on campus. But in bad times, when budgets are tight and jobs are scarce, many begin to look at those kinds of exploration that don't have obvious or direct economic benefits as "luxuries," as frivolous, as extraneous to the institution's mission -- precisely because the institution's mission, and the public good that it serves, have come to be wholly tied to ideas about economic growth.
+
+There is, in other words, a deeply ingrained mindset in American culture that lends itself to the assumption that economic development -- both at the social level and at the individual level -- is the primary good that the university can and should serve. This is a mindset that I would love to see us work on changing. It has its underpinnings in our faith in the extraordinary creative potential unleashed by capitalism, but it leads to the assumption that all of the problems in the contemporary world can and should be approached through market-based solutions.
+
+
+# #neoliberalism
+
+Note: This tight focus on the market as the telos of contemporary life is often discussed under the umbrella of "neoliberalism" on campus. "Neoliberalism" is admittedly one of those terms that has been so relentlessly misunderstood and misused that it's become a kind of caricature, an empty critique with all the force that "bourgeois" had in the early 1970s. It's the kind of term that causes a lot of people just to stop listening, because we know that what's coming is (a) profoundly ideological, and (b) likely not to mean exactly what its speaker thinks it means.
+
+But neoliberalism is nonetheless an important concept, and one that can tell us a lot about what's happened within western culture since the early 1980s -- the forces that have encouraged the public to question the value of institutions of higher education, as well as the other forms of public investment in the public good. In fact, it's part of what's surfaced the question of whether there even *is* such a thing as the public good. Just as Margaret Thatcher argued in the 1980s that there was no such thing as "society," but instead only individuals and families that needed to look out for themselves, so we find today a predominant political perspective in this country that holds that all goods are and should be private rather than public, individual rather than social.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@stri_khedonia
+
+Note: The effects of this conviction on our culture today have been corrosive. We have experienced over the last four decades a dramatic increase in inequality, both economic and social, as those who already *have* benefit from an environment in which rewards accrue to the individuals who are already most equipped to pursue them. We have also seen a radical decline in our cultural sense of shared obligations to or even basic care and respect for others. Broadly speaking, we've lost our collective grip on the notions that our individual actions affect others, that we should act with those others in mind, that we share common concerns, and that we are collectively responsible for ensuring that we provide a viable future for all of us. Without those understandings, without a recognition that the global crises we face today require responsible social engagement and collective action, poverty will continue to increase, structural racism will continue to grow, and the very prospect of a livable planet is thrown into serious question.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry
+
+Note: So. I want to pause here and acknowledge that I've managed to get in a very few minutes from a highly encouraging report on the economic impact of public research universities to the question of whether the future will be a livable one, and that there are several links along the way that I haven't yet fully explored -- not to mention all kinds of alternative paths that we have available to consider. So let's backtrack a bit. If, as I am arguing here, our overdetermined focus on the economic good that universities provide has the potential to undermine the other kinds of goods that our institutions serve, what are those goods, how are they undermined, what do we lose if we lose them, and how might we begin to ensure that they remain a crucial part of the public vision of what the university is for?
+
+
+
+
+Note: In order to explore the university's purpose in serving the public good, and the ways that the neoliberal understanding of the university's function have weakened it almost beyond recognition, we might begin by thinking through the distinctions drawn in economics among the four primary types of goods, and the ways they are defined, first, through their "excludability" -- or whether non-paying customers can be prevented from using them -- and second, through their "rivalrousness" -- or whether their use uses them up. Public goods are nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be excluded from their use and no one's use uses them up for others. Private goods are typically both excludable and rivalrous, and are typically market-based as a result. Goods that are non-excludable but rivalrous are thought of as common-pool resources, which were assumed for a long time to be subject to the "tragedy of the commons" until the work of Elinor Ostrom demonstrated the potential for shared governance in ensuring their sustainability, about which more in a bit. Finally, club goods are those that are excludable but non-rivalrous -- goods that are not diminished through use, but that people can be prevented from using unless they pay for them.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The question, then, is what kind of goods higher education and the knowledge that it provides and creates are and should be. Knowledge is certainly nonrivalrous; if I have it, and I share it with you, I do not wind up with less of it as a result. The question lies in excludability: where once knowledge and the higher education that fosters it might have been seen as striving to be nonexcludable, making itself available to anyone desiring it, it has since the 1960s become increasingly excludable, restricted to those who can pay. Access to knowledge is today a club good, in other words, rather than the public good that was once imagined to best serve our society: supported by all for the benefit of all.
+
+Those ideals regarding public education were always flawed, even at their most promising moments: our system of land-grant universities was founded on the appropriation of land from indigenous nations, and the GI Bill supported rather than undermined racial inequities. But the underlying principle remains important: the understanding that the university's purpose is the broad education of the public. And that broad education has always been understood to have benefits beyond the directly economic, creating a world that is not just more prosperous but *better* in a much deeper sense.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@thirdserving
+
+Note: In order to focus on that *better*, however, we need collectively to rethink the systems through which we produce and share knowledge both with one another, with our students, and with the world, ensuring that we keep our focus on the larger project of collective understanding that is at the heart of the academic mission. This mission requires us to find ways to treat knowledge not as a club good, restricted to those on the inside, but as a public good, created for all, available to all.
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+--Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: And this, as Tressie McMillan Cottom reminds us in *Lower Ed*, "is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The university's present situation, after all, has its roots not just in economics, but in politics: the institutions that not too long ago aspired to serve as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, today face not just a drastic reduction in their affordability but an increasing threat to their very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@sbk202
+
+Note: And many of our students are just as embedded in this privileging of individual benefit as is the rest of our culture. They have been told repeatedly that the purpose of a college degree is developing the skill set that will lead directly to a lucrative career -- and given how much they and their families are paying, and indeed going into debt, for that degree, it's understandable that they feel that way. Preparing students to enter the workforce is not a bad thing, and I'm not arguing at all that we should wave that aside. But if the goal of the university should be producing graduates who are not just successful economic actors, but who are well-rounded humans, who are able to think creatively about the complex conditions in which we live today, and who are willing to contribute not just materially but socially, ethically, even morally to the improvement of the world around them, not just for themselves but for others -- if that's the goal, we need to transform our engagements with our students in order to show them another path.
+
+
+
+jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous-thinking
+
+Note: This is generous thinking: finding ways to use our collective knowledge for the public good, demonstrating our deep connections to -- indeed, our responsibility for -- the world around us. The university's educational mission is and should be cultivating that generous thinking, preparing our students not just for the professions that might lead to wealth production but for the "several pursuits" in life. We are educating the "leaders of tomorrow" not just in the conventionally understood political and business realms, but in the kinds of engagement that will help their communities grow from the grassroots up. And that mission demands that we focus on what is required to make a better world, both on campus and off. It requires that we think about our institutions' often unspoken structural biases, including that toward "economic impact"; it requires us to focus not just on making it possible for more kinds of people to achieve conventionally coded success, but on examining what constitutes success, how it is measured, and why. And that requires a values-first approach to higher education, and an ongoing examination of the ways that those values are instantiated in institutional structures and processes.
+
+
+
+unsplash.com/@john_cameron
+
+Note: So: if we understood the well-being of communities to lie not just in the individual economic prosperity that can result but in terms of individuals' ability to work together -- to engage in collective action -- toward a wide range of common goals, we might begin thinking about how the university might itself begin to rely on systems that support connection and collaboration. We might think about the infrastructure of teaching itself, and how it might be used to help shape a more richly understood public good. As Leslie's talk indicates, we have become dependent on a wide range of platforms that deliver our core services -- learning management systems, student information systems, publishing and communication systems, research information management systems -- but by and large these are platforms over which we have little control. They are vendor-owned, corporation-controlled, and as such far more responsible to their shareholders than they are to us, or to our students. They appear to serve needs we cannot fill ourselves, and yet there is no sense of "service" in their relationship to our institutions. Only extraction. They take in our content, they take in our metrics, they take in our vast and growing annual fees, and they leave us dependent, privatized, beholden to economic forces that do not serve the public good.
+
+
+
+hcommons.org
+
+Note: This is just one of the reasons that my colleagues and I have been working to develop an open-source, open-access, non-profit, academy-owned and governed alternative to such extractive corporate platforms. *Humanities Commons* instantiates several key principles: first, that higher education will benefit from all of us doing more of our work together, in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions.
+
+And part of resisting privatization involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. This is true of a wide range of systems and platforms on which higher education relies, but perhaps nowhere has it become more pressing than in thinking about educational technology. We -- librarians, instructional technologists, and instructors -- need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education re-engage with the public good.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But developing the collaborative, community-supported infrastructure that can create the paradigm shift we need will require some careful thinking about the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable. And that includes not just financial and technical sustainability -- the forms of sustainability that we most often consider in this context. Most importantly, it includes social sustainability, a deep focus on the relationships required to build and maintain our shared infrastructure. Thinking about those relationships under the rubric of social sustainability directs our attention not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Collective action requires a kind of solidarity, in other words, a readiness to put the needs of the whole ahead of local demands, a determination to stand together in support of projects that may not necessarily seem to be our own top priority. And this form of solidarity, I am increasingly convinced, is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+ubs.com/microsites/nobel-perspectives/
+
+Note: The connection between sustainability and solidarity brings us back to the work of Elinor Ostrom, which focused on common-pool resource management. She argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability given what's been called the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to their upkeep, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without supporting them. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. Or so the conventional wisdom had it. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization of the resources involved. Ostrom, however, studied a wide range of community-held fisheries and demonstrated through them that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place. Relationships, in other words.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects that are seeking to provide community-based solutions that avoid the pitfalls of privatization, but all of them face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms often accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence. Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to use them. But this privatization is often the very problem that community-developed projects were developed in order to solve. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Building open platforms and keeping them functioning is not something that any of our institutions can do alone. But it is something that we can do together: we can build and share and maintain the infrastructure that will allow all of us to genuinely *open* education, to make the knowledge we develop for and with our students a public good. I've got a lot more to say about what will be required for us to commit to this work -- especially about the challenges involved in shifting the relationships between our institutions from the competitive to the collective -- but making those changes will enable the university, and the public good that it serves, to become the infrastructure allowing us to build a better world.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So at Humanities Commons we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in a shared network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the collective, but that the collective belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a flexible technology or a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives all of us a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Elinor Ostrom's work demonstrates, building the community that supports a platform like Humanities Commons, and enabling that community to become self-governing, are the crucial preconditions for its success. This is true for a wide range of open-source, academy-owned infrastructure projects, which require collective action for real sustainability. And it's at the heart of Open Education: your institutions of course have different structures, different requirements, different needs. And yet you share the same goals: the development, distribution, and preservation of new forms of knowledge. That you are all here together, looking for ways to meet your shared goals despite your different local needs gives me hope.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: It's a key form of generosity, one that can help us escape the bottom-line orientation of the neoliberal university to embrace instead the wide range of public goods that the university should serve. But if we are to reclaim our public mission, and to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university, we're going to have to do together, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward one another, toward our students, toward the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected, and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain the kinds of community-supported infrastructure that can enable open education, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+ Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I'm honored to have had this chance to talk with you this afternoon as you continue the work of building that community. Thanks so much.
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+ Sustainability and Solidarity
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Common Good
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Peter and Judy for inviting me to talk with you here today. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to share this work with you.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of the talk ahead grows out of the work I did in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of the book's subtitle grows out of my increasing sense that this necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+> --Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: So in what's ahead I'm asking the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, returning its attention to the publics, and the public good, that it is intended to serve. But that renewed attention to the public good is going to require a significant rethinking and realignment of the institution's reward structures, the kinds of work that it values and promotes.
+
+
+
+http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
+
+Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study by Juan Alperin and his colleagues entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." If the university is going to work toward the public good, that work has got to be rewarded -- and yet the current structure of higher education, the paradigm within which it operates, leaves such collaborative, community-engaged work un- or under-rewarded.
+
+
+## the anecdote
+
+Note: This problem first became painfully clear to me, coincidentally enough, at the first P2L meeting in Philadelphia. How many of you were there? (pause) Okay, so you may remember this moment. The meeting was keynoted by the highly distinguished provost of a large state research university, and it was an extraordinary talk. He descried his campus's efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty's work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university's singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our research up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-ranked venues. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising -- really, reimagining -- all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university's core service mission? The provost's response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
+
+
+# honest
+
+Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it's that there is a shadow mission -- competition -- that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
+
+
+## the worst of it
+
+Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that _Generous Thinking_ is most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered -- from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press -- to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to "compete all the time" forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while we are trapped in this mode of inter-institutional competition, higher education as a sector is facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though that is undoubtedly there. Rather, this decline in confidence in higher education should ask us to contemplate what we believe higher education is for, and why the paradigm under which we largely operate -- in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge -- has been in such a protracted conflict with the paradigm under which our function is understood in the broader culture, as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. Even more, it should make us consider whether both of those paradigms are failing today, and why.
+
+
+## Thomas Kuhn
+
+Note: As Thomas Kuhn noted in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, the failure of a scientific paradigm, as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account, throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely, one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the "period of pronounced professional insecurity" that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift, the cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. My argument is that we are desperately in need of such a paradigm shift if higher education as we want it to be is to survive.
+
+
+
+
+Note: _Generous Thinking_ explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education -- faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more -- to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead focus on the university's role in building community.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But my colleagues and I have also been trying to think through this problem in a more pragmatic, applied for through _Humanities Commons_, a non-profit, community-developed and governed network serving humanities scholars and organizations. Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of _Generous Thinking_: first, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation -- even among those universities that we call "private" -- can allow us to build the kind of community that can sustain them.
+
+
+## community-supported infrastructure
+
+Note: And part of resisting privatization, for both scholars and their institutions, involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. This is true of a wide range of systems and platforms on which higher education relies, but perhaps nowhere is it more true that in thinking about scholarly communication, both because these are the mechanisms through which the work of the academy is made public and because these are the systems that have been most deeply privatized at the direct expense of the academy. We -- libraries, publishers, and scholars -- need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education re-engage with the public good. But developing this form of collaborative, community-supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it, and the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable.
+
+
+
+http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/
+
+Note: And we need to think about these platforms precisely because of the extent to which the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery, data gathering and analysis, through writing, submission, and publishing, to dissemination, evaluation, and reporting, is increasingly concentrated in a very limited number of corporate hands.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Though the issues that I'm discussing long predate this particular moment, they came into stark visibility in August 2017, when bepress announced that it had been purchased by the RELX Group, the multi-national parent company of publishing behemoth Elsevier. Bepress had of course been founded in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open-access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. Bepress thus grew out of the academy, and was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at its heart.
+
+
+
+
+Note: As the bepress website notes, over 500 institutions have purchased bepress services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly-accessible ways. And in one fell swoop, these 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing behemoths such as Elsevier.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure -- built and run by academics, for the academic community -- appeared to have been turned on that community. It's not as though anyone had been unaware that bepress was a commercial service all along, but they were one of the good guys, and the costs of outsourcing infrastructural needs to them had been balanced against the often impossible task of maintaining locally hosted repository and publishing systems. Bepress provided what many saw as best-of-breed functionality at a reasonable price, and it supported libraries' desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But the acquisition of bepress by RELX not only put libraries in the position of unintentionally supporting a growing corporate control not just of scholarly publishing but of the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery through production to communication; it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely in promoting greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. As a result, serious conversations have since focused on means of supporting open-source, academy-owned and -controlled infrastructure.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is not an impossible move, by any stretch, but it's harder than it might sound. Long-standing open-access, open-infrastructure projects like arXiv might suggest some possible areas of concern.
+
+
+
+
+Note: By every reasonable measure, arXiv has been exemplary -- in its uptake, in its independence, and in the ways that it has helped to transform the fields that it serves. But in some crucial ways, arXiv has experienced what can only be called "catastrophic success" -- a crucial, paradigm-shifting project whose growing annual operating costs and mounting infrastructural requirements have demanded increasingly creative mechanisms for the platform's support.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So in 2010, the arXiv team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource. But our institutions, as we unfortunately know, are largely unaccustomed to this work of cross-institutional collaboration. For one thing, they're far more prone to understand such resources as terrain for competition, and for another, the community-building required becomes yet another form of labor added on top of maintaining the resources themselves.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I do not know the extent to which such difficulties may have played a role in arXiv's recent move from the Library to Cornell Computing and Information Science. It's entirely likely that the move is a matter of infrastructural pragmatics. But even so, the challenges of maintaining the kind of cross-institutional coalition necessary to sustain such a crucial resource remain.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Another example, with a different narrative, might be found in the Samvera project. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories rely, developers at a number of institutions have come together to create a collective solution. As the proverb and their website have it, if you want to go far, go together.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But this distributed developer community, like all such communities, has faced some challenges in coordination, challenges that have caused it, as the proverb also reminds us, to go more slowly than it might. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers involved in the project but of the institutions for which the developers actually work is not a simple matter.
+
+
+# sustainability
+
+Note: The foundation of the challenges that arXiv and Samvera have faced is the same challenge faced by any number of other projects and programs and initiatives: sustainability. This is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late, as my colleagues and I have been working to ensure that Humanities Commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And those attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point; they too would like to see the network thrive, but they cannot support it indefinitely. We need, they reasonably suggest, a plan for demonstrating that the network will, at some point in the future, be able to support itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models, in business plans, in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a non-profit entity forever tied to kinds of economic concerns that are very often divergent from, if not at odds with, the non-profit's primary mission. As a result, these non-profits remain forever precarious; one small miscalculation can make the difference between survival and collapse.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But sustainability broadly understood extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed -- or more waste produced -- than can be developed or managed in the near term.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There's technological sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects' future stability and growth.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All of these forms of sustainability are important, to varying degrees, to providing for the future of non-profit and open-source projects. But there's another form that gets a good bit less attention, and that I increasingly think precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability: social sustainability. The social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Ensuring that these commitments are sustained is, I increasingly think, a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward.
+
+
+# community
+
+Note: This notion -- of the role of "community" in community-supported software, and of the best ways of building and sustaining it -- raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. In an early chapter in _Generous Thinking_, I explore Miranda Joseph's argument that "community" is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life. In this sense, "community" becomes a relief valve of sorts for those structures, a way of mitigating the damage that they do. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network–based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises, rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education. "Community" becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: However, if we recognize that the communities that we form both on campus and off can be crucial organizing tools, ways of ensuring that our institutions meet their public obligations, we might start to think of the call to community as a form of coalition-building, of a developing solidarity. Solidarity itself is a concept that's been challenged, of course; there are important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom, and for whom. Women of color, for instance, have pointed out the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests. But I remain convinced that institutions of higher education must embrace forms of solidarity that do not demand that individuals seeking redress for institutionalized injustices drop their own issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those individuals are all of our issues too. This form of solidarity asks us to stand together in support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this form of solidarity, I am increasingly convinced, is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom was not just, as the UBS Nobel Perspectives website has it, the first female Nobel laureate in economics; she remains to date the _only_ female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place.
+
+
+## common-pool resources
+
+Note: It's important first to focus in a bit on what is meant by the notion of common-pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" -- the overuse of shared natural resources -- can apply.
+
+
+## the "free rider" problem
+
+Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization.
+
+
+## _Governing the Commons_
+
+Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book _Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action_, this model -- like other such models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
+
+
+> What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies. -- Elinor Ostrom
+
+Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned software projects -- like arXiv, like Samvera, like Humanities Commons -- on which they should be able to rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the problem that community-developed projects were developed to evade. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So last summer, Brett Bobley tweeted a question about ways of sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Cayless --
+
+
+
+
+Note: -- noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining such projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in _Generous Thinking_, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+# collaboration
+
+Note: But getting institutions to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside, is a huge part of what I've tried to do in _Generous Thinking_, and it's a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The project began its life at the Modern Language Association. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 to provide members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching the platform, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with colleagues in other areas in the humanities, so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields.
+
+
+
+
+Note: With further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons spaces developed for the members of the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the College Art Association. (And soon, AUPresses!) But beyond working with these partners, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work, and so we made the decision to open the network's hub to anyone who wants to join -- across the disciplines, around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites, and they can deposit and share their work in the network's open-access repository. This fusion of a social network with a library-quality repository (adhering to commonly accepted metadata standards, employing digital object identifiers, and so on) means that not only is stuff being put into the repository, and not only can that stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used, as there's a community there with which it can be shared.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while fully opening the Humanities Commons hub to free participation by any interested scholar or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use -- a little over two years later, we have over 17,000 members -- it has created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms Humanities Commons from a common-pool resource into a club good, one whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the network if it were an exclusive service see the openness of the hub as diminishing the network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
+
+
+## sustainability and solidarity
+
+Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. And it's of course where your relationship lies: presses and libraries of course have different structures, different requirements, different needs. And yet you share the same goals: the production, distribution, and preservation of new forms of knowledge. That you are all here together, looking for ways to meet your shared goals despite your different local needs gives me hope.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: It's a key form of generosity, and one that more units on our campuses, and more institutions in their engagements with one another need to embrace. Because the bottom line is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not _other institutions of higher education_, not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather, it is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university, we're going to have to do together, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward the other units within our institutions, toward the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected, and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community-supported infrastructure, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I'm honored to have had this chance to talk with you this morning as you continue the work of building that community. Thanks so much.
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+
+ Toward a More Generous University
+
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+## Building a More Generous University
+---
+### Collaboration, Community, Solidarity
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thank you for that introduction, and for inviting me to participate in your institute! I'm of course sorry that I'm not able to be there with you in person, but Zoom has made it possible for us to continue to work together despite the distance. This is one of the things we've learned from the pandemic: that we can do a lot of things remotely that we thought we had to travel for, and that we can include many more when we do. There have been a lot of such lessons in all of our lives over the last year-plus, some of them positive and some much less so, but all of which I hope we can carry with us as we begin to return to campus. I want us to carry these things not least because returning to "normal," or seeking to create a "new normal," would be a costly mistake. We have an opportunity right now to avoid normal and build something better, something more fluid and capable of growth. But coming back better is going to require us to think pretty differently about the structures within which we work, and about how to change them to support the kind of institution we genuinely want to be part of. (So that's my focus for today. Before I move on, a quick warning that there's a little bit of language coming up on the next slide, in case you've got little ones around.)
+
+So last year, just before everything began shutting down, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread on Twitter in which she talked about the things she tells early career Black scholars who seek her advice on surviving in the academy. These two tweets in particular caught my attention:
+
+
+
+
+Note: "This place was fucked up when you got here, it will be fucked up when you leave here. All you can control is how much you let it fuck you up in the process. That is a pretty impolitic stance but I stand by it. I don't think these institutions can support us or love us. And I honor the many many people who work to make them more humane. But you, alone, cannot do that. And you cannot do it, ever, by killing yourself."
+
+
+
+https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry
+
+Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the last year-plus of the horrifying accuracy of this perspective -- 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?
+
+
+# collective action
+
+Note: One key thing that it would require is collective action. Because McMillan Cottom is right: you, alone, cannot change things. Together we might: but first we have to build that together, build the spaces and places of supporting that together, and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what follows derives from the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education in the United States is going to require those of us who work on campus to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the many publics that it serves.
+
+
+# "radical approach"
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, and that it can't be made incrementally but instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no easy path or simple tool that can readily take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American university system that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the purpose of our institutions from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated population ready to participate in building a better world -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that exists. But we need to consider the possibility that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, the paradigm under which higher education has operated in the United States is failing, and failing fast, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world. And this is true not least because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the decline in confidence in the university is not just caused by the public failing to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. What I'm asking for is a tall order -- in many ways swimming against the current of the neoliberal institution. But a large part of what I'm after is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions *as* communities, as well as *in interaction with* communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own: we need our publics' help as much or more as they need ours.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education has always been of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while the concept of generosity may seem too touchy-feely to represent the key to the future of the university, I hope, in the book, that I've put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole."
-- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the institution itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests and excludes a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: So the book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves requires re-grounding the institution in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It requires concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+# listening
+
+Note: *Generous Thinking* asks us to consider how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+# reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that the critical reading practices we enact on campus might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged research, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns, as well as to transform those communities from passive recipients of the university's knowledge into active collaborators in shared projects.
+
+
+# the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and community engagement. The university must become the kind of institution that can focus less on individual achievement, on educating for individual leadership, and that instead focuses on building community, and indeed on educating for community-building. And this requires a radical rethinking of the reward structures of higher education: what we value and how we demonstrate that we value it.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: Our universities are in many ways structured as collectives, in which each member of the institution is charged with some part of the well-being of the whole. This is how we derive our principles of shared governance, that we each have a contribution to make to the operation of the institution. And yet: when we examine both the kinds of work for which we are actively rewarded, as well as the nature of the rewards themselves, we repeatedly find an emphasis on the individual rather than the whole. For instance, for faculty at an institution like mine the work for which we are most rewarded is our research -- which we pointedly refer to as our "own" work -- and the rewards we receive often pull us away from the collective. If I publish a well-received book or a an article published in a prestigious journal, I might be eligible for a course release or relief from service responsibilities. And all of the other possible rewards I can seek -- promotions, raises, sabbaticals, and so forth -- encourage me to retreat from membership in the university community and instead focus on my own work. This is part and parcel of the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university, in which every form of merit -- including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and more -- is determined by what I individually have done, even where I've done it collaboratively.
+
+
+# zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. The result is that we find ourselves in zero-sum game in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+# institutions
+
+Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Budget models such as responsibility center management promote competition among academic units for majors and enrollments, and actively discourage any attempts to think across units, whether to develop new interdisciplinary collaborations or to support connections and resource-sharing across larger university structure. And insofar as these sorts of budgetary structures within our institutions drive us all toward competition, our institutions as a whole are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time," seeking to distinguish themselves from other institutions by promoting their own interests. We need our institutions to distance themselves from the rankings and the other quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another, in order for those institutions to promote more generous, more collaborative internal structures, as well as a work environment in which each of us who work for them can move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more collective.
+
+
+# culture change
+
+Note: And this is no easy task. Over the course of the last several years, both while *Generous Thinking* was in press and after it was published, I had the opportunity to speak on a number of college and university campuses where faculty, staff, students, and administrators were thinking about how to create and support a greater sense of connection between their campus communities and their public-facing mission. The folks who invited me -- ranging from the officers of campus AAUP chapters to university presidents and their advisors -- felt a connection with the arguments in *Generous Thinking* not least because they recognized that their institutions require not just better strategic plans but deep culture change. That culture change demands, among other things, a serious rethinking of how we work, why we work the ways we do, how we assess and reward that work, and how we recognize as work things that tend to get dismissed as service but that play a crucial role in building and sustaining collaborative communities. *Generous Thinking*, however, focused pretty tightly on the why and the what of the changes that our university cultures need to make, and spent a whole lot less time on how.
+
+
+# better
+
+Note: For instance: it's clear that making a better, more sustainable institution, in other words, requires us to move away from individualistic ideas of meritorious production -- in fact to step off the Fordist production line that forever asks us to do *more* -- and instead to think in a humane fashion about ways that we can do *better* . Better often in fact requires slowing down, talking with our colleagues and our communities, and most importantly, listening to what others have to say. Better requires engagement, connection, sharing, time, in ways that more nearly always encourages us to rush past. Turning from more to better can help us access the pleasures -- indeed, the joys -- of our work that life on the production line has required us to push aside. But given the ways that we've all been steeped in *more*, it's not at all clear how we might begin to slow down, to make a set of changes that go against the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us.
+
+
+# generosity in hard times
+
+Note: So I was already thinking that I needed to follow up *Generous Thinking* with something that would dig a bit further into the how of transformation. And then after one of the talks I gave, an attendee asked me a question that made the stakes of thinking about how painfully clear. Her question has been stuck in my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that it's relatively easy to embrace when resources are plentiful, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to think generously 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 saying "you're completely right; that's the real question" and pointing out that 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. But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us -- we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them -- invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I do want the institution to survive, and I want to sustain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
+
+
+# sacrifice
+
+Note: And I also know that however much I may want to keep the institution running, the institution is not thinking the same about me. Our institutions cannot love us back. However much we sacrifice for them, they will never sacrifice for us. This returns me to Tressie McMillan Cottom's point: you, alone, cannot make the institution more humane, and especially not by killing yourself in the process. This is especially true for members of minoritized groups working within the academy; it's especially true for faculty without tenure; it's especially true for staff; it's especially true for scholars working in contingent positions; it's especially true for everyone whose positions in the hierarchies of prestige and comfort leave them vulnerable, especially at moments when "we're all in it together" is invoked not in the context of resource-sharing but of sacrifice. Sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and to accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time as we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
+
+
+# big structural change
+
+Note: The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. And this is the deepest goal of _Generous Thinking_, and by extension of the followup project I'm now working on, entitled _Leading Generously_. In this project I'm focusing on how we can work collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. What kinds of leadership are required for us remake the university into an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members, in good times and bad? _Leading Generously_ is in some ways intended to be a practical handbook for putting the ideas of _Generous Thinking_ into action. But in doing so it asks its readers to reconsider some basic concepts that underwrite big structural change. It proposes that, despite the enormity of the transformation that higher education needs today, local changes can begin to make a difference, and that we are capable of making those local changes, which can network out into something larger.
+
+
+# leadership
+
+Note: Among the concepts that demand reconsideration, however, is the very notion of leadership itself. We conventionally associate leadership with the folks at the top of an institutional hierarchy, those with the authority to steer the ship. While I hope that *Leading Generously* might speak to them, the project addresses everyone on campus, beginning with the argument that everyone in an institution has the potential to be a leader, to create local transformative change that can model ways of being that others might learn from and join in with. This conviction places a lot of emphasis on individual actors, however, in ways that may seem a bit at odds with some of today's most important ideas about how power operates. Those critical ideas -- including arguments about race and racism; about sex, gender, and misogyny; about class and power -- understand the issues they explore to be *systemic* rather than *individual*. That is to say, they argue that real change requires social transformation. It requires building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, transforming economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. I am convinced by those arguments, and I have that same end goal: building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world. But the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
+
+
+# agency
+
+Note: The key to this problem is where we locate agency: who has the power to start the process of making significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, there is little agency left to the individual. And it's unquestionably true that the structural problems we face are enormous, and that one individual can't do much to reshape the world. But groups of individuals can. And building those groups starts with individuals who decide to do more, to put what individual agency they do have to work in solidarity with others.
+
+
+# you
+
+Note: And so *Leading Generously* begins with you, where you are. It starts from the position that each of us is equipped to make change in the aspects of our institutions over which we have influence, and that these changes can model new modes of being within our communities. But there's a second part to the question of agency: how to multiply it. One of the deepest flaws in contemporary models of leadership is the assumption that our reach becomes bigger as we climb the org chart. And of course power does grow in that direction, but what also happens is that you narrow your connections, until you find yourself at the pinnacle of the institution: you're at the center of power, but you're teetering there alone.
+
+
+> "retreating from the center of things -- both in reality and in one's self-conception -- is inseparable from forging connections that expand the boundaries of one's self."
-- Sarah Buss
+
+Note: And as Sarah Buss notes in the introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled *Radical Humility*, it's through connections that we become larger, not through ego, and building those connections requires a willingness to step out of the singular position of power and to work on coalition-building instead. We need those coalitions to transform a complex organization, and we need to act in solidarity in order for those coalitions to succeed.
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: Because of this requirement, it's important to recognize that the object of leadership is not institutions, but people, bringing them together and organizing for change. Building a more generous, deeper sense of "us" asks us to focus our attention on our relationships with our colleagues and with our broader communities, ensuring that we maintain the humanity not just of those we work with and for, but of the structures through which all of us connect.
+
+
+# how
+
+Note: How we begin transforming our institutions, then, is shoring up the means of moving from "you" to "us," the means of building the coalitions and collectives required to transform our institutions and make them capable of the kinds of community-oriented thinking we most need today. There are aspects of this transformation that require high-level administrative intervention: developing the post-RCM budget model that rewards collaboration and contributions to the collective success of the institution rather than competition among units. (And honestly, any institution that can successfully develop and implement such a model could become a shining example for other to learn from.) But beyond these high-level administrative aspects of transformation, there are more local aspects as well, aspects that each of your units can take on. Many of our units are governed by bylaws or other policy documents, and the thing about those documents is that they can be revised. It's often a messy process, but bringing together the members of a department to articulate their values and then rewrite their bylaws to align with those values can foster deep cultural change, by looking hard at the discrepancy between, for instance, our desire for transparency and equity and our policies limiting who gets to participate in and vote on departmental processes. Or, by looking hard at the conflict between our desire for innovation and impact in scholarly work and our policies defining what counts as "research" in highly limited ways.
+
+
+# change
+
+Note: None of this is easy, not least because it requires us to do some deep self-examination, questioning both the ways our policies have become established and our attachments to them. As an expert in organizational change has put it, "People don't resist change. They resist being changed." We need to think hard about what the kinds of cultural change we'd like to see in our institutions will ask of us. We need to consider how we might become better listeners, how we might learn to sit with difficult conversations and even criticism, how we might commit to assessing our work and the work of those around us based on our deepest values, how we might cultivate an atmosphere of mutual and renewable trust, and so on. Each of these ideas -- listening, vulnerability, values, trust, support and more -- is deceptively simple, but with careful consideration can become the foundation for a practice of community building, for thinking through institutional policies and processes and ensuring that they serve the people for whom the institution operates.
+
+
+# people
+
+Note: The necessity of that practice is clear: our institutions cannot survive the crises they currently face unless the people and the relationships that make up the institution thrive. Budgets and bottom lines matter, but without its people -- the students, the staff, the faculty, the community -- the university is nothing. And that's the thing that we need to understand now more than ever, and the thing that your institute is working toward: the recognition that the primary work of the university is connection, and that in hard times the most generous thing we can do is to connect with ourselves and everyone we work with, so that we all might develop the collective strength necessary to return and rebuild.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+# Planned Obsolescence
+### Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy
+[Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://plannedobsolescence.net) // [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitzpatrick at mla dot org](mailto:kfitzpatrick@mla.org)
+
+Note: This talk is an overview of some work I’ve been doing over the better part of the last decade — which is to say that, being an overview, it’s fairly long on generalizations and polemics and a good bit shorter on detail. I’ll hope that the discussion afterward might focus in on some of the spots where questions lie. I should also note that the issues I’m focused on here are problems particular to the book-based fields within the humanities, though I think there are some relationships that can be drawn to the other forms of scholarly communication dominant in other areas of the academy more broadly. But I begin with two epigraphs:
+
+
+> “In many cases, traditions last not because they are excellent, but because influential people are averse to change and because of the sheer burdens of transition to a better state.”
+
+— Cass Sunstein, _Infotopia_
+
+
+> “There is no way to stop the shake-up of the university press system from happening. It has already begun.”
+
+— Lindsay Waters, _Enemies of Promise_
+
+
+## overview
+
+1. obsolescence
+2. undead
+3. material obsolescence
+4. institutional obsolescence
+5. mediacommons
+6. planned obsolescence
+7. peer review
+8. open questions
+
+
+
+## obsolescence
+
+Note: While the work I’m here to talk about with you today has been very much future-oriented, focused on the changes in scholarly communication that are taking root across the academy, it nonetheless starts with the past, in no small part because certain aspects of the ways that scholars in the US have traditionally worked, particularly in the humanities, are rapidly becoming obsolete. By this, however, I don’t mean to say that we are facing the
+
+
+## death
+
+Note: “death” of the book, for instance, only that certain aspects of our reliance on the book as a primary mode of scholarly communication aren’t serving us as well as they once might have. In fact, the argument that I made in my first book,
+
+
+## the anxiety of obsolescence
+
+Note: The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, was precisely that the so-called
+
+
+## death of the novel
+
+Note: “death of the novel” wasn’t at all based in material fact, but was instead an ideological claim designed to ensure the novel’s continuance. This continues to be true: neither the novel nor the book more broadly, nor even print in general are in any sense dying forms, but claims of this demise are often used as a means of creating what I like to think of as a kind of
+
+
+## “cultural wildlife preserve”
+
+Note: cultural wildlife preserve, a protected space within which a form that is apparently under threat from predatory forms of newer media can flourish. I bring my first book project up in no small part because of what happened once I’d finished that manuscript. Naively, I’d assumed that publishing a book that makes the argument that the book isn’t dead wouldn’t be that hard, that somebody might have an interest in getting that argument into print. What I hadn’t counted on, though, was the effect that
+
+
+## dot-com crash
+
+Note: the first dot-com crash was having on university presses. It took me nearly a year to find a press willing to consider the project, as press after press told me how much they liked it, but that they just couldn’t afford to publish it. Finally, though, I found a willing press, and in December 2003, after the manuscript had been under review for ten months, I received an email message from the editor. The news was not good: the press was declining to publish the book. The note, which was as encouraging as a rejection can ever be, stressed that in so far as fault could be attributed, it lay not with the manuscript but with the climate; the press had received two enthusiastically positive readers’ reports, and the editor was supportive of the project. The marketing department, however, overruled him on the editorial board, declaring that the book posed
+
+
+> “too much financial risk… to pursue in the current economy.”
+
+— the marketing guys
+
+Note: “too much financial risk… to pursue in the current economy.”
+ This particular cause for rejection prompted two immediate responses, one of which was most clearly articulated by my mother, who said
+
+
+> “they were planning on making money off of your book?”
+
+— mom
+
+Note: “they were planning on making money off of your book?” The fact is, they were — not much, perhaps, but that the press involved needed the book to make money, at least enough to return its costs, and that it doubted it would, highlights one of the most significant problems facing academic publishing today:
+
+
+## insupportable economic model
+
+Note: an insupportable economic model. To backtrack for a second: university presses in the United States were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a means of distributing the work being produced by university-based scholars, precisely because there was no market for that work, and so commercial publishers refused to take it on. In order to get scholars’ work into circulation, universities had to take on the responsibility for reproducing and circulating it, often giving it away for free to other institutions’ libraries, in exchange for similar work being produced at those institutions. And yet gradually, over the course of the first half of the 20th century, university presses professionalized, becoming revenue centers on their campuses rather than service organizations. As a result, market values all but inevitably came to be applied to the circulation of scholarship — and almost from that moment, the discussion of
+
+
+## “crisis”
+
+Note: the “crisis in scholarly publishing” was born.
+ Though these problems have been building for a long time, things suddenly got much, much worse after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. During this dramatic turn in the stock market, when many US university budgets took a nosedive (a situation that 2008 made to seem like mere foreshadowing), among the academic units whose budgets took the hardest hits were
+
+
+## university presses
+
+Note: university presses and
+
+
+## university libraries
+
+Note: university libraries. And the cuts in funding for libraries represented a further budget cut for presses, as numerous libraries, already straining under
+
+
+## rising cost of journals
+
+Note: the exponentially rising costs of journals, especially in the sciences, managed the cutbacks by reducing the number of monographs they purchased. The result for many university library users was perhaps only a slightly longer wait to obtain any book they needed, as libraries increasingly turned to consortial arrangements for
+
+
+## collection sharing
+
+Note: collection-sharing, but the result for presses was devastating. For a university press of the caliber of, say, Harvard’s, the expectation for decades was that they could count on every library in the University of California system buying a copy of each title they published. After 2001, however, the rule increasingly became such that one library in the system would buy that title - and today even that’s not a certainty, given systems of demand-driven acquisition being implemented at many libraries. This has happened with every system around the country, such that, as Jennifer Crewe noted in 2004, sales of monographs to libraries had already fallen to less than
+
+
+## one-third
+
+Note: one-third of what they had been in the previous decade — and again, that was in 2004, a full ten years of crisis ago. So library cutbacks resulted in vastly reduced sales for university presses, at precisely the moment when severe cutbacks in the percentage of university press budgets
+
+
+## subsidies
+
+Note: provided through institutional subsidies have made those presses dependent on income from sales for their survival. (The average university press receives well under 10% of its annual budget from its institution. And even that small percentage is being withdrawn in the current funding climate.) It’s for this reason, among others, that I have argued that the financial model under which university press publishing operates is simply not sustainable into the future. A foretaste of a likely future has been visible for a while now, as numerous presses are being shut down by their institutions, and as many of those that survive
+
+
+## reduced number of titles published
+
+Note: are required to reduce the number of titles that they publish each year, and as
+
+
+## marketing
+
+Note: marketing concerns are coming at times, of necessity, to compete with scholarly merit in making publication decisions.
+ In my case, things turned out well; the book got picked up (if only well over a year later) by a smaller press, one with a larger subsidy and thus more modest sales expectations, and the book managed to exceed those expectations - as well, ironically, as the requirements of that other press. But despite the fact that The Anxiety of Obsolescence was, finally, successfully published, my experience of the crisis in academic publishing led me to begin rethinking my earlier argument that the book wasn’t an endangered species. Perhaps there is a particular form of book —
+
+
+## the academic book
+
+Note: the academic book — that is indeed threatened with a kind of obsolescence. Even so, this is not to say that the academic book is dead. These books are still published, after all, if not exactly in the numbers they might need to be in order to satisfy all our hiring and tenure requirements, and they still sell, if not exactly in the numbers required to support the presses that put them out. The academic book is, however, in a curious state, one that might usefully complicate conventional associations of obsolescence with the “death” of this or that cultural form, for while the academic book is
+
+
+## no longer viable
+
+Note: no longer viable as a primary means of scholarly communication,
+
+
+## but still required
+
+Note: it is still required in many fields in the US in order to obtain tenure. If anything, the academic book isn’t dead; it is
+
+
+
+
+## undead
+
+Note: undead, exercising a kind of power over the ways we work without really, truly, being alive. If this is the case, if the academic book is undead, what do we do with it? There’s of course a real question to be asked about how far I want to carry this metaphor; the suggestion that contemporary academic publishing is governed by a kind of
+
+
+## zombie
+
+Note: zombie logic, for instance, might be read as indicating that these old forms refuse to stay put in their graves, but instead walk the earth, rotting and putrescent, wholly devoid of consciousness, eating the brains of the living and susceptible to nothing but decapitation — and this might seem a bit of an over-response. On the other hand, it’s worth considering the extensive scholarship in media studies on the figure of the zombie,
+
+
+
+
+Note: which is often understood to act as a stand-in for the narcotized subject of capitalism, particularly at those moments when capitalism’s contradictions become most apparent. If there is a relationship between the zombie and the subject of late capital,
+
+
+
+
+Note: the cultural anxiety that figure marks is currently, with reason, off the charts.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So far off the charts, in fact, that some have begun to grow weary of the zombie’s proliferation as metaphor in contemporary culture. I do still think it’s a useful one, however, precisely because of its viral spread.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Zombies are everywhere for a reason, and not least within the academy, as we not only find our ways of communicating increasingly threatened with a sort of death-in-life,
+
+
+## death-in-livelihood
+
+Note: but also find our livelihoods themselves decreasingly lively, as the liberal arts are overtaken by the study of supposedly more pragmatic fields, as a growing culture of assessment requires us to spend more time accounting for our work and less actually doing the work itself, as tenure-track faculty lines in US institutions are rapidly being replaced with more contingent forms of labor, and as too many newly-minted PhDs are finding themselves without the job opportunities they need to survive.
+
+
+## really?
+
+Note: but also find our livelihoods themselves decreasingly lively, as the liberal arts are overtaken by the study of supposedly more pragmatic fields, as a growing culture of assessment requires us to spend more time accounting for our work and less actually doing the work itself, as tenure-track faculty lines in US institutions are rapidly being replaced with more contingent forms of labor, and as too many newly-minted PhDs are finding themselves without the job opportunities they need to survive.
+
+
+## undead
+
+Note: the undead of academic publishing, as studies of radio and the vinyl LP indicate that obsolete media forms have long gone on to productive afterlives. But one key difference between those cases and the case of the academic book, of course, is that it isn’t being driven out of the marketplace by a newer form; in fact, we don’t yet have a good replacement for the work that the book has long done. It’s thus important for us to consider what the book is and isn’t doing for us, the ways that it remains vibrant and vital, and the ways that it has become undead, haunting the living from beyond the grave. But a few distinctions are necessary.
+
+
+
+## material obsolescence
+
+Note: The obsolescence faced by the academic book is not, primarily, material, any more than is the obsolescence of the novel; a radical shift to all-digital delivery would by itself do nothing to revive the form. However much I would insist that we in the humanities must move beyond our singular focus on
+
+
+## ink-on-paper
+
+Note: producing ink-on-paper (or its PDF surrogate) to really understand and take advantage of
+
+
+## pixels-on-screens
+
+Note: the affordances of pixels-on-screens, a simple move away from
+
+
+## print
+
+Note: print and toward electronic distribution within the current structures of academic publishing will not be enough to bail the system out, as printing, storing, and distributing the material form of the book only represents a
+
+
+## fraction
+
+Note: fraction of its current production costs — less than a third. And, of course,
+
+
+## digital
+
+Note: the digital has its own costs of production, storage, and maintenance to be accounted for — not to mention that, as many have pointed out, digital work may be more prone to a kind of material obsolescence than is print. But even that obsolescence needs a bit of further thought: on the one hand, there’s the obsolescence that you encounter if you try to read a first-generation hypertext like
+
+
+
+
+Note: Michael Joyce’s Afternoon on a Mac these days. (It’s all but impossible, unless you’ve happened to preserve or are able to emulate the system on which it originally ran.) Technological progress in fact creates an enormous problem for digital preservation that is currently the subject of significant investment and research. On the other hand, certain kinds of digital texts also reveal
+
+
+## persistences
+
+Note: unexpected persistences; one might, for instance, think about
+
+
+## blog
+
+Note: the form of the blog, which seems to be a perfectly
+
+
+## ephemeral
+
+Note: ephemeral form, as each post scrolls down the front page and off into the archives — and yet, the apparent ephemerality of the blog post bears within it a surprising
+
+
+## durability
+
+Note: durability, thanks both to the technologies of searching, filtering, and archiving that have developed across the web, as well as to the networked conversations that keep the
+
+
+## archives
+
+Note: archives in play. Blogs do die, often when their authors stop posting, sometimes when they’re deleted. But even when apparently dead, a blog persists, in archives and caches, and continues to draw readers in through old links and search engines. A form of obsolescence may be engineered into a blog’s architecture, but this ephemerality is misleading; our
+
+
+## interaction
+
+Note: interactions with blogs keep them alive long after they’ve apparently died.
+
+
+
+## institutional obsolescence
+
+Note: I want to hold up, alongside the interactions produced by blogs, the state of the academic book, which I’d argue faces an obsolescence that is not primarily material but instead institutional, arising from the environment in which it is produced. That is to say, if there’s something obsolete about the book, it’s not its content; despite my general conviction that the book shouldn’t be the make-or-break form of scholarship in tenure reviews in the humanities, there’s still a kind of large-scale synthetic work done in the form of the book that remains important to the development of scholarly thought. So the book’s content isn’t obsolete, but neither is the problem the book’s form; the pages still turn just fine. What has ceased to function in the academic book is the
+
+
+## system
+
+Note: system itself, the process through which the book comes into being. I mentioned earlier that the message I’d received from that press, declining my book on financial grounds, produced two immediate responses. The first was my mother’s bewildered disbelief; the second came from my colleague Matt Kirschenbaum, who left a comment on a blog post of mine saying that he could not understand why I couldn’t simply take the manuscript and the two positive readers’ reports and put the whole thing online — voilà: peer-reviewed publication — where it would likely garner a readership both wider and larger than the same manuscript in print would.
+
+
+
+
+Note: “In fact I completely understand why that’s not realistic,” he went on to say, “and I’m not seriously advocating it. Nor am I suggesting that we all become our own online publishers, at least not unless that’s part of a continuum of different options. But the point is, the system’s broken and it’s time we got busy fixing it. What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered.”
+ This exchange with Matt, and a number of other conversations that I had in the ensuing months, persuaded me to stop thinking about
+
+
+## scholarly publishing
+
+Note: scholarly publishing as a system that would simply bring my work into being, and instead approach it as the object of that work, thinking seriously about both the institutional models and the material forms through which scholarship might best circulate. About the time I began a fairly vague set of discussions about the possibility of founding an all-electronic scholarly press,
+
+
+
+
+Note: the Modern Language Association began to report back on the work of its task force on evaluating scholarship for tenure and promotion. The recommendations of the task force included a strong call to departments
+
+
+### consider articles published by tenure candidates as seriously as books
+
+Note: to give serious consideration to articles published by tenure candidates, thus decentering the book as the gold standard of scholarly production, and to communicate that expanded range of acceptable venues for publication to their administrations. The task force also urged those departments
+
+
+### acknowledge and fairly evaluate online scholarship
+
+Note: to acknowledge that scholarship of many different varieties is taking place online, and to evaluate that scholarship without media-related bias.
+ These were of course extremely important recommendations, but there was a significant degree of
+
+
+## “easier said than done”
+
+Note: “easier said than done” in the responses that the report received, and for no small reason: in effect, they called for a substantive rethinking not simply of the processes through which the academy tenures its faculty, but in how those faculty do their work, how they communicate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside the academy. Those changes cannot simply be technological; they must be both social and institutional. That kind of social and institutional change became the focus of two projects that I began work on then, both of which were aimed at creating the kinds of change I think necessary for the survival of scholarly communication in the humanities into the twenty-first century.
+
+
+
+## mediacommons
+
+Note: The first of these is MediaCommons, a digital scholarly publishing network focused on media studies, which my colleague Avi Santo and I co-founded with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book, the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, and the NYU Digital Library Technology Services group.
+
+
+
+
+Note: MediaCommons has worked over the last seven years to become a space in which the multiplicity of conversations in and about media studies taking place online can be brought together, through a range of projects that experiment with the form, the weight, and the time signature of scholarly communication. The longest-running of these projects is
+
+
+
+
+Note: In Media Res, which asks five scholars a week to comment briefly on some up-to-the-minute media text as a means of opening discussion about the issues it presents for media scholars, students, practitioners, and activists.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Similarly, The New Everyday brings clusters of scholars working on particular issues together in dialogue; the project is an experiment in “middle-state publishing,” focusing on articles that are more formal than blog posts, but not yet as fixed as the journal article.
+
+
+
+
+Note: #Alt-academy similarly remediates the edited volume and journal as a space for lengthier discussion about a particular issue.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Our newest project, inTransition, is a collaboration with Cinema Journal featuring videographic film criticism — video essays, that is, that make use of the form in thinking about the form.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And MediaCommons Press publishes longer texts for open discussion, some of which are moving through the digital phase on their way to a primary life in print,
+
+
+
+
+Note: like the recent open review of Jason Mittell’s book, Complex Television, while other projects are meant to remain primarily digital.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But one of our key interests in building MediaCommons was thinking about the social connections it could promote among scholars in the field, getting those scholars in communication with one another, discussing and possibly collaborating on their work. To that end, we focused the platform around a peer network that enables scholars to use their profiles to gather together the writing they’re doing across the web and to provide citations for offline work, creating a digital portfolio that provides a snapshot of their scholarly identities.
+
+
+## mediacommons
+
+Note: However, working on this project taught me several things that I sort of knew already, but hadn’t fully internalized, one of which is that any software development project will inevitably take far longer than you could possibly predict at the outset, and the second, and most important, is that no matter how slowly such software development projects move, the rate of change within the academy is positively glacial in comparison.
+
+
+
+## planned obsolescence
+
+Note: And it was my need to advocate for such change that led to the other project, the one I’m mostly talking about today. For while numerous publications over the last decade have argued for the need for new systems and practices in scholarly publishing, including, just to name two,
+
+
+- John Willinsky, *The Access Principle*
+- Christine Borgman, *Scholarship in the Digital Age*
+
+Note: John Willinsky’s The Access Principle and Christine Borgman’s Scholarship in the Digital Age, the arguments of these books too often fail to account for the fundamentally
+
+
+## conservative
+
+Note: conservative nature of academic institutions in the US and of the academics that comprise them. In the main, we are extraordinarily resistant to change in our ways of working; it is not without reason that a senior colleague once joked to me that the motto of my institution (one that might usefully be extended to the academy as a whole) could well be
+
+
+## “we have never done it that way before”
+
+Note: “we have never done it that way before.” Or, as Donald Hall has put it,
+
+
+> “While we are very adept at discussing the texts of novels, plays, poems, film, advertising, and even television shows, we are usually very reticent, if not wholly unwilling, to examine the textuality of our own profession, its scripts, values, biases, and behavioral norms.”
+
+— Donald Hall
+
+Note: scholars often resist applying the critical skills that we bring to our subject matter to an examination of “the textuality of our own profession, its scripts, values, biases, and behavioral norms” (Hall xiv). This kind of
+
+
+## self-criticism
+
+Note: self-criticism is a risky endeavor, and those of us who have been privileged enough to succeed within the existing system are often reluctant to bite the hand that feeds us. Changing our technologies, changing our ways of doing research, changing our modes of production and distribution of the results of that research, may well be crucial to the continued vitality of the academy —
+
+
+## change
+
+Note: and yet none of those changes can possibly come about unless there is first a profound change in the ways of thinking of scholars themselves. Until scholars really believe that publishing on the web is as valuable as publishing in print — and more importantly, until they believe that their institutions believe it, too — few will be willing to risk their careers on a new way of working, with the result that that new way of working will remain marginal, undervalued, and risky.
+ So what I have been interested in, then, is not just the set of technological changes that many believe are necessary to allow academic publishing to flourish into the future, but
+
+
+## social
+## intellectual
+## institutional
+
+Note: the social, intellectual, and institutional changes that are necessary to pave the way for these new technologies. In order for new modes of communication to become broadly accepted within the academy, scholars and their institutions must take a new look at the mission of the university, the goals of scholarly publishing, and the processes through which scholars conduct their work. We must collectively consider what new technologies have to offer not us, not just in terms of
+
+
+## cost
+## access
+
+Note: reducing the cost of publishing or increasing access to publications (though these are huge issues that deserve far more exploration than they have received); instead, we need to consider the ways that the new technologies with which we are in daily, intimate interaction
+
+
+## the ways we research
+
+Note: will change the ways we research,
+
+
+## the ways we write
+
+Note: the ways we write,
+
+
+## the ways we review
+
+Note: and the ways we review.
+
+
+
+## peer review
+
+Note: And it’s the structures of peer review that I have argued we need to begin with, not least because over the course of developing MediaCommons, in the dozens of meetings and conferences and panel discussions that I participated in, every single conversation came back, again and again, to the question “what are you going to do about peer review?” And no wonder, I suppose; concerns about peer review are quite understandable,
+
+
+## sine qua non
+
+Note: given that it is in some sense the sine qua non of the academy. We employ it in almost every aspect of the ways that we work, from hiring decisions through promotion and tenure reviews, in both internal and external grant and fellowship competitions, and, of course, in publishing. The work we do as scholars is repeatedly subjected to a series of vetting processes that enable us to indicate that the results of our work have been scrutinized by authorities in the field, and that those results are therefore themselves authoritative.
+
+
+## but
+
+Note: But I also want to suggest that the current system of peer review is in fact part of what’s broken. There’s a rather extraordinary literature available, mostly in the sciences and social sciences, on the problems with conventional peer review, including its biases and its flaws. Every scholar, I’d be willing to bet, has had direct, personal experience of those flaws — the review that misses the point, the review that must be personally motivated, or perhaps worst, the review that we never even get to see. And for such an imperfect system, peer review as we know it requires an astonishing amount of labor on our part, for which we can never receive “credit.” And so when Matt Kirschenbaum says that
+
+
+> “What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered.”
+
+— Matt Kirschenbaum
+
+Note: [read quote], I agree, but at the same time feel quite strongly that the system of peer review that we know today could be vastly improved — particularly in a networked environment. For that reason, I want us to take a closer look at what we mean when we say peer review, what it is we expect peer review to do, and how such processes might best work online.
+ One of the problems with using our current model of peer review in digital publishing is a fundamental misalignment between the net-native means through which “authority” is determined online and
+
+
+## disciplinary technology
+
+Note: what Mario Biagioli has referred to as the “disciplinary technology” of peer review, a decidedly Foucauldian form of
+
+
+## self-policing
+
+Note: self-policing that regulates knowledge through discipline. The problem with simply transferring this system to the networked world is, in no small part, that the network has its own preferred ways of working. The placement of conventional peer review prior to selection for publication in the traditional print-based process indicates that it serves a primarily
+
+
+## gatekeeping
+
+Note: gatekeeping function, one that allows certain kinds of academic discourse to thrive while excluding other ideas from the realm of the thinkable. Such gatekeeping is arguably necessary in print, in order to cope with the scarcities of print’s economics — only so many pages, in so many books and journals, can be published each year. In the digital, however, this kind of
+
+
+## scarcity is over
+
+Note: scarcity is over. Because anyone can publishing anything online — and, from a perspective that values the free and open communication of the products of scholarly research, not only can but should — we face instead a extraordinary
+
+
+## plenitude
+
+Note: plenitude. For this reason, I argue that what digital scholarly publishing must develop is not a means of applying the current system of peer review to new modes of online work in order to
+
+
+## create artificial scarcity
+
+Note: create artificial scarcity, but instead a net-native system that enables us to
+
+
+## cope with abundance
+
+Note: cope with abundance. As it is, increasing numbers of scholars are either self-publishing their work via their blogs or are forming new online publishing networks like MediaCommons, and in many cases, these publications are having a greater
+
+
+## impact
+
+Note: impact on the scholarly community than their traditional peer-reviewed publications are. It’s certainly true in my case: all of my first citations, lecture invitations, and other forms of public recognition stemmed not from my journal articles or my book, but from the work I was doing on my blog. But of course these new modes of publishing demand some kind of assessment, even if that assessment comes after the fact. For that reason, peer review online might fruitfully include
+
+
+## post-publication
+
+Note: an open, post-publication means of review that doesn’t determine
+
+
+## whether a text should be published
+
+Note: whether a text should be published (after all, the stuff is already out there) but rather measures
+
+
+## how it has been (and should be) received
+
+Note: how it has been (and how it should be) received, what its place in the ecosystem of scholarly communication is, and what kinds of responses it has provoked. Such a system would shift the center of gravity of peer review for online scholarship
+
+
+## from regulation to communication
+
+Note: from regulation to communication, transforming review into a mechanism for
+
+
+## facilitating
+
+Note: facilitating more fluid and productive exchanges amongst peers — and, not at all incidentally, a system in which the work of reviewing itself becomes visible as work, and the reviews themselves become part of the scholarly record.
+ What I argue is that we need to develop a system of
+
+
+## “peer-to-peer review”
+
+Note: “peer-to-peer review,” one that takes advantage of networked publishing’s capacity for discussion and dialogue, as well as of what Michael Jensen has called
+
+
+> “the new metrics of scholarly authority”
+
+— Michael Jensen
+
+Note: the “new metrics of scholarly authority” — things like hits and downloads, of course, but also comments and inbound links, which reveal how web-based texts get used — in order to provide a post-publication mode of filtering the wealth of content that should be made available via networked publishing. After all,
+
+
+## scarcity
+
+Note: scarcity does linger in internet-based communication — it’s just that, for the most part, what has become scarce is time and attention, rather than the materials of production. What internet-based scholarly publishing requires is not gatekeepers but
+
+
+## filters
+
+Note: filters, systems that allow a community of scholars working with and responding to one another to set and maintain their own standards, guiding one another to the best work being produced in their fields.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Though Planned Obsolescence came out in print from NYUPress in 2011, in order to put my money (at least metaphorically) where my mouth was, I put the entire draft manuscript online for open review in 2009. It wasn’t a perfect process, but it had some great benefits - I was able to discuss the text at a much earlier stage than I would have been otherwise, and I had reviewers discussing the text with one another, disagreeing on points of assessment. And I also know a lot of things about the text. For instance:
+
+
+### 31,650+ page loads
+### 12,100+ first-time visitors
+### 3370+ return visitors
+### 295 comments
+### 44 commenters
+
+Note: I know that in the first nine months after the project launched, it had over 31000 page loads; over 12000 unique visitors came by for the first time, and more than 3300 of them came back; 44 unique commenters left a total of 295 comments. And the project was written about and linked to in more than 20 venues, including one review article in a scholarly journal, and it was taught during that same nine-month period in at least four graduate seminars and one undergraduate seminar that I know about.
+
+
+# 400
+
+Note: And I want to place that alongside the fact that the average scholarly press monograph in the humanities sells fewer than 400 copies over its lifetime. Numbers of course aren’t everything, but they are still significant, particularly when coupled with the ability to see the reception of a text in action.
+
+
+
+## open questions
+
+Note: Of course, an online review process such as this creates a number of open questions, not least around our notion of what publication is, and what purposes it serves. Was my book “published” in 2009? When NYU released the revised version in 2011, was that in effect a second edition? What status did the online version of the text take on once the print version came out? And what kind of relationship is there between the readers’ comments on the online version and the ways that I’ve incorporated them in my revision? A broadly implemented peer-to-peer review system will inevitably require us to think in new ways about
+
+
+## authorship
+
+Note: authorship, in no small part because such new modes of review will almost certainly necessitate a turn from thinking about academic publishing as being focused on the production and dissemination of individual
+
+
+## products
+
+Note: products to imagining a system focused more broadly on facilitating the
+
+
+## processes
+
+Note: processes of scholarly work, as the time and effort required to maintain a gift-economy-driven system of peer-to-peer review will require that scholars place some portion of their primary emphasis not on their own individual achievements, but rather on the advancement of the
+
+
+## community
+
+Note: community as a whole. This kind of collectivity is a utopian ideal, of course, and to a significant degree, it goes against our training as scholars, and particularly as scholars within the humanities; what we accomplish, we accomplish alone. Or so it seems to us, at least. Roland Barthes, of course, claimed back in 1967 that
+
+
+> “We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, released a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture.”
+
+— Roland Barthes
+
+Note: no text is a single “line of words,” but that each instead is a “a fabric of quotations” (Barthes 52-53). We have long acknowledged the contested nature of the author, in theory — but we haven’t thought much about what such a proclamation might mean for our own status as authors. Now, I’m not arguing that we need to prepare to part with the lines on the CV that are the result of our authorship,
+
+
+## interaction
+
+Note: but I do want to suggest that digital networks, as structures that facilitate interaction, communication, and interconnection, will require us to think differently about what it is we’re doing as we write. As the example of the blog might suggest, communities best engage with one another around writing that is open rather than closed, in process rather than concluded.
+
+
+## process
+
+Note: New publishing systems that foreground process will likely encourage us to “publish” work earlier in its development (at the conference paper stage, for instance), and to remain engaged with those texts much longer after they’ve been released to readers. Admittedly, this makes many scholars nervous, about letting the messiness of our processes be seen, about the prospect of never being fully “done” with a project, but it’s worth considering why we’re doing the work in the first place: to the degree that scholarship is about participating in an exchange of ideas with one’s peers, new networked publishing structures can facilitate that interaction, but will best do so if the discussion is open-ended.
+
+
+## control
+
+Note: This foregrounding of process, however, may likely also require authors to be prepared to relinquish a certain degree of control over their texts, letting go of the illusion that their work springs wholly from the individual intelligence and acknowledging the ways that scholarship, even in fields in which sole authorship is the norm, has always been
+
+
+## collaborative
+
+Note: collaborative. The conversational structures of the web will inevitably intensify these collaborative relationships, sometimes producing new co-authoring relationships, though not always. It’s clear, however, that we’ll need to develop new citational practices that acknowledge the participation of our peers in the development of our work. Along the way, though, we’ll also need to think differently about
+
+
+## originality
+
+Note: “originality” in scholarly production, recognizing that, in a networked environment in which more and more discourse is available, some of the most important work that we will do as scholars may more closely resemble contemporary editorial or curatorial practices, bringing together and highlighting and
+
+
+## remix
+
+Note: remixing significant ideas in existing texts. We must find ways for these new modes of authorship — process-centered, collaborative, remix-oriented — to “count” within our systems of evaluation.
+ There are many other such changes that will be required throughout the entire academic community if such new publishing practices are to take root:
+
+
+## publishers
+
+Note: publishers, for instance, will need to think differently about their business models (which may need to focus more on services and less on objects), about their editorial practices (which may require a greater investment in guiding the development of projects from an early stage), and about the structures of texts (which may become less linear and will undoubtedly become less uniformly “textual”);
+
+
+## libraries
+
+Note: they’ll also need to think in concert with libraries about ways to ensure that the texts they’re producing are discoverable and accessible, that preservation is a core focus of their systems of production, and that projects can degrade gracefully when necessary.
+
+
+## universities
+
+Note: And universities, in the broadest sense, will need to rethink the relationship between the library, the university press, the information technology center, and the academic units within the institution, reimagining the funding model under which publishing operates and remembering the institutional purposes that such publishing was invented to serve — but also, and crucially, reimagining the relationship between the academic institution and the surrounding culture. As new systems of networked
+
+
+## knowledge production
+
+Note: knowledge production become increasingly prevalent and influential online, the university, and the scholars who comprise it, need to find ways to adapt those systems to our needs, or we will run the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant to the ways that contemporary culture produces and communicates authority.
+ In the end, we in the academy today face what is less a
+
+
+## obsolescence
+
+Note: material obsolescence than an institutional one; we are caught in entrenched systems that no longer serve our needs as well as they should. But because we are, by and large, our institutions, the greatest challenge we face is not that obsolescence, but our
+
+
+## response
+
+Note: response to it. Like the novelists I studied in my first book, who feel their cultural centrality threatened by the rise of newer media forms, we can shore up the boundaries between ourselves and the open spaces of intellectual exchange on the internet; we can extol the virtues of the ways things have always been done; we can bemoan our marginalization in a culture that continues marching forward into the digital future — and in so doing, we can further undermine our influence on the main threads of intellectual discussion in contemporary public life. We can build supports for an
+
+
+## undead
+
+Note: undead system, and we can watch the profession itself become undead.
+
+
+## change
+
+Note: Or we can continue to try to change the ways we communicate and the systems through which we attribute value to such communication, opening ourselves to the possibility that new modes of publishing might enable not just more texts but better texts, not just an evasion of obsolescence but a new life for scholarship. The point, finally, is not whether any one particular technology can provide a viable future, but whether we have the institutional will to commit to the development of the systems that will make such a technology viable, and keep it and ourselves viable into the future.
+
+
+# thanks.
+[Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://plannedobsolescence.net) // [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitzpatrick at mla dot org](mailto:kfitzpatrick@mla.org)
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+
+ Building a More Generous University
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+## Building a More Generous University
+---
+### Collaboration, Community, Solidarity
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thank you for that introduction, and for inviting me to talk with you here today! I'm of course sorry that I'm not able to be there with you in person, but Zoom has made it possible for us to continue to work together despite the distance. This is one of the things we've learned from the pandemic: that we can do a lot of things remotely that we thought we had to travel for, and that we can include many more when we do. There have been a lot of such lessons in all of our lives over the last year-plus, some of them positive and some much less so, but all of which I hope we can carry with us as we begin to return to campus. I want us to carry these things not least because returning to "normal," or seeking to create a "new normal," would be a costly mistake. We have an opportunity right now to avoid normal and build something better, something more fluid and capable of growth. But coming back better is going to require us to think pretty differently about the structures within which we work, and about how to change them to support the kind of institution we genuinely want to be part of. (So that's my focus for this afternoon. Before I move on, a quick warning that there's a little bit of language coming up on the next slide, in case you've got little ones around.)
+
+So last year, just before everything began shutting down, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread on Twitter in which she talked about the things she tells early career Black scholars who seek her advice on surviving in the academy. These two tweets in particular caught my attention:
+
+
+
+
+Note: "This place was fucked up when you got here, it will be fucked up when you leave here. All you can control is how much you let it fuck you up in the process. That is a pretty impolitic stance but I stand by it. I don't think these institutions can support us or love us. And I honor the many many people who work to make them more humane. But you, alone, cannot do that. And you cannot do it, ever, by killing yourself."
+
+
+
+https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry
+
+Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the last year-plus of the horrifying accuracy of this perspective -- 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?
+
+
+# collective action
+
+Note: One key thing that it would require is collective action. Because McMillan Cottom is right: you, alone, cannot change things. Together we might: but first we have to build that together, build the spaces and places of supporting that together, and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what follows derives from the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education in the United States is going to require those of us who work on campus to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the many publics that it serves.
+
+
+# "radical approach"
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, and that it can't be made incrementally but instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no easy path or simple tool that can readily take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American university system that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the purpose of our institutions from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated population ready to participate in building a better world -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that exists. But we need to consider the possibility that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, the paradigm under which higher education has operated in the United States is failing, and failing fast, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world. And this is true not least because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the decline in confidence in the university is not just caused by the public failing to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. What I'm asking for is a tall order -- in many ways swimming against the current of the neoliberal institution. But a large part of what I'm after is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions *as* communities, as well as *in interaction with* communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own: we need our publics' help as much or more as they need ours.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education has always been of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while the concept of generosity may seem too touchy-feely to represent the key to the future of the university, I hope, in the book, that I've put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole."
-- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the institution itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests and excludes a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: So the book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves requires re-grounding the institution in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It requires concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+# listening
+
+Note: *Generous Thinking* asks us to consider how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+# reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that the critical reading practices we enact on campus might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged research, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns, as well as to transform those communities from passive recipients of the university's knowledge into active collaborators in shared projects.
+
+
+# the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and community engagement. The university must become the kind of institution that can focus less on individual achievement, on educating for individual leadership, and that instead focuses on building community, and indeed on educating for community-building. And this requires a radical rethinking of the reward structures of higher education: what we value and how we demonstrate that we value it.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: Our universities are in many ways structured as collectives, in which each member of the institution is charged with some part of the well-being of the whole. This is how we derive our principles of shared governance, that we each have a contribution to make to the operation of the institution. And yet: when we examine both the kinds of work for which we are actively rewarded, as well as the nature of the rewards themselves, we repeatedly find an emphasis on the individual rather than the whole. For instance, for faculty at an institution like mine the work for which we are most rewarded is our research -- which we pointedly refer to as our "own" work -- and the rewards we receive often pull us away from the collective. If I publish a well-received book or a an article published in a prestigious journal, I might be eligible for a course release or relief from service responsibilities. And all of the other possible rewards I can seek -- promotions, raises, sabbaticals, and so forth -- encourage me to retreat from membership in the university community and instead focus on my own work. This is part and parcel of the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university, in which every form of merit -- including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and more -- is determined by what I individually have done, even where I've done it collaboratively.
+
+
+# zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. The result is that we find ourselves in zero-sum game in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+# institutions
+
+Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Budget models such as responsibility center management promote competition among academic units for majors and enrollments, and actively discourage any attempts to think across units, whether to develop new interdisciplinary collaborations or to support connections and resource-sharing across larger university structure. And insofar as these sorts of budgetary structures within our institutions drive us all toward competition, our institutions as a whole are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time," seeking to distinguish themselves from other institutions by promoting their own interests. We need our institutions to distance themselves from the rankings and the other quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another, in order for those institutions to promote more generous, more collaborative internal structures, as well as a work environment in which each of us who work for them can move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more collective.
+
+
+# culture change
+
+Note: And this is no easy task. Over the course of the last several years, both while *Generous Thinking* was in press and after it was published, I had the opportunity to speak on a number of college and university campuses where faculty, staff, students, and administrators were thinking about how to create and support a greater sense of connection between their campus communities and their public-facing mission. The folks who invited me -- ranging from the officers of campus AAUP chapters to university presidents and their advisors -- felt a connection with the arguments in *Generous Thinking* not least because they recognized that their institutions require not just better strategic plans but deep culture change. That culture change demands, among other things, a serious rethinking of how we work, why we work the ways we do, how we assess and reward that work, and how we recognize as work things that tend to get dismissed as service but that play a crucial role in building and sustaining collaborative communities. *Generous Thinking*, however, focused pretty tightly on the why and the what of the changes that our university cultures need to make, and spent a whole lot less time on how.
+
+
+# better
+
+Note: For instance: it's clear that making a better, more sustainable institution, in other words, requires us to move away from individualistic ideas of meritorious production -- in fact to step off the Fordist production line that forever asks us to do *more* -- and instead to think in a humane fashion about ways that we can do *better* . Better often in fact requires slowing down, talking with our colleagues and our communities, and most importantly, listening to what others have to say. Better requires engagement, connection, sharing, time, in ways that more nearly always encourages us to rush past. Turning from more to better can help us access the pleasures -- indeed, the joys -- of our work that life on the production line has required us to push aside. But given the ways that we've all been steeped in *more*, it's not at all clear how we might begin to slow down, to make a set of changes that go against the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us.
+
+
+# generosity in hard times
+
+Note: So I was already thinking that I needed to follow up *Generous Thinking* with something that would dig a bit further into the how of transformation. And then after one of the talks I gave, an attendee asked me a question that made the stakes of thinking about how painfully clear. Her question has been stuck in my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that it's relatively easy to embrace when resources are plentiful, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to think generously 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 saying "you're completely right; that's the real question" and pointing out that 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. But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us -- we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them -- invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I do want the institution to survive, and I want to sustain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
+
+
+# sacrifice
+
+Note: And I also know that however much I may want to keep the institution running, the institution is not thinking the same about me. Our institutions cannot love us back. However much we sacrifice for them, they will never sacrifice for us. This returns me to Tressie McMillan Cottom's point: you, alone, cannot make the institution more humane, and especially not by killing yourself in the process. This is especially true for members of minoritized groups working within the academy; it's especially true for faculty without tenure; it's especially true for staff; it's especially true for scholars working in contingent positions; it's especially true for everyone whose positions in the hierarchies of prestige and comfort leave them vulnerable, especially at moments when "we're all in it together" is invoked not in the context of resource-sharing but of sacrifice. Sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and to accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time as we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
+
+
+# big structural change
+
+Note: The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. And this is the deepest goal of _Generous Thinking_, and by extension of the followup project I'm now working on, entitled _Leading Generously_. In this project I'm focusing on how we can work collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. What kinds of leadership are required for us remake the university into an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members, in good times and bad? _Leading Generously_ is in some ways intended to be a practical handbook for putting the ideas of _Generous Thinking_ into action. But in doing so it asks its readers to reconsider some basic concepts that underwrite big structural change. It proposes that, despite the enormity of the transformation that higher education needs today, local changes can begin to make a difference, and that we are capable of making those local changes, which can network out into something larger.
+
+
+# leadership
+
+Note: Among the concepts that demand reconsideration, however, is the very notion of leadership itself. We conventionally associate leadership with the folks at the top of an institutional hierarchy, those with the authority to steer the ship. While I hope that *Leading Generously* might speak to them, the project addresses everyone on campus, beginning with the argument that everyone in an institution has the potential to be a leader, to create local transformative change that can model ways of being that others might learn from and join in with. This conviction places a lot of emphasis on individual actors, however, in ways that may seem a bit at odds with some of today's most important ideas about how power operates. Those critical ideas -- including arguments about race and racism; about sex, gender, and misogyny; about class and power -- understand the issues they explore to be *systemic* rather than *individual*. That is to say, they argue that real change requires social transformation. It requires building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, transforming economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. I am convinced by those arguments, and I have that same end goal: building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world. But the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
+
+
+# agency
+
+Note: The key to this problem is where we locate agency: who has the power to start the process of making significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, there is little agency left to the individual. And it's unquestionably true that the structural problems we face are enormous, and that one individual can't do much to reshape the world. But groups of individuals can. And building those groups starts with individuals who decide to do more, to put what individual agency they do have to work in solidarity with others.
+
+
+# you
+
+Note: And so *Leading Generously* begins with you, where you are. It starts from the position that each of us is equipped to make change in the aspects of our institutions over which we have influence, and that these changes can model new modes of being within our communities. But there's a second part to the question of agency: how to multiply it. One of the deepest flaws in contemporary models of leadership is the assumption that our reach becomes bigger as we climb the org chart. And of course power does grow in that direction, but what also happens is that you narrow your connections, until you find yourself at the pinnacle of the institution: you're at the center of power, but you're teetering there alone.
+
+
+> "retreating from the center of things -- both in reality and in one's self-conception -- is inseparable from forging connections that expand the boundaries of one's self."
-- Sarah Buss
+
+Note: And as Sarah Buss notes in the introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled *Radical Humility*, it's through connections that we become larger, not through ego, and building those connections requires a willingness to step out of the singular position of power and to work on coalition-building instead. We need those coalitions to transform a complex organization, and we need to act in solidarity in order for those coalitions to succeed.
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: Because of this requirement, it's important to recognize that the object of leadership is not institutions, but people, bringing them together and organizing for change. Building a more generous, deeper sense of "us" asks us to focus our attention on our relationships with our colleagues and with our broader communities, ensuring that we maintain the humanity not just of those we work with and for, but of the structures through which all of us connect.
+
+
+# how
+
+Note: How we begin transforming our institutions, then, is shoring up the means of moving from "you" to "us," the means of building the coalitions and collectives required to transform our institutions and make them capable of the kinds of community-oriented thinking we most need today. There are aspects of this transformation that require high-level administrative intervention: developing the post-RCM budget model that rewards collaboration and contributions to the collective success of the institution rather than competition among units. (And honestly, any institution that can successfully develop and implement such a model could become a shining example for other to learn from.) But beyond these high-level administrative aspects of transformation, there are more local aspects as well, aspects that each of your units can take on. Many of our units are governed by bylaws or other policy documents, and the thing about those documents is that they can be revised. It's often a messy process, but bringing together the members of a department to articulate their values and then rewrite their bylaws to align with those values can foster deep cultural change, by looking hard at the discrepancy between, for instance, our desire for transparency and equity and our policies limiting who gets to participate in and vote on departmental processes. Or, by looking hard at the conflict between our desire for innovation and impact in scholarly work and our policies defining what counts as "research" in highly limited ways.
+
+
+# change
+
+Note: None of this is easy, not least because it requires us to do some deep self-examination, questioning both the ways our policies have become established and our attachments to them. As an expert in organizational change has put it, "People don't resist change. They resist being changed." We need to think hard about what the kinds of cultural change we'd like to see in our institutions will ask of us. We need to consider how we might become better listeners, how we might learn to sit with difficult conversations and even criticism, how we might commit to assessing our work and the work of those around us based on our deepest values, how we might cultivate an atmosphere of mutual and renewable trust, and so on. Each of these ideas -- listening, vulnerability, values, trust, support and more -- is deceptively simple, but with careful consideration can become the foundation for a practice of community building, for thinking through institutional policies and processes and ensuring that they serve the people for whom the institution operates.
+
+
+# people
+
+Note: The necessity of that practice is clear: our institutions cannot survive the crises they currently face unless the people and the relationships that make up the institution thrive. Budgets and bottom lines matter, but without its people -- the students, the staff, the faculty, the community -- the university is nothing. And that's the thing that we need to understand now more than ever, and the thing that your institute is working toward: the recognition that the primary work of the university is connection, and that in hard times the most generous thing we can do is to connect with ourselves and everyone we work with, so that we all might develop the collective strength necessary to return and rebuild.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+## Digital, Public, Scholarship
+---
+### Sustainable Infrastructure for the Future of the University
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Before I get started, I want to thank Matt for inviting me to speak here with you today; I'm delighted to have this chance to celebrate the launch of the DH Studio with you, and to talk a bit about the kinds of work, and the kinds of futures, that an institutional structure like this makes possible.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Part of what I hope to address today stems from my recent book, _Generous Thinking_. The book as a whole argues that the future of the university as we have known it depends heavily on rebuilding relationships of trust between our institutions and the publics that they serve. The book addresses lots of aspects of those relationships and ways they might be fostered, but the key bit for today is that the networks and spaces that support digital scholarship are crucial to building and maintaining connections with a range of broader publics in the context of the work we do on campus.
+
+
+# background
+
+Note: I come to this work through a slightly idiosyncratic path. Back in 2002, I'd just finished the long process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and there seemed the very real possibility that no one else might ever read it. (I wasn't wrong -- it took another four years to get the thing published, for a lot of complicated reasons.) And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience. People read it, and I knew they read it because they left comments responding to and interacting with him. And I thought, wow, that's it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: My blog, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up doing something more interesting than I expected: it helped me build a small community. I found a number of other early academic bloggers, all of whom were in ongoing comment-and-crosslink conversations. Those relationships, which opened out into a growing network of scholars working online, were crucial to me as a somewhat isolated assistant professor. I had struggled to make the intellectual and professional connections that might help my writing develop, and it was the blog that provided the first real opportunity. Even more, posts I published there were the first pieces of my writing to be cited in more formal academic settings.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I'd just finished the draft of my second book. Rather than simply have the manuscript sent out for anonymous peer review, I asked my press to let me post the draft online for open comment too. I get asked a lot about that decision, especially how I worked up the courage to release something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth of the matter is that the risks didn't figure into my thinking. What I knew was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, with whom I'd had productive, engaging interactions that contributed to the book's development, and I wanted to hear their thoughts about where I'd wound up. I trusted them to help me--and they did, overwhelmingly so.
+
+
+# 2009
+
+Note: It's important to acknowledge the entire boatload of privilege not-thinking about the risks requires; I was writing from a sufficiently safe position that allowing flaws in my work-in-progress to be publicly visible wasn't a real threat. It's also not incidental that this was 2009, not 2019--a much more naive hour in the age of the Internet. The events of the last few years, from GamerGate to the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, have made the risks of opening one's work up online all too palpable. But my experiences with the blog, with the book manuscript, and with other projects I've opened to online discussion, still leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kind of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work's development. And--perhaps most importantly today--willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I tested that belief in 2018 by opening the draft of _Generous Thinking_ to a similar open review. Between early February and the end of March, I staged a process in which I first invited a group of readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, after which I opened the project to the world. In the end, 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own), giving me a rich view of the revision process that lay ahead. It wasn't all rainbows and unicorns: there are a few comments that sting, and a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking had been a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is better for having gone through this public process.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: So what I'm focused on is the ways that a digital scholarship studio like this one can can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that do not just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
+
+
+# obstacles
+
+Note: There are, of course, real obstacles that have to be faced in this process. Some of them reflect the communication platforms that we use today. Blogs don't readily produce the same level of engagement that they did in the early 2000s. In part this has to do with their massive proliferation, and in part it has to do with the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks. As a result, online communities of readers and writers are unlikely to develop spontaneously; instead, building community around online work has to be far more deliberate, reaching out to potential readers and participants and finding ways to draw them, and ourselves, back into sustained conversation.
+
+
+# trolls
+
+Note: And of course the nature of internet discourse has changed in recent years as much as has its location. Trolls are not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one's work public can involve significant risk--especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
+
+
+# no easy answers
+
+Note: I do not have easy answers to these problems; I do not have a perfect platform to offer, and I do not know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. Countering these destructive forces requires advance preparation and focused responses. Ensuring that public discourse about scholarly work remains productive requires a tremendous amount of collective labor, and the careful development and maintenance of trust, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But there are several other challenges that I want to explore a bit today, challenges that are about the ways that we as scholars do our work, the ways that we can draw a range of broader publics to that work, and the ways that we can ensure that the work we do together is supported in an ongoing way.
+
+
+# access
+
+Note: The first is the need to ensure that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it is impossible for anyone to care about what we do if they cannot see it. And yet, perhaps because we assume we are mostly writing for one another, the results of our work end up overwhelmingly in places where it cannot be found--and even if it is found, where it cannot be accessed--by members of the broader public.
+
+
+# accessibility
+
+Note: The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to get their hands on it, but enabling them to see in it the things that they might care about. We often resent the ways that academic work gets "dumbed down" in public venues, but we might think instead about ways that we can productively mainstream our arguments, engaging readers where they are, rather than always forcing them to come find us, in our venues and on our terms.
+
+
+# participation
+
+Note: Beyond access and accessibility, however, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural creation by more kinds of public thinkers. In other words, we need to focus not just on the public's potential consumption of the work that is done by the university, but also about potential modes of co-production that involve communities in the work of the university. Such collaborations might serve as a style of work that our universities can fruitfully model for the rest of our culture: new modes of scholarship done not just for but with the world.
+
+
+# networks
+
+Note: Networks for digital scholarship have the potential to create the conditions for greater access, for greater accessibility, and for greater public participation in the work that we all do as scholars. By encouraging this kind of work, I don't mean to suggest that there is no room for more traditional modes of internal exchange among field-based experts; there is, and should be. But the twenty-first century university must provide means by which the results of those exchanges can become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. Our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone at all times, of course, but different aspects of our work might engage with different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences--and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors--is a crucial skill for today's scholars, and a skill that needs to be cultivated and supported.
+
+
+# open access
+
+Note: The simplest way of making more scholarly work more available to the public is by making that work available through open access venues. There's a long history to the open access movement, of course, and in the book I dig into that history and the ties the movement created between its altruistic goals -- establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge -- and it more pragmatic arguments about the impact that public access might have on the advancement of research. The key point is that what's good for the public turns out to be good for scholarship, too. Publishing in ways that enable any interested reader to access our work, allows the work to be more read, more cited, creating more impact for us and for our fields. Making our work more openly accessible enables scholars in areas of the world without extensive library budgets, as well as U.S.-based instructors and students at undergraduate teaching institutions and secondary schools, to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. All of this can produce an expansion in our readership and an expansion in our influence.
+
+
+# resistance
+
+Note: Any yet, we often resist publishing our work in open venues, sometimes because of a perceived loss of prestige, and sometimes because we fear the consequences of exposing it to broader publics--and in that latter case, at least, not without justification. The public often seems determined to misunderstand us, or is hostile or, nearly as bad, utterly dismissive of the work we do. Our determination to wrestle with difficult or highly politicized questions and our use of expert methods and vocabularies can feel threatening to many readers. They fail to understand us; we take their response as an insult. Given this failure to communicate, we see no harm in keeping our work closed off from the public, arguing that we're only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter?
+
+
+# why
+
+Note: It matters because the more we close our work away from the public, and the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of the academy, the more we undermine the public's willingness to support our research and our institutions. As numerous public humanities scholars including Kathleen Woodward have argued, the major crisis facing the funding of higher education is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good. We wind up strengthening that conviction and worsening the crisis when we treat our work as private. Closing our work away from non-scholarly readers might protect us from public criticism, but it can't protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous in the current economic and political environment. The risks are real, especially for scholars working in politically engaged fields, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public, including our governments, of the relevance of what we do on campus.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: And of course engaging readers in thoughtful discussions about the important issues we study lies at the core of the academic mission. It is at the heart of our values. We don't create knowledge in order to hoard it, but instead, every day, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and in our writing, we embrace an ethic of generosity, of paying forward knowledge that we have received as a gift. We teach, as we were taught; we publish, as we learn from the publications of others. We cannot pay back those who came before us, but we can and do give to those who come after. Our participation in an ethical, voluntary scholarly community is grounded in the obligations we hold for one another, obligations that derive from the generosity we have received.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: Okay, idealistic, right? And that kind of idealism is all well and good, but it doesn't adequately account for an academic universe in which we are evaluated based on individual achievement, and in which prestige often overrides all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for and effects of that bias toward prestige in another part of the larger project; here, I want to think a bit about its effects on the individual scholar, as well as that scholar's role in perpetuating this hierarchical status quo. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily shades over into a sense that the more exclusive a publication's audience, the higher its value. // This is, at its most benign, self-defeating; if we privilege exclusivity above all else, we wind up undermining our work's potential cultural impact; as David Parry has commented,
+
+
+"Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge."
+
+Note: "Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge." It is only in giving it away, in making it as publicly available as possible, that we produce knowledge. As it is, most of the players involved in the production of scholarship have always been engaged in a process of "giving it away": authors, reviewers, scholarly editors, and others involved in the process have long offered their work to others without requiring direct compensation.
+
+
+# gift economy
+
+Note: In fact, the entire system of scholarly communication runs on an engine of generosity, one that demonstrates the ways that private enterprise can never adequately provide for the public good. So rather than committing our work to private channels, signing it over to corporate publishers that profit at higher education's expense, how might all of the members of the university community--researchers, instructors, libraries, presses, and administrations--instead work to develop and support a system based on our highest values? What if we understood sustainability in scholarly communication not as the ability to generate revenue, but instead the ability to keep the engine of generosity running?
+
+
+# responsibility
+
+Note: It's crucial to note that where I am asking for generosity--for giving it away--it is from those of us who are already fully credited and compensated for the work we do: from those tenured and tenure-track faculty and other fully-employed members of our professions who can and should contribute to the world the products of the labor that they have already been supported in undertaking. Similarly, generosity is called for from those institutions that can and should underwrite the production of scholarship on behalf of the academy and the public at large. It is our mission, and our responsibility, to look beyond our own walls to the world beyond, to enlarge the gifts that we have received by making them public. Doing so requires that we hold the potential for public engagement with our work among our highest values, that we understand such potential engagement as a public good that we can share in creating.
+
+
+# interest
+
+Note: But there are steps beyond simply making work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn't possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that's fine, to an extent: communication within a discourse community plays a crucial role in that community's development, and there must always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But that inwardly-focused sharing of work has been privileged to our detriment. Scholars are not rewarded--and in fact are at times actively punished--for publishing in popular venues, but it's those popular venues that can help carry the work of the academy out into the world.
+
+
+# public-facing
+
+Note: Of course, many scholars have recently worked to develop a range of public-facing publications that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, venues like the _Los Angeles Review of Books_ and _Public Books_. Venues like these open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture. But if we are to open our ideas to larger public audiences, we need to give some serious thought to the mode and voice of our writing. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn't restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many general interest publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to focus on complexity and nuance, and the result is often far from straight-forward. Getting past the accusations of obscurity and irrelevance often leveled at us requires us to open up our rhetoric, to demonstrate to a generally educated reader how and why what we do matters.
+
+
+# accessible
+
+Note: Again, not all academic writing needs to be done in a public register. But we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible to the public. And we are all already called, to varying extents, to be public intellectuals. Our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus and thereby building support for that work. But for that project to be successful, scholars need to be prepared to bridge the communication gaps, by honing our ability to alternate speaking with one another and speaking with different audiences.
+
+
+# publics
+
+Note: However, a key component of the work of the public intellectual is not simply addressing but actually helping to build a public in the first place. Nancy Fraser long since noted the fragmentation of contemporary public life into a "plurality of competing counterpublics." We are of course one of those counterpublics; the retreat of scholars into private intellectual life has produced a tighter sense of community and the comfort of being understood, but at the cost of withdrawing scholarly issues and perspectives from public view, and with the result of further fragmentation of the public itself. If we are to return to public discourse, if we are to connect with--and perhaps even be responsible for helping to foster--a range of engaged publics, we're going to have to contend with those publics' multiplicity, even as we try to draw them into dialogue.
+
+
+# work
+
+Note: Most importantly, perhaps, we need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. Our processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don't meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, when scholars make the transition to more public prose, their work is frequently underrewarded, if not actively derided, back on campus. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it's likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must "dumb down" key ideas in order to do so. If we're going to make publicly engaged digital scholarship genuinely sustainable, we have to ensure that it's properly respected, and properly rewarded, so that the focus can genuinely be placed on engaging with the communities the work is trying to reach.
+
+
+# understanding
+
+Note: This is in some ways the heart of the problem: we too often do not know how to reach those publics, because we don't fully understand them. And, as I argue at length in the larger project, this is in no small part because we spend a bit too much time talking and not enough time listening to them. We need to make room for the public in our arguments, and in our prose, but we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having found a way to connect with a broader audience, having helped to transform that audience into something like a public, how do we then activate that public to work on its own behalf?
+
+
+# public scholarship
+
+Note: Here is where our working in public--creating public access, valuing public engagement, becoming public intellectuals--transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, a scholarship that is not simply performed for the public but that includes and is in fact given over to the publics with whom we work. In public scholarship, members of our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants, as stakeholders.
+
+
+# citizen humanities
+
+Note: Recent experiments in "citizen science" provide some potentially interesting examples, projects like Galaxy Zoo that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. But what might the citizen humanities look like? It might look like museum exhibits such as Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California, which engaged members of local Pacific communities in the planning and development processes. It might look like The September 11 Digital Archive, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project, which presents first-hand accounts of the events of that day, along with photos, emails, and other archival materials from more than 150,000 participants. It might look like the Baltimore Stories project at UMBC, which used humanities scholarship as a convening force to bring community organizers, educators, and non-profit organizations together to explore narratives of race in American life. What these projects have in common is that each of them explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern belongs to them. The work involved is theirs not just to learn from but to shape and define as well. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
+
+
+# "peers"
+
+Note: By working in publicly engaged ways, and by bringing those publics into the self-reflexive modes of humanities- and social science-based critique, we have the potential to produce a renewed conception of how intellectual life operates in contemporary culture -- but that renewed conception is going to require us to be open to a new understanding of the notion of our "peers." Such a new understanding will have profound consequences not just for determining whom we address within that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening the notion of the peer to a much broader range of forms of critical inquiry and active project participation has the potential to reshape relations between town and gown, to lay the groundwork for more productive conversations across the borders of the campus, and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work of the academy matters for our culture as a whole.
+
+
+# networks
+
+Note: And much of that work begins with projects and spaces like the DH Studio, which provides not just a place where new forms of collaborative, public scholarship can be invented but the networks through which it can be realized. An institutional structure like this one enables us to ask what might be possible if we were to open up our scholarly practices up to real public engagement, to deep interdisciplinarity, to new modes of working. How can spaces like this enable public universities like Purdue to more genuinely focus on the mission of bringing knowledge to the people of the state? How might the work done in a studio like this draw public support back to the institution by demonstrating the extent to which it is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public? For public universities to win back public support, they must find ways like this--structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just the mission statement but of the actual mission--to place publicly engaged work at the top of its priorities. And that starts in places like this, where scholars can come together to explore new work in and with the public.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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+ We Have Never Been Social
+
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+
+## We Have Never Been Social:
+### Web 2.0 and What Went Wrong
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // hcommons.social/@kfitz
+Reclaim Open // 6 June 2023
+
+Note: Thank you so much -- I'm delighted to be here and to get to talk with all of you today about something that's been bothering me for the better part of fifteen years:
+
+
+## what happened to blogging?
+
+Note: What happened to blogging? We heard a bit yesterday morning in the opening panel about the early excitement around blogging, and lots of us really want to figure out where that excitement went and whether we might get it back. There are lots of obvious answers circulating out there, but it's a question that I take seriously, and personally. Because blogging made my career. And I mean that literally: insofar as I have anything like a public presence today, it was created by blogging. Everything I have written, every project I've worked on, every job I've held, to one extent or another I owe to my blog. And so I take what's become of it in the years since pretty hard, and I want to spend some time digging into what went wrong, and to think with all of you about whether, and how, the particular magic that blogs created might be recoverable.
+
+
+# 2003
+
+Note: I'm going to begin this inquest by jumping 20 years backward, to 2003. I was an assistant professor of English and Media Studies at a small liberal arts college on the eastern edge of the west coast, right where the sprawl of LA county runs into the desert. I'd been out of grad school for five years, and I was struggling to get my first book published, feeling the deadline of my 2004 tenure review bearing down on me. Spoiler alert: I did receive tenure, as it looked at the time of my review as though I'd found a home for that book, though it ended up being declined at the eleventh hour because the press's marketing guys couldn't figure out how to sell it. It finally did come out from another press in 2006, thankfully, but it ultimately had a far smaller impact on my career than did the writing I had been doing online in the interim.
+
+So, content warning: I’m about to make a lot of us in the room feel super old. But to paint the scene a bit: in 2003, LiveJournal and Blogger had each been around for about four years, and of course GeoCities for another five beyond that. These were a somewhat messy and anarchic set of tools and spaces that allowed users to build out forms of self-representation and community connection, bringing the ethos that had long been found in discussion spaces like USENET, IRC, and a range of MUDs and MOOs to the graphical windows of the web. LiveJournal and Blogger were also the leading edges of the transformation of the world-wide web from a relatively static service, presenting pages that lived on servers requiring both access and a certain degree of expertise in order to manage on the back end. Instead, these new applications embodied the principles of the "read-write web," which allowed users to interact with and add to web content via the front end.
+
+
+# “web 2.0”
+
+Note: That "read-write web" was one feature of the complex of web-based applications that was in the early years of the 21st century turning the browser from a means of presenting static web pages into something far more dynamic. That more dynamic thing is part of what many of us originally understood the term "web 2.0" to mean. Credit for coining the term is usually given to Tim O'Reilly, who in 2004 hosted the first "Web 2.0 Summit" intended to explore what the web was becoming as it took flight from the ashes of the dot-com bust. Wikipedia, however, attributes the first use of the term "web 2.0" to Darcy DiNucci, in a 1999 article entitled "Fragmented Future."
+
+
+
+http://darcyd.com/fragmented_future.pdf
+
+Note: In this article, DiNucci describes the first-generation web as "essentially a prototype -- a proof of concept" for "interactive content universally accessible through a standard interface," but given that "it loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls," it was clear even then that it was "only an embryo of the Web to come." DiNucci went on to describe the many screens and devices that might interact with what she called "web 2.0" in the future (including your microwave, which might automatically seek out correct cooking times online), noting quite presciently the particular challenges that web publishing would face in encountering such a wide range of screen sizes and resolutions. What DiNucci did not include in this fragmented future was what would happen when the web browser did more than retrieve and display content, but rather allowed for the creation of that content in the first place.
+
+
+
+https://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/
+
+Note: It took another few years before Kingsley Idehen, in 2003, wrote a blog post thinking about XML-based applications such as RSS and their potential for "the next generation web," saying "I refer to this as Web 2.0."
+
+
+
+https://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/
+
+Note: That this post was followed a month later by another quoting Jeff Bezos on the "executable Web" and the rapidly expanding "Amazon web services" that were supporting a wide range of database-driven online retail sites points exactly to the problem of "web 2.0": the channeling of interactive creativity into business. (And if you need something to break your heart just a little bit this morning, try this on for size:
+
+
+
+https://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/
+
+Note: That tiny text reads "Q: What benefit is Amazon.com getting from this? A: It's too early to say. It's certainly not a major source of revenue for us. But when people use our Web services, they give us credit for that. This turns out to be very helpful.")
+
+
+
+http://www.web2con/web2con via the wayback machine
+
+Note: Sigh. In any case. By the time Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle took the stage for the opening keynote at that first Web 2.0 Summit, they were ready to outline a vision for the future of "the web as platform," starring a lot of folks looking to build "truly great companies" on top of it. And it's thanks to those folks, and their interest in platformization,
+
+
+
+
+Note: that we'd find ourselves just two short years later honored as *Time* Magazine's Person of the Year, being told that we control the Information Age! The unbridled enthusiasm of the cover carries over into the story by Lev Grossman, though it's possible to see in the story an early hint of the forking paths that Web 2.0 presented. On the one hand, Grossman notes that the explosive growth in active, creative participation in online spaces was "a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before." On the other hand, the extent to which we -- you and I -- really control the world being built is uncertain, as Grossman hints at the importance of those building the platforms on which all this engagement was taking place, making it possible for "millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity \[to] get backhauled into the global intellectual economy."
+
+I've gotten a bit ahead of the story I want to tell today, which is in large part about those forking paths, which point to community and collaboration in one direction and to the global intellectual economy in the other, and the fundamental failures that meant we were always destined to find ourselves lost in the latter even while we sought the former. So let's back up again, back to
+
+
+# 2003
+
+Note: 2003. As I noted, LiveJournal and Blogger had been actively feeding the read/write web for a few years, as had several other early blogging packages. Around that time, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little decided to take the software they'd been using, b2/cafelog, which was about to be discontinued, and build something on top of it, releasing the first version of what they decided to call "WordPress" on May 27, 2003.
+
+
+# “blog”
+
+Note: As for me, I first heard the word "blog" in a workshop at UCLA during the summer of 2001, when Jenny Bay, then an early career scholar of digital rhetoric, presented some early research questions she was exploring about the development of forms of online communication being popularized by folks like Jason Kottke. I remember being a bit puzzled at first, not just about how you'd go about building a website on which you could post regular updates about things you found of interest, but also, to be frank, about why you'd do so. I didn't see the appeal, at least not at first.
+
+But the idea got stuck somewhere in the back of my head, and a year later, in June 2002, it resurfaced. I had just finished revising the manuscript for that first book, and I knew that it was probably going to be a year or two before anyone would be able to read it.
+
+
+# ahaahahhahahahahaahahahahhaahahha
+
+Note: It turned out to be almost five years, which I don't know what I'd have done if I'd have known that at the time. But even given the deeply naive view of the scholarly publishing process that I was still clinging to at the time, I was antsy. I had Things to Say. And I was tired of waiting for my stuff to find its way to an audience. And one afternoon I was procrastinating by searching online for some old friends from grad school and I ran into this website that one of them had! It was one of those blog things! And it was funny, and smart, and people were reading it. And I knew they were reading it because they were responding to posts in the comments. And I thought, "oh man, that's *it*."
+
+
+
+
+Note: So I figured out how to get an account with a web hosting service, and how to install Movable Type, and started blogging. My original site looked like this. I named it "Planned Obsolescence" as a bit of an inside joke -- the title of the ill-fated book I'd just finished writing was *The Anxiety of Obsolescence*, and the blog format felt like it provided a vehicle for, if not fame and fortune, at least a kind of obsolescence that I could control.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Here's what my very first post looks like today. Since 2002 it's been migrated from Movable Type to ExpressionEngine to WordPress, from whoever my first hosting provider was to DreamHost to Reclaim, from plannedobsolescence.net to kfitz.info, and most recently from WordPress on Reclaim to a Jekyll-based static site hosted on GitHub. And yet, despite all of the web's evanescence, and despite my certainty that I was working in a form that was productive of obsolescence, this content remains -- remains accessible, remains available, remains alive.
+
+When I started blogging, what I thought I was after was the instant gratification of publishing, the ability to push my words out to the world. All of the other thousands of words I'd produced were either stuck on my hard drive waiting for a press to agree to consider them, or languishing in journals that I wasn't sure anyone would ever read. The whole exercise of scholarly publishing as we knew it felt a whole lot like shouting down a well. But this! This blog thing would allow me to take charge of my own process, to push stuff out when I was ready.
+
+
+# conversation
+
+Note: It turns out, though, that what I really wanted, deep down underneath the sense of being stifled, was the possibility of response. When you shout down the traditional publishing well, the only answer you really get is your own voice echoing back; the possibility that someone will read your article and cite it in their own, and then have that reply pushed through the publishing process is so slow as to have lost all traces of the conversational. The early world of blogging, however, was all about conversation. I'd post something, and someone would read it and leave a comment! Or, they'd read it and write a post in response, and link to mine in the process. There was an entire web of conversations taking place in the blogoverse, and through that web I found my way into a cluster of early literary and media studies bloggers, all of whom were writing and thinking together, lifting one another's ideas up and making them better along the way.
+
+
+# community
+
+Note: This cluster of bloggers formed a community, one that I wasn't even really aware I needed back in my remote small liberal arts college bubble. That bubble was an awfully comfortable one, and yet I had no real collaborators inside it. Connecting online with folks who were pursuing questions related to my own produced a kind of engagement that was hard to sustain alone. And blogging turned out to be enormously productive for me: not only did the relationships built in that community evolve into several of the closest friendships I have today, but the writing I did on the blog led to every single idea I've had since, and every bit of recognition that my work has received.
+
+Blogging in 2003 was the bomb, is what I'm trying to say.
+
+
+# but
+
+Note: But. Alongside the creative ferment being produced by blogs in 2003, there were a few other developments happening. 2003 saw the launch of Friendster and MySpace. And then -- fairly quietly, at first -- this thing called FaceMash. These platforms billed themselves, to different extents, as ways to engage with your social networks online, which doesn't sound all *that* different from what the blog network I participated in did. Except, of course, that these were *platforms*, in which the accumulation of connections and competition for influence rather than the building of relationships became the point. By the time FaceMash turned into Facebook and started moving beyond Harvard's gates, "social networks" had become spaces for the accumulation of both social capital and venture capital. They were about YOU YOU YOU, and not at all about who we were together.
+
+
+# twitter
+
+Note: Twitter was in this sense just another nail in the coffin, but I hold fast to the conviction that Twitter is what ultimately did blogging as I knew it in. Not just because it was so much quicker to spit out 140 characters than it was to write even a moderately considered blog post, and not just because that heightened sense of immediate gratification was coupled with knowing *exactly how many people* were following you, and thus (at least theoretically) how much of an "impact" your post about what your dog ate for breakfast was going to have, but also because one of its real benefits -- following people who posted links to cool stuff, including to your moderately considered blog post -- resulted in stealing the conversation away from blogs themselves. If someone had a response to the blog post you linked to on Twitter, they responded *on Twitter*, and that conversation rarely had a chance to develop in the ways it had in the comments, or in linked posts from other blogs. And worse, the fact that that conversation was taking place might not even be something that the original post author was aware of, or got to participate in.
+
+
+
+https://indieweb.org/
+
+Note: Of course, folks wrote WordPress plugins that attempted to repair that conversational leak, by aggregating tweets and republishing them as comments on the post to which they responded, not least the folks affiliated with the IndieWeb community, who argued for personally-owned alternatives to corporate platforms, ensuring that content you produce remained under your own control, published and connected where and when you wanted. While I'm a huge supporter of IndieWeb and its goals, I worry that focusing on *ownership per se* misses a part of what went wrong. The problem is not just that the platforms into which we poured our time and energy, our creativity, our representations of ourselves and our relationships with others -- it's not just that these platforms were corporate-owned. It's not just that those corporations had VCs to whom they had to provide quantitative proof of success. And it's not just that our relationships thus got caught up in the Silicon Valley cash nexus -- though all of that is demonstrably bad, too.
+
+
+# antisocial
+
+Note: What's so antisocial about social media, rather, is mostly a radical misunderstanding of sociality itself.
+
+
+> “It’s the story of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems.” (Vaidhyanathan, *Antisocial Media* 3)
+
+Note: Siva Vaidhyanathan has described the history of Facebook by saying that "It's the story of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems." That ideology assumes, among other things, that "society" can be represented coherently through the network graph of a highly individuated self and its accumulated connections -- that society is nodes and edges and that's about it. Fred Turner’s *From Counterculture to Cyberculture* is pretty instructive on the ideological connections between the alternative communities of the ‘60s and the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley, each of which focuses on freedom as something possessed by the sovereign individual. This understanding of freedom as negative liberty (freedom from regulation) rather than positive liberty (freedom to live fully) is a deep failure to reckon with the complexities of sociality. Real sociality is about human relationships and the contingent ways that individuals with different histories, cultures, languages, and experiences build a sense of mutual responsibility through ongoing conversation and endless negotiation – that failure results in, at best, a deeply impoverished network.
+
+
+> “the subjugation of the social to the technical“ (Eve, forthcoming)
+
+Note: The Silicon Valley dream is a deeply libertarian landscape, one built on platforms that elevate the sovereign individual who can stand tall, without obligation. Martin Eve, in a forthcoming project that I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of, thinks about this mode of platformization -- particularly with respect to the governance processes constructed through the blockchain and epitomized in the cryptocurrencies it supports -- as "the subjugation of the social to the technical." These technologies in fact represent the desire to eliminate the contingencies and complexities of the social and replace them wholesale with a form of technicality that can be individually optimized. This desire and the degree to which it has manifested in our social media platforms is what leads me to argue that
+
+
+# social media has never been social
+
+Note: social media has never been social. It's not that things have recently gone wrong, with bad new overlords or dangerous political shenanigans. Everything that's wrong has been wrong from the start. "Social media" as we have known it has always been wholly geared toward the individual and the wants and desires of that individual as understood, processed by, and catered to through technology. Even more, the goal in that technical service to the individual has likewise never been social, no matter how much Silicon Valley rhetoric celebrates the ideal of global connection; the connectedness that these platforms is able to produce is between YOU, a pair of eyeballs, and the algorithm, which feeds you what it thinks you most want to see, in order to keep you sutured to the network itself.
+
+
+- self-representation as performance
+- engagement as confirmation
+- interaction as data
+
+Note: So, to dig in just a bit on the elements of the antisocial that makes social media what it is: (**CLICK**) **First**, the platforms encourage a presentation of selfhood that is less about representation than about performance, tailoring what is shared to the audience, each of whom is likewise engaged in a performance of self. (**CLICK**) **Second**, the interactions among those performed selves become a form of confirmation -- I see what you are presenting, and respond in the way I am supposed to -- rather than providing room for thoughtful exchange. And (**CLICK**) **third**, the platform ruthlessly tracks these interactions in order to figure out what you "like," for a value of like that most means stuff that you click on, with the goal of feeding more such stuff in order to prolong the connection -- where the connection is not between you and other humans engaged in a process of thinking together, but rather between you and a platform whose profits derive from your attention.
+
+
+#
+
+Note: There are so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to begin. When we are reduced to performing selfhood, when our conversations get turned into performances of connection, our online interactions far too often turn into knee-jerk reactions rather than considered responses. And on some level, this is what the platform wants. Whatever the algorithm behind social media platforms actually looks like when you dig into its code, it serves to produce the greatest rewards for the worst behavior, elevating posts that will produce reactions and thus feeding our worst impulses. As Siva Vaidhyanathan argues,
+
+
+> “Facebook is explicitly engineered to promote items that generate strong reactions…. Facebook measures engagement by the number of clicks, ‘likes,’ shares, and comments. This design feature – or flaw, if you care about the quality of knowledge and debate – ensures that the most inflammatory material will travel the farthest and the fastest.” (Vaidyanathan, *Antisocial Media* 6)
+
+Note: **READ SLIDE.** The point is to keep you glued to the interface, to keep the dopamine hits coming. It is not only not engineered to create a sense of social connection or responsibility to the actually existing humans on the other side of those interactions -- it in fact functions to break any such sense of sociality, except insofar as it confirms our own performances.
+
+
+# grrr
+
+Note: I could go on about this for quite a while, but I think I’ve said enough to convey the depth of the grudge that I bear toward Twitter and Facebook and all of the other social media platforms that together undermined what my small community of bloggers was building together. I have to acknowledge a couple of things here, though. First, Jessa Lingel reminds us to ask, however much corporate media platforms have done to gentrify the internet,
+
+
+> “Was the internet ever really ungentrified? The short answer is, no. There was no golden age when the internet was blind to race, class, and gender, no magical era when communities could thrive without corporate interference and a push toward profits.” (Lingel, *The Gentrification of the Internet* 15)
+
+Note: **READ SLIDE.** Undoubtedly the portrait I have in my head of the wonders of 2003 skews rosy, as a highly educated upper-middle class white cis woman in the academy. Folks without my level of access and support may not have found the web such an easy place to find a home. It’s likewise important to remember the extent to which social media has been important for people who are marginalized or isolated, people who cannot safely be themselves in their families and communities. Many, many people have found support and comfort, and have developed real meaningful relationships that began on these platforms. And I have been able to keep in touch with old friends I’d never have seen otherwise. I have been able to see my nieces and nephews grow up. And social media networks have the potential to provide millions and millions of users with access to news and information. Of course, how good that news and information is, and how much I really get to know about those old friends, and how my nieces and nephews might feel about the pictures their parents are sharing, remains a real question.
+
+
+## responsibility
+
+Note: The other thing I have to acknowledge, as plainly as I can, that I own some of the responsibility for what social media did to my blog, and to the community I was part of. I mean, I fell for it! I let the immediacy and the reach and the metrics turn my head and pull me away from the work I was doing. And I let it happen in part because, to be frank,
+
+
+# work
+
+Note: the blog was hard work. It required a lot of time and attention to think through posts and make them worth sharing. It required real engagement with what other writers were posting, and a real willingness to think through their ideas and contribute something to the conversation. Blogging required real work – in the same way that real sociality requires real work – and however immediate blogging’s gratification seemed in comparison with writing (and god forbid trying to publish) an academic book, it had nothing on the nonstop dopamine fountain that was Twitter. So I let myself get pulled away into social media, and so did most of my blogging friends.
+
+
+## where are we now?
+
+Note: But over the last ten years, to one extent or another, nearly all of us have found ourselves in a love/hate relationship with Twitter and Facebook, and lots of us have been looking for more satisfying alternatives. Several of us are part of a small, private Mattermost community that I host, one that is utterly closed and will remain so. Some of us have left Twitter for Mastodon, including the smallish but open instance that my colleagues and I at Humanities Commons are hosting (at hcommons.social – you’re welcome to join us there!)
+. And a few of us keep doing what we can to bring blogging back, to use the web spaces that we own and control to do longer-form, less noisy work.
+
+
+# go back
+
+Note: So if this talk is going to close with anything like a call to action for those of us here, it’s for each of us to go back and see if we can recover the best of 2003, and infuse it with what we’ve learned in the two decades since. What I want to get back to is partly the kind of personally owned infrastructure advocated for by the IndieWeb folks, and partly the decentralized communities of Mastodon. But it’s also an understanding of the web as a space for the kind of inventiveness that doesn’t have a business model behind it. Creativity without venture capitalists. Thoughtful conversation. The potential for building real relationships. That’s what was best about the web that was – less that the infrastructure was personally owned or decentralized (though that too!), than about its potential for real sociality and the joint invention and experimentation it inspired, the ways that new features got hacked together with duct tape and baling wire rather than with the polish that VC funding brought. I mean, Webrings! Blogrolls! Pingomatic! And RSS!
+
+
+# RSS
+
+Note: RSS, the little engine that could of the web. It’s been pronounced dead more times than I can count, and it just keeps coming back. And so in this vein, I want to close by bringing up one of my web heroes,
+
+
+
+https://inessential.com/
+
+Note: Brent Simmons, the developer behind NetNewsWire. His website, inessential, makes clear that the app – a super clean RSS reader – is and will remain 100% free. Simmons originally launched NetNewsWire in 2002; it was acquired by NewsGator in 2005 and then by Black Pixel in 2011. Sometime in about 2015, Brent started working on a new RSS reader, Evergreen, but in 2018 he reacquired the intellectual property involved in NetNewsWire, merged it with the new product, and returned it to active development. So: NetNewsWire, a free and open tool for engaging with the free and open web. And as he notes, he will not accept money for the app – but he points to a number of ways to support it:
+
+
+
+https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/Technotes/HowToSupportNetNewsWire.markdown
+
+Note: The first of those being “Write a blog instead of posting to Twitter or Facebook”! If you don’t do it for me, do it for Brent, and for NetNewsWire. Take your work back. Keep it not just free and open, but genuinely social. Use your work on the web to share, to think, to discuss, to learn. Reclaim your intellectual property, and your intellectual production, for all of us.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // hcommons.social/@kfitz
+
+Note: Many thanks!
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+ DH@MSU
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+# DH@MSU
+---
+### What We've Done So Far, and Where We Go from Here
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Hi all. Thanks for taking the time to engage with this review process. I'm grateful to the committee for the time and care they've invested in thinking about the future for DH@MSU. I've put together a number of documents, including a reflection on the accomplishments of the last five years, a vision for our path ahead, a statement of my administrative philosophy, and a DEI statement. The committee has also asked me to put together a talk addressing some aspect of those materials; what I've chosen to focus on here is a little bit of reflection and a little bit of vision: what we've done together in forming the DH@MSU community, and how we might strengthen that community in the years ahead.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Perhaps the first thing to note about DH@MSU is that while some of its particulars have developed recently, what's going on under the hood is far from new. The digital humanities has a very long history at Michigan State, but for most of that history, it developed in idiosyncratic, non-institutional, and often personality-driven ways. When I came to MSU in 2017, I was asked to raise the profile of digital humanities both within the university and on the national scene, not least by creating a sense of structure around it. But walking into a new institution where DH work has been done the way it has been done for more than 30 years and saying "I'm here to direct things!" is risky business, to say the least.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Backing up just a bit: I came to this role from having been the associate executive director and director of scholarly communication at the MLS. I was hired into that role to help the organization think about the ways it might transform its publishing practices for an increasingly digital environment. I learned an enormous amount in that role, but perhaps the most important thing I learned has to do with the difference between management and leadership. I have a lot more to say about that if you're interested, but the key thing to note here is that while good management focuses on bringing out the best in people in order to help a team optimize its processes and achieve organizational goals, changing those processes and goals and getting people on board with moving in a new direction requires a different set of skills. Management, after all, comes with both carrots, in the form of merit raises, and sticks, in the form of disciplinary action. Transformational roles within the academy very often come with neither. And I would be willing to bet that the number of faculty members anywhere who consider themselves to have a "manager" is vanishingly small. So convincing a bunch of established scholars to work together in a focused way toward some kind of vision of change requires an entirely different kind of authority, one built on trust, on relationships, and on listening.
+
+And it was clear when I arrived that I had a lot to learn. I needed a much deeper understanding of the institutional and interpersonal environment that I was entering, not least because, prior to interviewing for this position, this is what I knew about MSU's DH environment:
+
+
+
+
+Note: MATRIX, one of the oldest and most successful DH centers in the US, and LEADR, a lab that I knew had some kind of relationship with MATRIX, sort of, and that was mostly student-facing. As I moved into the interview process, I did enough research to figure out that
+
+
+
+
+Note: there was also an academic program in DH, offering both an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate, but there was so much more I needed to know.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There were projects that I'd known for a long time, like H-NET, but had no idea they were housed at MSU. There were labs like the DHLC that I knew were there but didn't really understand and hadn't connected to the overall DH picture, and groups like WIDE that I hadn't known about. And there were new spaces and projects coming into being, including the Library's DSL and the College of Arts and Letters's CEDAR collaborative. And amidst this alphabet soup, the relationships among these units was not at all visible to me.
+
+My running joke for the first several months in the position was that my job consisted mostly of having coffee. I reached out to everyone that I could think of within the DH scene at MSU -- present and former directors and associate directors of these labs and centers, faculty with digital projects, administrators, and so on -- and set up time to chat. I asked each of them to tell me the story of the digital humanities at MSU -- how their center or lab or project came to be, how it fit in (or did not fit in) with the other such entities on campus, how it had evolved over time. I asked them what they felt was necessary to creating a more holistic environment for DH within the institution, and where they felt the chief roadblocks to such interconnection and collaboration lay. I also asked them who else I should be talking to, and then talked to them.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This process allowed me to understand and appreciate the work that had gone into making DH at MSU what it had become, as well as the institutional and interpersonal challenges involved in making it something more. Those two things -- the institutional and interpersonal -- were of course deeply entwined, not least because while I'd been asked to get the existing labs and centers and projects and programs at MSU to cooperate and collaborate, I had neither carrots nor sticks to make that happen. I couldn't offer tantalizing new resources that would make such collaboration appealing, nor did I have any authority to force the issue. I needed to work by creating community, and so needed to get to know the people involved as well as I could.
+
+
+
"I don't want to say that everything magically falls into place once you have formed the basic community of people and ideas, but it's staggering how all of the decisions that so obsess people trying to build a center follow logically and inexorably from the evolving needs and expanding vision of more-or-less informal gatherings of like-minded enthusiasts."
+
——Stephen Ramsay, "Centers of Attention"
+
+Note: Steve Ramsay, in his essay "Centers of Attention," begins from this idea -- that centers are people -- and encourages those who are longing for a DH center on their campus to begin simply by working together. READ SLIDE. As Steve would readily acknowledge, there's a lot of labor hidden between the phrases in this sentence. My round of coffees was one component of that work, but it mostly created one-to-one connections between me and my new colleagues. Forming a community required something different. So in September, I invited everyone that Kristen and I could think of to a community meeting to discuss the future directions for DH and to see what we might want to do together. If I'm remembering correctly, around 25 colleagues came to that meeting and discussed paths forward. In the course of our conversation it became clear that while lots of prior work had been done, there wasn't yet a connective structure within which this large group of people could make the potential for collaboration a part of their ongoing institutional lives, nor was there an institutional structure that could help facilitate the process of making those potential collaborations actual. So we collectively decided that one of our first orders of business should be defining the parameters of our work together. Four volunteers came together with me over the course of a semester to draft a set of bylaws defining DH@MSU and the structures that would support and facilitate our community.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Bylaws give every appearance of being the the least idealistic genre in which one can write, all legalese and densely numbered sections and sub-sections preparing them to be cited in an array of procedures we should all hope we never have to participate in. But they have the potential to be wildly idealistic as well, defining the best possibilities for our work together. And they have to be written to define us at our best, because they set the standard for a lot of ensuing activity, and they define both who we are and how we want to work together.
+
+In re-reading the bylaws for this review, however, I realized that there are some ways in which we're not quite living up to them. For instance, we state that a formal meeting of the core faculty is to be held once per semester, and we haven't held one of those in a few years. We hold several events annually that are intended to bring the entire community together, including our THATCamps and our end-of-semester celebrations. But this moment of return to our governing document has encouraged me to wonder what initiatives we might press forward with if we were to meet more formally as a faculty.
+
+The key problem, of course, is time: especially now, after nearly two years of COVID, we're all overstretched, and the idea of adding one. more. meeting. is just more than most of us can bear. We're already facing a bit of fray in our governance fabric, as it is: all of our core faculty have primary appointments elsewhere, and the time you give us is an extra bit of labor. That you give it demonstrates your real commitment to DH@MSU and what it can do, but that commitment of necessity comes at the end of a long list of other commitments. And if I'm being honest, something similar is true of me: though my appointment is 45% administration, that 45% can only be spread so thin. As a result, most of our initiatives have been slower to develop than I'd like, but we're inching toward them. Key among those initiatives is developing a map of sorts for DH@MSU.
+
+
+
+
+Note: When we first created the structures within which we now operate, DH@MSU looked something like this -- we'd recently added two new units to our confederation, the DSL and CEDAR, and we would soon add my own R&D unit, MESH. All of these projects and spaces were created in order to fill gaps in the DH landscape at MSU, to provide more support for more kinds of work being done across the field. But there are still institutional puzzles to be solved. For instance, if I have a project and I want to hire a student or two to work on it with me, where might I find funding for that? And how do I hire that student? If I need a higher level of developer support, is there a group of programmers somewhere that I can work with? It's these kinds of questions that often drive the desire for formal centers, but as you can see we've got a pile of centers and still can't fully meet the need. Some of these centers, like MATRIX and the DHLC, are focused on internally generated grant-funded projects and aren't able to support external projects. Some, like the DSL, have constituencies that are so broad that they can't go deep on many projects. And all of them face similar questions about the full lifecycle of projects: How are they incubated? How do they get past the incubation stage and into full development? How can their teams obtain not just the funding but also the training they need to be self-sufficient? How are projects hosted and maintained over the long-term? And once those projects are no longer viable, what provisions can we make for flattening and archiving them?
+
+
+
+
+Note: In order to answer these questions, and more, we're currently working on two fronts: first, to map all of the resources within MSU that the DH community should know about -- the funding sources, the training opportunities, the support services, and more. And second, we're working to pull together the research units within DH@MSU with the other units on campus -- like EDLI, the Enhanced Digital Learning Initiative -- that have some of the same questions. We're hoping to build out additional layers of consortium, first, within the humanities and social sciences via what we're currently calling the Consortium for Digital Scholarship and Practice.
+
+
+
+
+Note: We're also working at a second level, across the university, via the Research Facilitation Network, bringing together related groups in quantitative fields, in the bench sciences, and in university-level enterprise computing. This superstructure, led by the MSU Libraries, central IT, and the Office of Research and Innovation, will be crucial to ensuring that the most important forms of research infrastructure are just as available to scholars in the humanities as they are in the sciences.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Okay, so we've now zoomed out from the constellation that is DH@MSU to the galaxy that is the Research Facilitation Network. And I've told you a bit about my journey along the way. But I'm guessing you might like me to boil this down into a few conclusions that we can think about as we move forward. So:
+
+
+1. Remember Steve Ramsay's claim -- centers are people -- but focus on the connections among those people.
+
+Note: READ SLIDE. Getting DH@MSU to where we are, and pushing us along to where we need to be, is all about building relationships among the different folks with a stake in the collaborations that we hope to facilitate. Along which lines:
+
+
+2. Informal relationships are a great place to begin, but formal structures for those relationships can make them institutionally durable.
+
+Note: READ SLIDE. How can we continue to define the connections among independent units and projects that allow them to maintain their independence while leveraging their combined strength? This is especially important when we're trying to do the work of creating something coherent without a substantial budget or a top-down administrative mandate. And finally:
+
+
+3. Networks might facilitate the development of new, spontaneous connections in ways that centers cannot.
+
+Note: READ SLIDE. Networks can both harness the power of informal relationships and allow their impact to extend outward, drawing strength from the combination of resources and knowledge that all of their participants bring to bear. Networks are also more flexible than centers, in that they can accommodate new developments, shifts of direction, and so on in ways that solid structures cannot.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+ Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: So: that's pretty much where I am right now, and I'm sure I've opened up way more questions than I've answered. Thanks for watching this, and I'll look forward to hearing your questions as this process moves forward.
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+ Sustainability and Solidarity
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Common Good
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking Krisellen for inviting me to talk with you and Joann for all the work involved in getting me here. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to share this work with you.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of the talk ahead grows out of the work I did in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as “generous thinking,” focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of the book's subtitle grows out of my increasing sense that this necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can’t be made incrementally, that instead it requires — as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ — a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
+> --Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be understood as evidence that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. The crisis in higher education today stems both from the incommensurability of these two paradigms and from the fact that _both of them are failing_, if in different ways.
+
+
+## Thomas Kuhn
+
+Note: As Thomas Kuhn noted in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, the failure of a scientific paradigm, as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account, throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely, one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the "period of pronounced professional insecurity" that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift, the cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. And my argument is that we are desperately in need of such a paradigm shift if higher education as we want it to be is to survive.
+
+
+
+
+Note: _Generous Thinking_ explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education -- faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more -- to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead focus on the university's role in building community.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So some of my thoughts here today grow out of this aspect of _Generous Thinking_, but some stem more pragmatically from my work over the last several years on _Humanities Commons_, which is a non-profit, community-developed and governed network serving humanities scholars and organizations.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of _Generous Thinking_: first, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation -- even among those universities that we call "private" -- can allow us to build the kind of community that can sustain them.
+
+
+## community-supported infrastructure
+
+Note: And part of resisting privatization, for both scholars and their institutions, involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. We need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education return to its mission of public service. But developing this form of community-supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it, and the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The stories I'm about to tell are ones with which all of you are much too familiar, and in many cases with which you are far more familiar than I am. I hope you'll forgive this; my usual audiences are scholars and administrators who don't always have a clear sense of why community-supported infrastructure might matter, and the examples I'm about to cite make that importance clear. So, bear with me.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Though the issues that I'm discussing of course long predate this particular moment, they came into stark visibility in August 2017, when bepress announced that it had been purchased by the RELX Group, the multi-national parent company of publishing behemoth Elsevier. Bepress had of course been founded in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open-access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. Bepress thus grew out of the academy, and was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at its heart.
+
+
+
+
+Note: As the bepress website notes, over 500 institutions have purchased bepress services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly-accessible ways. And in one fell swoop, these 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing behemoths such as Elsevier.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure -- built and run by academics, for the academic community -- appeared to have been turned on that community. It's not as though anyone had been unaware that bepress was a commercial service all along, but they were one of the good guys, and the costs of outsourcing infrastructural needs to them had been balanced against the often impossible task of maintaining locally hosted repository and publishing systems. Bepress provided what many saw as best-of-breed functionality at a reasonable price, and it supported libraries' desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But the acquisition of bepress by RELX not only put libraries in the position of unintentionally supporting a growing corporate control not just of scholarly publishing but of the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery through production to communication; it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely in promoting greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. As a result, serious conversations have since focused on means of supporting open-source, academy-owned and -controlled infrastructure.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is not an impossible move, by any stretch, but it's harder than it might sound. Long-standing open-access, open-infrastructure projects like arXiv might suggest some possible areas of concern.
+
+
+
+
+Note: By every reasonable measure, arXiv has been exemplary -- in its uptake, in its independence, and in the ways that it has helped to transform the fields that it serves. But in some crucial ways, arXiv has experienced what can only be called "catastrophic success" -- a crucial, paradigm-shifting project whose growing annual operating costs and mounting infrastructural requirements have demanded increasingly creative mechanisms for the platform's support.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So in 2010, the arXiv team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource. But our institutions, as we unfortunately know, are largely unaccustomed to this work of cross-institutional collaboration. For one thing, they're far more prone to understand such resources as terrain for competition, and for another, the community-building required becomes yet another form of labor added on top of maintaining the resources themselves.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I do not know the extent to which such difficulties may have played a role in arXiv's recent move from the Library to Cornell Computing and Information Science. It's entirely likely that the move is a matter of infrastructural pragmatics. But even so, the challenges of maintaining the kind of cross-institutional coalition necessary to sustain such a crucial resource remain.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Another example, with a different narrative, might be found in the Samvera project. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories rely, developers at a number of institutions have come together to create a collective solution. As the proverb and their website have it, if you want to go far, go together.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But this distributed developer community, like all such communities, has faced some challenges in coordination, challenges that have caused it, as the proverb also reminds us, to go more slowly than it might. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers involved in the project but of the institutions for which the developers actually work is not a simple matter.
+
+
+# sustainability
+
+Note: The foundation of the challenges that arXiv and Samvera have faced is the same challenge faced by any number of other projects and programs and initiatives: sustainability. This is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late, as my colleagues and I have been working to ensure that Humanities Commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And those attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point; they too would like to see the network thrive, but they cannot support it indefinitely. We need, they reasonably suggest, a plan for demonstrating that the network will, at some point in the future, be able to support itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models, in business plans, in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a non-profit entity forever tied to kinds of economic concerns that are very often divergent from, if not at odds with, the non-profit's primary mission. As a result, these non-profits remain forever precarious; one small miscalculation can make the difference between survival and collapse.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But sustainability broadly understood extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed -- or more waste produced -- than can be developed or managed in the near term.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There's technological sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects' future stability and growth.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All of these forms of sustainability are important, to varying degrees, to providing for the future of non-profit and open-source projects. But there's another form that gets a good bit less attention, and that I increasingly think precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability: social sustainability. The social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Ensuring that these commitments are sustained is, I increasingly think, a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward.
+
+
+# community
+
+Note: This notion -- of the role of "community" in community-supported software, and of the best ways of building and sustaining it -- raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. As Miranda Joseph argues in _Against the Romance of Community_, the concept is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life, a set of ostensibly organic felt relationships that harken back to a mythical premodern moment in which people lived and worked in direct connection with one another, without the mediating forces of modern capitalism.
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: "Community" is in this sense, in Benedict Anderson's sense, an imagined relationship, and even an imaginary one, as its invocation is designed to yoke together bodies whose existence as a group is largely constructed. It's a concept often used both idealistically and as a form of discipline, a claim of unity that smooths over and thus suppresses internal difference and disagreement. And, as Joseph points out, the notion of community is often deployed as if the relationships that it describes could provide an antidote to or an escape from the problems created by contemporary political and economic life. But this suggestion serves to distract us from the supplementary role that community in fact actually serves with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network–based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises, rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education. "Community" becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So it's important to be careful in issuing calls to build community: such calls, issued uncritically, not only run the risk of enabling the institutions that structure contemporary life to absolve themselves of responsibility for public care, but they also risk essentializing a highly complex and intersectional set of social relations, treating those relations as if they were a simple, single thing. At the same time, though, there are some important uses for the notion of community that remain, uses that might benefit from an analogy to Gayatri Spivak's "strategic essentialism." In these uses we might simultaneously recognize that our calls to community are flawed, in fact impossible, but nonetheless useful as organizing tools.
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: We might thus begin to think of the call to community not as an invocation of organic unity but instead as a form of coalition-building, of a developing solidarity. Solidarity itself is a challenged concept, of course; there are important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom, and for whom.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Women of color, for instance, have pointed out the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests, leading author Mikki Kendall to establish the Twitter hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen. So I don't want to make it sound as though "solidarity" can serve as an unproblematic substitute for "community."
+
+
+
+
+Note: But I remain convinced that there are stronger forms of solidarity to be found, forms that do not demand that individuals seeking redress for institutionalized injustices drop their own issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those individuals are all of our issues too, and that we must stand together in support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this is the form of solidarity that I'm seeking, a form that I am convinced is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom was not just, as the UBS Nobel Perspectives website has it, the first female Nobel laureate in economics; she remains to date the _only_ female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place.
+
+
+## common-pool resources
+
+Note: It's important first to focus in a bit on what is meant by the notion of common-pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" -- the overuse of shared natural resources -- can apply.
+
+
+## the "free rider" problem
+
+Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization.
+
+
+## _Governing the Commons_
+
+Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book _Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action_, this model -- like other such models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
+
+
+> What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies. -- Elinor Ostrom
+
+Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned software projects -- like arXiv, like Samvera, like Humanities Commons -- on which they should be able to rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the problem that community-developed projects were developed to evade. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So last summer, Brett Bobley tweeted a question about ways of sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Cayless --
+
+
+
+
+Note: -- noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining such projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in _Generous Thinking_, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+# collaboration
+
+Note: But getting institutions to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside, is a huge part of what I've tried to do in _Generous Thinking_, and it's a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: A bit of background, for those of you who may not be fully familiar with the project. The MLA is the largest scholarly society in the humanities, representing around 25,000 members across North America and around the world, members who teach and study a very wide range of languages, literatures, and cultures. (The MLA, full disclosure, is also my former employer.) With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 to provide members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching the platform, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with colleagues in other areas in the humanities, so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields.
+
+
+
+
+Note: With further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons spaces developed for the members of the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the College Art Association. But beyond working with these partners, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work, and so we made the decision to open the network's hub to anyone who wants to join -- across the disciplines, around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites, and they can deposit and share their work in the network's open-access repository. This fusion of a social network with a library-quality repository (adhering to commonly accepted metadata standards, employing digital object identifiers, and so on) means that not only is stuff being put into the repository, and not only can that stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used, as there's a community there with which it can be shared.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while fully opening the Humanities Commons hub to free participation by any interested scholar or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use -- a little over two years later, we have over 17,000 members -- it has created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms Humanities Commons from a common-pool resource into a club good, one whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the network if it were an exclusive service see the openness of the hub as diminishing the network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
+
+
+## sustainability and solidarity
+
+Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. My arguments to this end, probably needless to say, have a tough road ahead of them.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: I'm asking the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, fully aligning its internal reward structures with the public mission it claims to espouse. And this is where the need for a paradigm shift -- for politics -- arises.
+
+
+
+http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
+
+Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." We've no doubt all got stories to tell that would support this conclusion, stories that illustrate the ways that the kinds of collaborative work that might best support the university's need for a more open, publicly oriented future goes un- or under-rewarded.
+
+
+## the anecdote
+
+Note: Here's mine: Right around the time I began sketching the outline for this book, I attended a day-long workshop on new models for open scholarly communication, for which the provost of a large state research university had been invited to give a keynote address. And the keynote was quite powerful: the provost described his campus’s efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty’s work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university’s singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our work up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-quality venues, conventionally understood. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising—really, reimagining—all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university’s core service mission? The provost’s response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
+
+
+# honest
+
+Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it’s that there is a shadow mission—competition—that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
+
+
+## the worst of it
+
+Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that _Generous Thinking_ is most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered—from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press—to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to “compete all the time” forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What I am arguing, both directly in _Generous Thinking_ and indirectly through Humanities Commons, is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not _other institutions of higher education_, not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather, it is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university, we're going to have to do it as a sector, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward both the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community-supported infrastructure, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community. None of this will be easy -- but the alternatives, which we have all seen building over the last several years, will be far worse.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: And with that cheery note, I'm going to say thanks, and open things up for discussion.
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+ Scholarly Networks: Digital Beyond DH
+
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+## Scholarly Networks
+---
+### Possibilities for the Digital Beyond DH
+---
+
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Let me start today by thanking Janice and everyone else here at Marquette who made it possible for us to join you here today. I'm very much looking forward to the conversations ahead. What I want to focus on a bit this morning is the importance for 21st century scholars — and perhaps especially for scholars in 2018 — of using the digital technologies at our disposal in order to make connections with one another and with the public: with voters who elect legislators and other representatives who determine budgets and set policies that govern our institutions; with parents who encourage or discourage our students in various directions in their educational choices; with employers who hire our students. We need to find ways to make clear to those off-campus constituencies why the work we do on campus, and especially in the humanities, is important, in order to make sure we keep getting to do it. My forthcoming book, _Generous Thinking_, explores this issue at much greater length; my thoughts are drawn from a chapter that focuses on the role that making our work more public might serve in that process. I'm also drawing heavily on my experiences with Humanities Commons, about which more in a bit.
+
+
+## background
+
+Note: First, a bit of background. Back in 2002, I’d just finished the process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and it seemed entirely possible that no one else might ever read it. And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience in active discussion with him. And I thought, wow, that’s it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: My blog, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up helping me build a small community of other scholars working online, a community that was crucial to helping alleviate the isolation I'd been feeling. The connections I forged there helped my writing develop, and the work I published drew the first bits of scholarly recognition my work received.
+
+
+
+http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence
+
+Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I’d just finished the draft of my second book and decided (with my press's blessing) to post it online for open review. I get asked a lot what made me take the risk of releasing something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth is that I ignored those risks with privileged abandon. What I knew from my blog was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, whose thoughts I wanted to hear, and who I trusted to help me make the book better. And happily, it worked.
+
+
+## 2009
+
+Note: Okay, that was 2009, not 2018. The last few years have made the risks of working in the open impossible to ignore. And yet my experiences leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kinds of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work’s development. And -- perhaps most importantly today -- willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+
+https://generousthinking.hcommons.org
+
+Note: I tested that belief this spring through an open review of the draft of _Generous Thinking_, held at Humanities Commons. I first invited a group about of 40 readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, and then opened the project to the world. 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own). The comments are not all rainbows and unicorns: a few of them sting, and there are a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking were a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is going to be better for having gone through this public process.
+
+
+## public
+
+Note: So what I'm focused on today is the ways that working in public can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that don't just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
+
+
+## challenges
+
+Note: There are real challenges to that process, however. Some of them have to do with today's communication platforms. Blogs don't generate the level of engagement that they once did, partly because their massive proliferation, partly thanks to the death of some related technologies like Google Reader, and partly because of the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks.
+
+
+## trolls
+
+Note: And then there are the trolls -- not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one’s work public today can involve real risk -- especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
+
+
+## no easy answers
+
+Note: These problems don't have easy answers. As much as I adore Humanities Commons, I can't promise you that it's a perfect platform, and I don't know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. I am convinced, however, that countering these destructive forces will require advance preparation, focused responses, and a tremendous amount of collective labor, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But despite these problems, I want to explore a few ways that we might help draw a range of broader publics to the work that we do.
+
+
+## publics
+
+Note: None of what I'm about to say is meant to imply that there isn't room for internal exchange among academics; there is, and should be. But there should also be means for the results of those exchanges to become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. And by talking about "publics," I mean to indicate that our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone, all the time; rather, different aspects of our work might reach different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences -- and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors -- is a crucial skill for the 21st century academic.
+
+
+## access
+## accessibility
+## participation
+
+Note: So I want to consider three issues in thinking about how those publics might interact with our work. The first is ensuring that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it's impossible for anyone to care about our work if they can't see it. The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to see it, but enabling them to see IN it things that they might care about. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural work by more kinds of public thinkers.
+
+
+## access
+
+Note: So, starting with access. Mobilization around open access began in the scientific community more than twenty years ago and has since spread, with varying degrees of uptake, across the disciplines. I dig into the history and particulars of open access in the book, but the key point is that establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge turns out to increase the impact of work so published. In other words, what's good for the public turns out to be good for research, too, not least because making even the most highly specialized work openly available gives it the greatest opportunity to be found and built upon. Which is to say: the value of open access lies not just in making the most "popular" work publicly available, but in making all work as available as possible, even where that work might seem to have a vanishingly small audience.
+
+
+## economic model
+
+Note: That said, it's important to note that there are some significant challenges to enabling and supporting open access. Freeing journal articles from barriers to access is a relatively attainable goal, but as we know, in many humanities fields the most important work done takes the shape of books rather than articles, and the technologies and economics of book publishing are quite different. Moreover, the economic model into which much open access publishing has settled in the last decade, in which the exchange has been "flipped" from reader-pays to author-pays, presents problems of its own. This flip has worked in the sciences, where grants are able to cover publication costs, but it's a model that's all but impossible to make work in the humanities. Even more, the move from reader-pays to author-pays risks shifting the inequities in access from the consumer side to the producer side of the equation, such that researchers in fields without significant grant funding, or at underfunded institutions, can't get their work into circulation in the same way that their more privileged colleagues can.
+
+
+## engagement
+
+Note: So I don’t want to suggest that creating public access is easy, but I don’t want to restrict our sense of the possibilities either. Enabling greater public access to scholarly work is not just about changing its business model but about making public engagement with that work possible. If we publish in ways that enable any interested reader to access our work, that work will be more read, more cited, creating more impact for us and for our fields. Making our work more openly available enables many more scholars, instructors, and students world-wide to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. Expanding our readership in these ways would seem an unmitigatedly good thing.
+
+
+## why it matters
+
+Note: And yet, many of us worry about opening our work to broader publics, sometimes because we fear the consequences of making it open -- and not without justification. The general public often seems determined to misunderstand us, to interpret what we say with focused hostility or, nearly as bad, utter dismissiveness. As a result, we see no harm in keeping our work closed, because we’re only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter? It matters because the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of our campuses, the more we undermine the public’s willingness to support our research and our institutions. If one key component of the crisis facing higher education today is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good, we wind up strengthening that conviction when we treat our work as private. Keeping our work to ourselves might protect us from public criticism, but it can't protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous. This is not to say that working in public doesn’t bear risks, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public of the relevance of our work.
+
+
+## prestige
+
+Note: We work, however, in an environment that often privileges prestige over all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for that bias toward prestige in another part of the project, but I want to think briefly about its effects on us. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily bleeds into a sense that the more exclusive a publication’s audience, the higher its value. Needless to say, this is a self-defeating attitude; if we privilege exclusivity, we can't be surprised when our work fails to make its importance clear to the public.
+
+
+## access
+
+Note: There's much more to be said here, especially about the erasure of labor inherent in assuming that all publications should simply be made available for free online. But the thing that I'm asking us to consider is whether those of us who can afford to be generous -- those fully-employed members of our professions who can and should make a gift of our work to the world -- might be willing to take on the work of creating greater public engagement for our fields by understanding our work as a public good, by creating the greatest possible public access to it.
+
+
+## accessibility
+
+Note: But creating that public good requires more than simply making our work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn’t possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that’s fine, to an extent: there should always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But we've privileged that inwardly-focused sharing of work to our detriment. Scholars are too often not rewarded -- and in fact are at times actively punished -- for publishing in popular venues. And because the values instantiated by our rewards systems have a profound effect on the ways we train our students, we build the wall between academic and public discourse higher and higher with every passing cohort.
+
+
+## public-facing
+
+Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing venues that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, such as the _Los Angeles Review of Books_ and _Public Books_, as well as a host of individual and group blogs. These venues open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture. But if we are to open our ideas to larger public audiences, we need to give some serious thought to the ways we write as well. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn’t restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many mainstream publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to highlight complexity and nuance, and the result is often lines of argumentation, and lines of prose, that are far from straight-forward.
+
+
+## public register
+
+Note: This is not to say that all academic writing should be done in a public register. But I do want to argue that we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible. After all, our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus. But for that project to be successful, we need to hone our ability to alternate speaking with one another and with different audiences. We need, in other words, to learn a professional form of code switching.
+
+
+## code-switching
+
+Note: "Code switching" has its origin in linguistics and is used to explore how and why speakers move between multiple languages within individual speech instances. The concept was borrowed by rhetoric and composition as a means of thinking about students’ need to move between vernacular and academic languages in addressing particular audiences at particular moments. However, as many scholars have noted, there is a highly racialized power dynamic deployed in most pedagogical injunctions to code-switch, which carry the assumption that students of color must learn "standard" varieties of English in order to succeed, enforcing a double consciousness that ultimately accommodates, rather than eradicating, racism.
+
+
+## power
+
+Note: The command to code switch in an unequal environment is inevitably a tool of power. But so, I want to argue, is scholars’ assumption that academic English as we perform it is the “standard variety”; in fact, ours is as much a lived vernacular as any, but a vernacular based in privilege, one that risks undermining our ability to build alliances with other communities. This is not to say that we can simply adopt a common language that will make us understood and beloved by all. Nor should we abandon the precise academic languages that undergird the rigor of our work. But it's worth asking how judicious code switching, as a means of acknowledging the effects of our educational and professional privilege and inviting others into our discussions, might become a more regular part of our scholarly work.
+
+
+## learn
+
+Note: It's also worth asking what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work. Public-facing writing -- as many editors of mainstream intellectual publications would note -- is very different from academic writing, and by and large it is not something scholars are trained to do. But numerous initiatives are working to help scholarly authors focus and express the ideas contained in their scholarly publications in ways that help broader audiences engage with them. Ideally, this kind of writing should become part of graduate training across the university.
+
+
+## public / intellectual
+
+Note: We also need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. Our processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don’t meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, public work is frequently underrewarded. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it’s likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must “dumb down” key ideas in order to do so. We need to recognize and appropriately value the work required to make room for the general reader in our arguments, and in our prose.
+
+
+## participation
+
+Note: But we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having worked to engage the public, how can we activate that public to work with us? This is where creating public access and valuing public accessibility transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, work not simply performed for the public but that includes the publics with whom we work, inviting our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants.
+
+
+## citizen humanities
+
+Note: There's been a lot of attention paid to “citizen science” projects of late, projects that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. We might consider what a similar citizen humanities might look like. It might look like museum exhibits such as Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California, which engaged members of local Pacific communities in the planning and development processes. It might look like The September 11 Digital Archive, which presents first-hand accounts along with photos, emails, and other archival materials from more than 150,000 participants. It might look like the Baltimore Stories project at UMBC, which used humanities scholarship as a convening force to bring community organizers, educators, and non-profit organizations together to explore narratives of race in American life. What these projects have in common is that each explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern is theirs, and the resulting work is theirs too, not just to learn from but to shape and define. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
+
+
+## peers
+
+Note: One key thing that this mode of work also does is foster a new understanding of the notion of the "peer," encouraging us to understand our peers not just as credentialed colleagues but instead as participants in a community of practice, whoever those participants may be. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we consider under that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening our sense of who "we" are to a much broader range of participants has the potential to reshape relations between the public and the academy and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work we do matters for our culture as a whole.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This notion of 'us,' and of ways that we might open 'us' up to a broader range of publics and forms of connection, brings me in a roundabout way to talk about Humanities Commons. Humanities Commons was launched as a project of the Modern Language Association, intended to serve the needs of scholarly societies for more open forms of peer-to-peer communication amongst their members.
+
+
+
+https://commons.wikimedia.org
+
+Note: Of course, the 'us' formed by learned and professional societies has long been a pretty particular one. Since the founding of the Royal Society of London, such organizations have been created precisely in order to facilitate communication amongst their members, but also between their members and the broader intellectual world. Early in their histories, that communication took the form of meetings at which research was discussed and letters circulated within the membership between meetings. Over time, those channels of communication formalized into the conferences and publications we know today, and society business models solidified around providing access to those resources.
+
+
+
+https://www.flickr.com/photos/anonymouscollective
+
+Note: But new networks have begun to change scholars' relationships with their professional organizations, as they're now able to get their work more directly to one another, and to the world beyond. These networks don't necessarily provide the formalized review and publication processes of scholarly societies and other publishers, but they enable individual scholars to connect with colleagues, to create new collaborations, to develop and share projects, and to increase the impact of the results of their work. This is precisely the kind of communication that scholarly societies were invented to facilitate, and during my time at the MLA, we came to believe quite strongly that such facilitation remained our responsibility, even in an age in which relatively ready access to technology makes it possible for individual scholars to handle it all by themselves.
+
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are a range of other kinds of entities that have brought some recent disruption to the scholarly communication space, including a couple of notable venture-capital funded platforms for research-sharing. One might think of these platforms as “Facebook for scholars,” allowing individual members to share work with others in a radically democratized open space.
+
+
+
+
+Note: One of the problems with these platforms, however, is made visible in the analogy to Facebook: being venture capital-funded, the platforms are not primarily driven by scholarly goals, but rather by the necessity of returning value to investors, and to that end, everything that scholars contribute to those platforms will in the end somehow be monetized.
+
+
+
+
https://opencontext.org
+
+Note: This is not to say that monetization is in and of itself a bad thing. Publishing costs — it always has, and it always will. Even as the cost of reproduction of scholarship trends toward zero online, the cost of production — of editing, of design, of indexing, of storage and systems and platforms — remains. And someone, somewhere along the line, has got to cover those costs. Every publishing mechanism, in other words, has a business model of some sort, or has to have one, in order to survive.
+
+
+## disruption
+
+Note: So while conventional scholarly communication has gotten locked into the dominant business models of reader-pays and author-pays, online scholarly networks have begun presenting some compelling disruptions: work circulated on these networks is available world-wide, with no charge to either the reader or the author. But the business model that will allow these platforms to continue operations is still taking shape.
+
+
+## datamining
+
+Note: Will it wind up, as in the case of Facebook, author-and-reader-get-datamined-and-sold-to-third-parties, whether advertisers or others who see financial potential in these networks?
+
+
+## freemium
+
+Note: Will it wind up, as in a range of other “freemium” ventures, author-and-reader-get-free-access-to-an-impoverished-service-but-have-to-pay-to-use-the-platform’s-full-benefits?
+
+
+## acquisition
+
+Note: Or will it wind up, as we’ve seen recently happen to several other free scholarly tools, that the network is ultimately sold to a commercial publisher that uses the platform to create an increasingly locked-in research communication environment? Given the requirements that return-on-investment imposes in the venture-capital landscape, something like this is all but inevitable if the platform is to survive.
+
+
+## collectives
+
+Note: The good news is that there’s another option: scholarly collectives working in the interest of and supported and guided by a community of practice. To this point, such collectives have best been modeled by scholarly societies. Such societies of course require membership in order to receive full benefits from them, and so while they aren’t “open” in the sense that the new online networks are (permitting anyone to participate without charge), they are open in what I believe is a far more important sense: they are governed by their members, working in the interest of their members, and, ideally, transparent to their members.
+
+
+## open
+
+Note: The challenge presented by the current moment both in internet-based scholarly communication and in the increasingly precarious academic economic environment, however, is finding a way to support and sustain both kinds of openness. How can we create research communities online that invite everyone to participate, that are transparent about their governance and community-oriented in their values, and that remain both technologically and fiscally sustainable?
+
+
+## collective
+## cooperative
+## sustainable
+
+Note: What we need is a model of collective, cooperative, sustainable support for open platforms; an architecture that makes those platforms’ data not just available but interoperable, shareable, reusable; and an ethic that makes commitment to those platforms and the organizations that provide them an important element of professional belonging. It’s not just a matter of building the digital infrastructure; the key thing is really building the community that will not just use but co-create, support, and sustain the infrastructure.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Humanities Commons launched in December 2016, and it brings together an open hub with society-managed sites, permitting anyone to create an account and, if they have an active membership in one or more of the network’s participating societies, use that account to gain access to those societies’ resources as well.
+
+
+
+
+Note: That is to say, while Humanities Commons was originally imagined to serve scholarly societies and their needs for member-to-member communication, it was important to us to open up the network hub to any interested participant, regardless of their professional affiliation or status. Anyone who self-identifies as having an interest in the humanities is welcome.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Note: Humanities Commons was developed with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The network is built on the Commons In A Box platform, which is a project of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and it is in turn built on BuddyPress, a plugin for WordPress, which collectively provide an open source solution for organizations seeking rich social networking and publishing capabilities. We are thus committed not just to open communication among Humanities Commons members but also to the open-source software community, and we are contributing all our development efforts back upstream in order to help improve the platforms on which we rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All Humanities Commons members can engage in all of the network’s activities, including creating extended, CV-like profiles linking to their work on the Commons and across the web. These profiles thus enable greater access and bring greater visibility to scholars' work in a space that is professionally oriented and yet open to dialogue with the world.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Moreover, all Humanities Commons members can deposit their work – preprints, datasets, presentations, syllabi, you name it – to CORE, the repository we’ve integrated into the network, and they can share that work with the Commons communities to which they belong. We partnered with the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at the Columbia University Libraries in building CORE, which is a Fedora/Solr based repository, and we built a WordPress plugin that provides a user interface for depositing, entering metadata, discovering and sharing work there.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What’s most important about CORE is its fusion of a library-quality repository (adhering to commonly accepted metadata standards, employing digital object identifiers, and so on) with a social network — meaning that not only is stuff being put into the repository, and not only can that stuff be found there, but it’s also being actively used. Members can notify the groups to which they belong of new deposits, and users can share the work they find with other interested readers via social media.
+
+
+## public
+
+Note: This, for me, is the key thing: not just that Humanities Commons is open to all scholars, providing them with a digital presence that enables greater visibility for their work, but that it brings those scholars together, facilitating new kinds of conversations and collaborations. And even more, the network invites interested members of the public to join in. Work being shared via Humanities Commons is reaching a public, in other words, just as the network is building a public, one that has the potential to stretch across the borders of our campuses and demonstrate the impact of work in humanities to the world.
+
+
+## sustainability
+
+Note: In order to do so, though, we'll need to ensure that the network is sustainable -- by which I mean sustainable technologically as well as financially. The financial part looms large over all non-profit, community supported resources like Humanities Commons, and we expect, based on the experiences of other such projects, that we'll need to be prepared to do some significant fundraising in order to keep the project viable.
+
+
+## governance
+
+Note: But there's also a significant social aspect to sustainability. We need to ensure that the community that the network builds has an adequate voice in its future, that they are able to understand the network as a space to which they belong and as a space that belongs to them.
+
+
+## community
+
+Note: And that community aspect is crucial, the last major hurdle to genuine openness — because beyond open access, beyond sustainability, lies collective action. If the work of scholars in the 21st century is to transform the world, it has to be accessible to the world, but we also have to be part of and in full interaction with the world. Understanding community not just as an entity out there to which we do outreach, but instead as a continually shifting constellation of groups in which we participate, has the potential not just to transform scholarship but to transform our institutions. How might we draw public support back to our institutions by demonstrating the extent to which the work that we do is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public good? If the university is to win back public support, it must be prepared -- structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just its mission statement but its actual mission -- to place the public good at the top of its priorities. And that must begin with us, finding ways to do our work in and with the public.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+ Scholarly Communication
+
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+## Scholarly Communication
+### DH865 -- Spring 2018
+[Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://kfitz.msu.domains) // [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitz@msu.edu](mailto:kfitz@msu.edu)
+
+Note: This lecture is going to walk through a bunch of work that I've done over the course of the last decade-plus and the arguments that lead up to my current projects, which focus in different ways on the future of scholarly communication. I hope that we'll be able to spend some time afterward with any questions that you may have about the ways we write and publish today and how your own work might be affected. Most of my thinking is pretty inescapably shaped by my own fields, English and media studies, which are largely book-oriented, but I think there are some relationships that can be drawn to the other forms of scholarly communication that are dominant in other areas of the academy today.
+
+
+## overview
+
+1. the first book, aka the crisis
+2. blogs and networks
+3. the second book
+4. peer review
+5. scholarly communities
+
+
+
+## 1. the first book,
+## aka the crisis
+
+Note: So while much of what I'm talking about today is focused on the present and future of scholarly communication, it starts with the past, in no small part because certain aspects of the ways that humanities scholars in the US have traditionally worked are rapidly becoming obsolete. By this, however, I don’t mean to say that we are facing the imminent “death” of the book, for instance, only that certain aspects of our reliance on the book as a primary mode of scholarly communication aren’t serving us as well as they once did. In fact, the argument that I made in my first book,
+
+
+## the anxiety of obsolescence
+
+Note: The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, was precisely that the so-called
+
+
+## “death of the novel”
+
+Note: “death of the novel” much bemoaned in the late twentieth century wasn’t at all based in material fact, but was instead an ideological claim designed to ensure the novel’s continuance. This continues to be true: neither the novel nor the book more broadly, nor even print in general are in any sense dying forms, but claims of this demise are often used as a means of creating what I like to think of as a kind of
+
+
+## “cultural wildlife preserve”
+
+Note: cultural wildlife preserve, a protected space within which a form that is apparently under threat from predatory forms of newer media can flourish. I bring my first book project up in no small part because of what happened once I’d finished that manuscript. Naively, I’d assumed that publishing a book that makes the argument that the book isn’t dead wouldn’t be that hard, that somebody might have an interest in getting that argument into print. What I hadn’t counted on, though, was the effect that
+
+
+## dot-com crash
+
+Note: the first dot-com crash was having on university presses. It took me nearly a year to find a press willing to consider the project, as press after press told me how much they liked it, but that they just couldn’t afford to publish it. Finally, though, I found a willing press, and in December 2003, after the manuscript had been under review for ten months, I received an email message from the editor. The news was not good: the press was declining to publish the book. The note, which was as encouraging as a rejection can ever be, stressed that in so far as fault could be attributed, it lay not with the manuscript but with the climate; the press had received two enthusiastically positive readers’ reports, and the editor was supportive of the project. The marketing department, however, overruled him on the editorial board, declaring that the book posed
+
+
+> “too much financial risk… to pursue in the current economy.”
+
+— the marketing guys
+
+Note: “too much financial risk… to pursue in the current economy.”
+ This particular cause for rejection prompted two immediate responses, one of which was most clearly articulated by my mother, who said
+
+
+> “They were planning on making money off of your book?”
+
+— my mom
+
+Note: “they were planning on making money off of your book?” The fact is, they were — not much, perhaps, but that the press involved needed the book to make money, at least enough to return its costs, and that it doubted it would, highlights one of the most significant problems facing academic publishing today:
+
+
+## insupportable economic model
+
+Note: an insupportable economic model. To backtrack for a second: university presses in the United States were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a means of distributing the work being produced by university-based scholars, precisely because _there was no market_ for that work, and so commercial publishers refused to take it on. In order to get scholars’ work into circulation, universities had to take on the responsibility for reproducing and circulating it, often giving it away for free to other institutions’ libraries, in exchange for similar work being produced at those institutions. And yet gradually, over the course of the first half of the 20th century, university presses professionalized, becoming revenue centers on their campuses rather than service organizations. As a result, market values all but inevitably came to be applied to the circulation of scholarship — and almost from that moment, the discussion of
+
+
+## “crisis”
+
+Note: the “crisis in scholarly publishing” was born.
+ Though these problems have been building for a long time, things suddenly got much, much worse after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. During this dramatic turn in the stock market, when many US university budgets took a nosedive (a situation that 2008 made to seem like mere foreshadowing), among the academic units whose budgets took the hardest hits were
+
+
+## university presses and university libraries
+
+Note: university presses and university libraries. And the cuts in funding for libraries represented a further budget cut for presses, as numerous libraries, already straining under
+
+
+## rising cost of journals
+
+Note: the exponentially rising costs of journals, especially in the sciences, managed the cutbacks by reducing the number of books they purchased. The result for many university library users was perhaps only a slightly longer wait to obtain any book they needed, as libraries increasingly turned to collection-sharing arrangements, but the result for presses was devastating. For a university press of the caliber of, say, Harvard’s, the expectation for decades was that they could count on every library in the University of California system buying a copy of each title they published. After 2001, however, the rule increasingly became such that one library in the system would buy that title - and today even that’s not a certainty, given systems of demand-driven acquisition being implemented at many libraries. This has happened with every system around the country, such that by 2004, sales of monographs to libraries had already fallen to less than
+
+
+## one-third
+
+Note: one-third of what they had been in the previous decade — and again, that was in 2004, a full fourteen years of crisis ago. So library cutbacks resulted in vastly reduced sales for university presses, at precisely the moment when severe cutbacks in the percentage of university press budgets
+
+
+## subsidies
+
+Note: provided through institutional subsidies have made those presses dependent on income from sales for their survival. (The average university press receives well under 10% of its annual budget from its institution, and must make up the rest with revenue from sales.) It’s for this reason, among others, that I have argued that the financial model under which university press publishing operates is simply not sustainable into the future. A foretaste of a likely future has been visible for a while now, as a number of presses have been shut down by their institutions -- the University of Kentucky's press is the most recent to be threatened with being closed -- and nearly all of those that have survived
+
+
+## reduced number of titles published
+
+Note: have been required to reduce the number of titles that they publish each year, especially in smaller fields, and as
+
+
+## marketing
+
+Note: marketing concerns have come at times, of necessity, to compete with scholarly merit in making publication decisions.
+ In my case, things turned out fine; the book got picked up (if only well over a year later) by a smaller press, one with more modest sales expectations, and the book managed to exceed those expectations - as well, ironically, as the requirements of the first press. But despite the fact that The Anxiety of Obsolescence was, finally, successfully published, my experience of the crisis in academic publishing led me to begin rethinking my earlier argument that the book wasn’t an endangered species. Perhaps there is a particular form of book —
+
+
+## the academic book
+
+Note: the academic book — that is indeed threatened with a kind of obsolescence. Even so, this is not to say that the academic book is dead. These books are still published, after all, if not exactly in the numbers they might need to be in order to satisfy all our hiring and tenure requirements, and they still sell, if not exactly in the numbers required to support the presses that put them out. The academic book is, however, in a curious state, one that might usefully complicate conventional associations of obsolescence with the “death” of this or that cultural form, for while the academic book is
+
+
+## no longer viable, but still required
+
+Note: no longer viable as a primary means of scholarly communication, it is still required in many fields in the US in order to obtain tenure. If anything, the academic book isn’t dead; it's kind of
+
+
+## undead
+
+Note: undead, exercising power over the ways we work without really, truly, being alive. There's a sort of zombie logic to the academic book, which begins to make a particular kind of sense if you consider the extensive scholarship in media studies on the figure of the zombie,
+
+
+
+
+Note: which is often understood to act as a stand-in for the narcotized subject of capitalism, particularly at those moments when capitalism’s contradictions become most apparent. If there is a relationship between the zombie and the subject of late capital, the cultural anxiety that figure marks has been, of late, off the charts.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Zombies are everywhere for a reason, and not least within the academy, as we not only find our ways of communicating increasingly threatened with a sort of death-in-life,
+
+
+## death-in-livelihood
+
+Note: but also find our livelihoods themselves decreasingly lively, as the liberal arts are overtaken by the study of ostensibly more pragmatic fields, as a growing culture of assessment requires us to spend more time accounting for our work and less actually doing the work itself, as tenure-track faculty lines in US institutions are rapidly being replaced with more contingent forms of labor, and as too many newly-minted PhDs are finding themselves without the job opportunities they need to survive.
+
+
+## really?
+
+Note: Just to be clear: I am not suggesting that the future survival of the academy requires us to put academic publishing safely in its grave. But I'm not being wholly facetious either, as I do want to indicate that certain aspects of scholarly communication today are neither quite as alive as we'd like them to be, nor quite as dead as might be most convenient. Because, honestly, we'd probably do just fine if the book were actually dead; we'd turn our attention to ensuring that new forms of scholarly communication were as powerful and vibrant as they could be, rather than continuing to fetishize one particular shape.
+
+
+
+## 2. blogs and networks
+
+Note: For instance, we might more fully explore the potentials presented for scholarship by blogs and other personally-hosted or networked writing platforms. I suggest this in no small part because while I was finishing the manuscript for my first book, I found myself getting antsy. No one was reading my work, and I really wanted to get some thoughts in front of readers. And in a fit of procrastination one day in 2002, I was googling some old friends from grad school, and discovered that one of them had an amazing blog. It was smart, it was funny, and I knew that people were reading it because they responded to his posts in the comments.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So I started a blog. Though it didn't look so much like this at the time.
+
+
+
+
+Note: It looked more like this. Not fancy at all, and somewhat off the official pathway that was laid out for my scholarly work, but it allowed me to
+
+
+1. Write more frequently
+2. Get faster responses
+3. Build a community
+
+
+## conversations
+
+Note: And that community was key. Some of what the blog produced for me looked a lot like conversations with friends; in fact, some of my best friends today were folks that I stumbled across in blog-land, including the Wordherders, a blogging collective run by an English grad student out of the University of Maryland. Conversations with that cluster of folks were key to most of the work that I did in the ensuing years. (Incidentally, that grad student was Jason Rhody, who went on to be one of the founding program officers in the Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH.)
+
+
+## ephemerality
+
+Note: One of the ironies of the impact that blogging had on the development of my career, especially given that I was writing about obsolescence, is the blog's almost perfectly ephemeral form: each post scrolls down the front page and off into the archives — and yet, the apparent ephemerality of the blog post also has a surprising
+
+
+## durability
+
+Note: durability, thanks the technologies of searching, filtering, and archiving that have developed across the web, as well as to the networked conversations that keep the archives in play. Blogs do die, often when their authors stop posting, sometimes when their authors fail to renew their domain names. But even when apparently dead, a blog persists, in archives and caches, and continues to draw readers in through old links and search engines. A form of obsolescence may be engineered into a blog’s architecture, but this ephemerality is misleading; our interactions with blogs keep them alive long after they’ve apparently died.
+
+
+## obsolescence
+
+Note: So I found myself thinking a lot about the differences between the apparent ephemerality of the blog and the possible obsolescence of the academic book, and what that meant. It's not so much that the book as a material form is becoming obsolete, after all, as it is that something in the ways we produce and disseminate the content that circulates in book form that is ceasing to function as well as it should.
+
+
+## institutional
+
+Note: It's an institutional problem, in other words. I mentioned earlier that the message I’d received from that press, declining my book on financial grounds, produced two immediate responses. The first was my mother’s bewildered disbelief; the second came from my Wordherder friend Matt Kirschenbaum, who left a comment on a blog post of mine saying that he couldn't understand why I couldn’t simply take the manuscript and the two positive readers’ reports and put the whole thing online — voilà: peer-reviewed publication — where it would likely garner a readership both wider and larger than the same manuscript in print would.
+
+
+
+
+Note: “In fact I completely understand why that’s not realistic,” he went on to say, “and I’m not seriously advocating it. Nor am I suggesting that we all become our own online publishers, at least not unless that’s part of a continuum of different options. But the point is, the system’s broken and it’s time we got busy fixing it. What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered.”
+ This exchange with Matt, and a number of other conversations that I had on the blog, persuaded me to stop thinking about
+
+
+## scholarly publishing
+
+Note: scholarly publishing as a system that would simply bring my work into being, and instead approach it as the object of that work, thinking seriously about both the institutional models and the material forms through which scholarship might best circulate. So I started noodling online about the possibility of founding an all-electronic scholarly press,
+
+
+
+
+Note: including writing a guest post on The Valve, then a widely-read group blog in literary studies. It seemed clear to me that we couldn't just change the technologies through which we publish and allow everything else to stay the same; in fact, we needed a deep rethinking of the processes through which the academy tenures its faculty, of the ways those faculty do their work, the ways they communicate that work, and the ways that work is read both inside and outside the academy. Those changes had to be both social and institutional. Creating the possibility for such change became the focus of a cascading series of projects that I began work on then, all of which were aimed at creating the kinds of change I think necessary for the survival of scholarly communication in the humanities into the twenty-first century.
+
+
+## mediacommons
+
+Note: The first of these was MediaCommons, an early digital scholarly publishing network focused on media studies, which my colleague Avi Santo and I co-founded with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book, the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, and the NYU Digital Library Technology Services group.
+
+
+
+
+Note: MediaCommons has worked over the last ten years to become a space in which the multiplicity of conversations in and about media studies taking place online can be brought together, through a range of projects that experiment with the form, the weight, and the time signature of scholarly communication.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The longest-running of these projects is In Media Res, which asks five scholars a week to comment briefly on some up-to-the-minute media text as a means of opening discussion about the issues it presents for media scholars, students, practitioners, and activists.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And our most recent project, inTransition, is a collaboration with Cinema Journal featuring videographic film criticism — video essays, that is, that make use of the form in thinking about the form.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But one of our key interests in building MediaCommons was thinking about the social connections it could promote among scholars in the field, getting those scholars in communication with one another, discussing and possibly collaborating on their work. To that end, we focused the platform around a peer network that enables scholars to use their profiles to gather together the writing they’re doing across the web and to provide citations for offline work, creating a digital portfolio that provides a snapshot of their scholarly identities.
+
+
+## 3. the second book
+
+Note: However, working on this project taught me several things that I sort of knew already, but hadn’t fully internalized, one of which is that any software development project will inevitably take far longer than you could possibly predict at the outset, and the second, and most important, is that no matter how slowly such software development projects move, the rate of change within the academy is positively glacial in comparison. And if I was going to make that change, I had to meet the academy where it was, and write another book.
+
+
+
+
+Note: That book is Planned Obsolescence, which yes, I named after my blog. There had been several other books about the digital future of scholarship published in the preceding years, but most of them failed to fully account for the fundamentally conservative nature of academic institutions in the US and of the academics that comprise them. In the main, we are extraordinarily resistant to change in our ways of working; it is not without reason that a senior colleague once joked to me that the motto of my institution (one that might usefully be extended to the academy as a whole) could well be
+
+
+## “we have never done it that way before”
+
+Note: “we have never done it that way before.” Or, as Donald Hall has put it,
+
+
+> “While we are very adept at discussing the texts of novels, plays, poems, film, advertising, and even television shows, we are usually very reticent, if not wholly unwilling, to examine the textuality of our own profession, its scripts, values, biases, and behavioral norms.”
+
+— Donald Hall
+
+Note: scholars often resist applying the critical skills that we bring to our subject matter to an examination of “the textuality of our own profession, its scripts, values, biases, and behavioral norms” (Hall xiv). This kind of
+
+
+## self-criticism
+
+Note: self-criticism doesn't come naturally to those of us who have been privileged enough to succeed within the existing system -- for us, at least, things seem to work perfectly well. But for others, of course, maybe less so, and so changing our ways of doing research, our modes of production and distribution of the results of that research, may well be crucial to the continued vitality of the academy —
+
+
+## change
+
+Note: and yet none of those changes can possibly come about unless there is first a profound change in the ways of thinking of scholars themselves. Until scholars really believe that publishing in new forms is as valuable as publishing in conventional ways — and more importantly, until they believe that their institutions believe it, too — few will be willing to risk their careers on a new way of working, with the result that that new way of working will remain marginal, undervalued, and risky.
+ So Planned Obsolescence focused not on just the set of technological changes necessary to allow academic publishing to flourish into the future, but
+
+
+## social
+## intellectual
+## institutional
+
+Note: the social, intellectual, and institutional changes that these new technologies require. In order for new modes of communication to become broadly accepted within the academy, scholars and their institutions must take a new look at the mission of the university, the goals of scholarly publishing, and the processes through which scholars conduct their work.
+
+
+
+## 4. peer review
+
+Note: And it’s the structures of peer review that I argue we need to begin with, because peer review is in some sense the sine qua non of the academy. We employ it in almost every aspect of the ways that we work, from hiring decisions through promotion and tenure reviews, in both internal and external grant and fellowship competitions, and, of course, in publishing. The work we do as scholars is repeatedly subjected to a series of vetting processes that enable us to indicate that the results of our work have been scrutinized by authorities in the field, and that those results are therefore themselves authoritative.
+
+
+## but
+
+Note: But I also want to suggest that the current system of peer review is in fact part of what’s broken. There’s a rather extraordinary literature available, mostly in the sciences and social sciences, on the problems with conventional peer review, including its biases and its flaws. Everyone I know has had direct, personal experience of those flaws — the review that misses the point, the review that must be personally motivated, or perhaps worst, the review that we never even get to see. And for such an imperfect system, peer review as we know it requires an astonishing amount of labor on our part, for which we can never receive “credit.” And so when Matt Kirschenbaum says that
+
+
+
+
+Note: "what ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit," I agree, but at the same time feel quite strongly that the system of peer review that we know today could be vastly improved — particularly in a networked environment. The placement of peer review prior to selection for publication in the traditional print-based process indicates that it serves a largely
+
+
+## gatekeeping
+
+Note: gatekeeping function, one that allows certain kinds of academic discourse to thrive while other kinds are excluded. This kind of gatekeeping is arguably necessary in print, in order to cope with the scarcities of print’s economics — only so many pages, in so many books and journals, can be published each year. In the digital, however, this kind of scarcity is over. Because anyone can publishing anything online — and, from a perspective that values the free and open communication of the products of scholarly research, not only can but should — we face instead a overwhelming plenitude. And as we've seen in the last year, that plenitude can lead to a lot of crap in the system. But what we need to develop is not a means of applying the current system of peer review to new modes of online work in order to
+
+
+## create artificial scarcity
+
+Note: create artificial scarcity and keep the crap out, but instead a net-native system that can help us to
+
+
+## cope with abundance
+
+Note: cope with abundance. As it is, increasing numbers of scholars are either self-publishing their work via their blogs or are sharing work through a number of online scholarly networks, and in many cases, these publications are having a greater
+
+
+## impact
+
+Note: impact than their traditional peer-reviewed publications are. It’s certainly true in my case: all of my first citations, lecture invitations, and other forms of public recognition stemmed not from my journal articles or my book, but from the work I was doing on my blog. But of course these new modes of publishing demand some kind of assessment, even if that assessment comes after the fact. For that reason, peer review online might fruitfully include
+
+
+## post-publication
+
+Note: an open, post-publication means of review that doesn’t determine whether a text should be published (after all, the stuff is already out there) but rather represents how it has been (and how it should be) received, what its place in the ecosystem of scholarly communication is, and what kinds of responses it has provoked. Such a system would shift the center of gravity of peer review for online scholarship from gatekeeping
+
+
+## conversations
+
+Note: to facilitating more fluid and productive conversations amongst peers — and, not at all incidentally, a system in which the work of reviewing itself becomes visible as work, and the reviews themselves become part of the scholarly record. We might think of this as a system of
+
+
+## “peer-to-peer review”
+
+Note: “peer-to-peer review,” one that focuses on providing a post-publication mode of filtering the wealth of content that is shared online. After all,
+
+
+## filters
+
+Note: we need those filters, because despite what I said earlier, scarcity does linger in internet-based communication — it’s just that, for the most part, what has become scarce is time and attention, rather than the materials of production. So we need systems that allow a community of scholars working with and responding to one another to guide one another to the best work being produced in their fields.
+
+
+
+
+Note: In order to put my money (at least metaphorically) where my mouth was, I put the entire draft of Planned Obsolescence online for open review in 2009. The primary benefit of this process for me was the conversations that it inspired: not only was I able to get more feedback, from more readers, but I was able to see those readers arguing with one another about the text. It also created an advance interest in the book, which wound up selling way better than the press expected, despite the manuscript being openly available.
+
+
+## open questions
+
+Note: But the project opened up a lot of questions about scholarly communication that remain only partially resolved, questions including
+
+
+## authorship
+
+Note: the ways that the nature of authorship is changing in the wake of the digital, both because our attention is gradually shifting from a strict focus on
+
+
+## products to processes
+
+Note: the production and dissemination of individual products (like a book or an article) to a broader focus on facilitating the processes of scholarly work.
+
+
+## individual to collective
+
+Note: Our attention is also gradually shifting from the individual to the collective in that work, as our networked processes start to surface the inevitably, if often hidden, collaborations involved in all scholarship.
+
+
+
+## 5. scholarly communities
+
+Note: And this is how my current projects come about, as I work, on the one hand, on ways of building and facilitating the development of scholarly communities, and on the other hand, as I think about the ways of thinking -- the core values and principles -- that those communities require in order to thrive.
+
+
+
+http://generousthinking.hcommons.org
+
+Note: That latter project is my new book, Generous Thinking, which I'm once again putting through an open peer review process. I'm staging the review process a little differently this time, first inviting a group of about 40 readers -- my scholarly community -- to engage with the manuscript, and then opening it to the world. Comments remain open until the end of March, after which time I'll start revising.
+
+
+
+http://hcommons.org
+
+Note: The other project is Humanities Commons, which is the platform on which I'm hosting the review process. Humanities Commons is an open-access, open-source, not-for-profit network for scholars and practitioners across the humanities. We originally started developing the project during my time working at the Modern Language Association as a means of facilitating communication among MLA members, but in December 2016, we launched Humanities Commons as a way of creating collaborations across fields. Humanities Commons offers a wide range of ways for scholars to participate in group discussions, to create new collaborations, to develop a professional profile online, and to share their work with one another and with the world.
+
+
+## scholarly communication lab
+
+Note: So Humanities Commons is part social network, part blogging network, and part disciplinary repository. But in the background, we're thinking of it as a kind of lab space within which scholars, librarians, publishers, and many other humanities practitioners can experiment with the future of scholarly communication, helping figure out what formats and modes of engagement create the best possible work today. If you don't have an account there, I hope you'll do some exploring and think about creating one. And I'd of course be happy to help with that, or to answer any questions you might have.
+
+
+
+## 6. etc.
+
+Note: There are a lot of issues that I haven't really talked about today, including the importance of (and challenges around) open access, the changing business models of scholarly publishing, the role of and problems with disruptive networks like academia.edu, and so on. But perhaps I can leave things there and we can see where your thinking is headed?
+
+
+
+# thanks.
+[Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://kfitz.msu.domains) // [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitz@msu.edu](mailto:kfitz@msu.edu)
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+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Toward a More Generous University
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thanks; happy to be here.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what follows builds on the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be understood as evidence that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. We find ourselves in a situation today, however, in which both of those paradigms are failing, if in different ways, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
+
+
+## generous thinking
+
+Note: My overall argument is that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It's going to require concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+## listening
+
+Note: So I ask us to think about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. This begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+## reading together
+
+Note: I also explore ways that our critical reading practices could be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+## working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged projects, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and public engagement. And this needs to begin with our engagement with one another on campus, and perhaps especially our engagement with our students.
+
+
+## students
+
+Note: Our students, after all, are our first and most important point of contact with the publics we serve. Our students come to us from a very wide range of backgrounds and with a very wide range of interests. Ensuring that we connect with them, that we work with them in creating the university's future, is job one. But I want to suggest that some of our students are learning habits of mind from us that ultimately work to undermine the future that we want to build.
+
+
+## seminar
+
+Note: My thinking in this project had several points of inception over the years, one of which was a moment in a graduate seminar I taught years ago, a moment that has come to feel emblematic of the situation of the contemporary university. I want to preface the story by saying that I offer it not as an indictment of the kids today, but rather of the m.o. of higher education since the last decades of the 20th century. So here's the scene: the seminar is in cultural studies, and is meant to provide an overview of some current questions in critical theory. I do not now remember what article it was we'd read for that class session, but I opened our discussion by asking for first responses. And three students in a row issued withering takedowns of the article, pointing to the author's methodological flaws and ideological weaknesses. After the third, I said okay, that's all important and I definitely want to dig into it, but let's back up a bit: what is the author's argument here? What is she trying to accomplish?
+
+
+## silence
+
+Note: Nothing. "It's not a trick question," I said. "What is this article about?" Now, I was a fair bit younger and less sure of myself at that point, and I immediately began wondering whether I'd asked a stupid question, whether the sudden failure to meet my gaze was a sign that I, like the author, was now being dismissed as having pedestrian interest in neoliberal forms of meaning-making that demonstrated my complicity with the systems of oppression within which I worked. But it gradually dawned on me that the problem with the question wasn't its stupidity but its unfamiliarity. The students were prepared to dismantle the argument, but not to examine how it was built.
+
+
+## they say / i say
+
+Note: The students in this seminar, like so many of us, had learned all too well the lessons of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's _They Say, I Say_: that the key move in academic argumentation is from what others have previously said to one's own -- almost always contrasting, and inevitably more interesting or correct -- contribution. That is to say, that the goal of critical thinking is to expose the flawed arguments of others in order to demonstrate the inherent rightness of our own.
+
+
+## conversation
+
+Note: The larger point that Graff and Birkenstein make in _They Say, I Say_ is a good and important one: that scholarship proceeds through conversation, and thus that scholarly argument begins with engaging with what others have said and then develops through one's own individual contribution to the discussion. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first part is that we are -- and when I say we, I mean human beings at this hour of the world -- we are by and large TERRIBLE at conversation. Witness any set of talking heads on television, or any Thanksgiving dinner table, or any department meeting: more often than not, we spend the time when other people are talking waiting for our own turn to speak, and we take what's being said to us mostly as a means of formulating our own response. We do not genuinely *listen*, but instead *react*. And the same is too often true of scholarly conversation: the primary purpose of engaging with what "they" have said is to get to the important bit -- what I am saying.
+
+
+## individualism
+
+Note: That's the first problem. The second is the assumption that what I am saying, my own individual contribution to the discussion, is genuinely individual, that it is my own. In no small part this stems from the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university -- an orientation inseparable from the individualism of the surrounding culture -- in which the entire institutional reward structure, including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and every other form of merit is determined by what I individually have done. Every tub sits on its own bottom, in other words, and if I am to succeed it must be based on my own individual accomplishments.
+
+
+## zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. We all find ourselves in an environment in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time.
+
+
+## competitive thinking
+
+Note: As a result, the mode of conversation promoted by _They Say, I Say_ has become less about the most important forms of critical thinking on which our work focuses -- engaging with what has been said before us and adding to the discussion -- than about competitive thinking. Competitive thinking is a hyperindividualistic mode of debate that suggests that we are in an endless struggle with one another, in which there is only room for so much success, for so much attention. In competitive thinking, the quest for academic and professional success requires us to defend our own positions, and attack others. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+## institutions
+
+Note: This analysis of course applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the institutional reward structures within which we operate privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions separate themselves from quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that we'll likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more productive.
+
+
+## teaching
+
+Note: But in the meantime, one of the places where we can begin to create a new ethos and transform the values that structure our institutions is in teaching. This is not to say that such transformation will be easy. We are working within a system that instills these notions of competition and individual achievement earlier and earlier, of course, as students come to us from elementary and secondary institutions increasingly structured around testing. Perhaps students aren't competing directly against one another in the moment of testing, but they are nonetheless being inculcated into at least two of competitive thinking's underpinnings: the responsibility of the individual for demonstrating mastery, and the significant consequences of being wrong.
+
+
+## wrong
+
+Note: And perhaps it's here that we see the origins of at least some of our students' -- and our -- terror of being wrong. Wrong means failure. Wrong brings shame. But wrong is inevitable, a horrible thought. And so if we can't avoid being wrong, we can certainly refuse to acknowledge when we're wrong; as Kathryn Schulz has explored, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid recognizing their wrongness. But of course there is no real thinking without the possibility of being wrong. Without being willing to be wrong, we can't hypothesize, we can't experiment, we can't create. We can't imagine new possibilities. We can't dream. But we are hard-wired not to admit the possibility that we might be wrong.
+
+
+## you're wrong
+
+Note: And one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong -- and again, by "we" here, I mean both to point to academics in particular and to humans living at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century in general -- again, one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong is by demonstrating the inherent wrongness in everyone else's ideas. In the academy, and perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, this takes the form of critique: if I can demonstrate what's wrong with your ideas, it must mean that my ideas are better.
+
+
+## critique
+
+Note: This is the upshot of _They Say, I Say_, and it's what leads to the situation I faced in my graduate seminar: we have armed our students with all the most important tools of critique. They are ready to unpack and dismantle. They are well-trained, that is to say, in playing what Peter Elbow once referred to as the doubting game, in which they focus on the parts of an idea that could be wrong and what it might mean if they were. But they have -- and if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we all have -- a tendency to skip the half of the game that's supposed to come first: the believing game, in which we focus on what it might mean if the idea were right. The m.o. of _They Say, I Say_, in other words, encourages us to dismiss what "they say" as quickly as possible, in order to get on to the more crucial "I say," the part for which we will actually get credit.
+
+
+## critical thinking
+
+Note: I want to be clear here: there is a LOT of what "they say" that in fact should be pushed back against. There's a lot out there worth doubting. I'm not asking us not to disagree, not to push new ideas forward, not to think critically. I am, however, hoping that we might find ways to remember that critical thinking requires deep understanding and even generosity as a prerequisite.
+
+
+## generosity
+
+Note: So what I want to ask this morning is what we and our students might gain from slowing the process down a bit, from emphasizing the believing game before leaping to the doubting game, from lingering a bit longer in the "they say." We might, just as a start, find that we all become better listeners. We might open up new ground for mutual understanding, even with those with whom we most disagree.
+
+
+## we say
+
+Note: And we might find ourselves moving less from "they say" to "I say" than instead to "we say," thinking additively and collaboratively about what we might build together rather than understanding our own ideas to require vanquishing everyone else's. We might, as Lakoff and Johnson have suggested, move away from understanding argument through the metaphor of war and instead think of it as a dance, in which two creative individuals come together to produce something that neither could do alone.
+
+
+## asset
+
+Note: We might learn from theories of community engaged scholarship which, as my colleague Burt Bargerstock has told me, have recognized the damage that a deficit model of engagement has produced -- saying to the community, in effect, you have a problem and we're here to fix it -- and instead focus on an asset model: your community has these strengths, and we as scholars have these others, and together we might do something remarkable.
+
+
+## improv
+
+Note: Or we might think of ways that the work that we do together in the classroom could learn from improvisational comedy, which operates within an ethos of "yes, and." Saying "no" to an improv partner can derail a scene in progress; contradicting what's already happened in order to go a different direction fragments the scenario and shuts down possibility. "Yes, and" instead builds on what's been established, even if in order to go somewhere entirely new.
+
+
+## generous university
+
+Note: All of these models begin to suggest what a more generous university might look like, one based on building something collective rather than tearing down our predecessors in order to promote our own ideas. Generosity might help us frame ways of thinking that focus on higher education as a means of fostering community rather than providing individual benefit. And this is key to the future of the university: we have to find our way back to an understanding of the university's work as grounded in service to a broadly construed public, and that requires all of us -- faculty, students, staff, administrators, trustees -- reframing the good that higher education provides as a social good, a collective and communal good, rather than a personal, private, individual one.
+
+
+## generous assessment
+
+Note: Of course, if we are really going to effect this transformation -- what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about the values that underwrite higher education -- we're going to have to think differently about how we measure our success as well. About what success means in the first place. If we're going to move away from the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom, hyper individualistic, competitive mode of achievement, in which all outcomes are understood to be individual and are therefore assessed at that level, and instead foster more collective goals, we're going to need to think carefully about what we're assessing and why. How might we instead focus our modes of assessment at all levels, and the rewards that follow, on collaboration, on process?
+
+
+## us
+
+Note: And that's of course not just about assessing our students; it's about our own professional reviews and evaluations as well. We need to think seriously about, and to press our institutions on, ways that all of the processes that structure our professional lives -- not least our processes of hiring, of retention, of tenure and promotion -- might help to instantiate the values we want to bring to the work we do, rather than fostering the culture of competition, of invidious distinction, that colors all of the ways that we work today.
+
+
+## critique
+
+Note: One cautionary note, however: I do not mean this emphasis on generosity, on a supportive engagement with the work that has gone before us, to be used as a means of defusing the important work that critique actually does in helping make ideas better. In the early days of working on _Generous Thinking_, I gave an invited talk in which I tested out some of its core ideas. In the Q-and-A that followed, one commenter pointed out what he saw as a canny move on my part in talking about generosity: no one wanted to be seen as an ungenerous jerk in disagreeing with me. It was a funny moment, but it gave me real pause; I did not at all intend to use generosity as a shield with which to fend off the possibility of critique. Generosity, in fact, requires remaining open to criticism -- in fact, it requires recognizing the generous purposes that critique can serve. So in pressing for more generous modes of working, I do not mean to impose a regime that is all rainbows and unicorns on us. Instead, what I'm hoping to ask is how we might all benefit from thinking *with* rather than *against* one another in developing the knowledge that might make all of us better contributors to the social good.
+
+
+## questions
+
+Note: I've asked a lot of questions about what we might do and how it might work, and I'm not sure how many answers I have for them. In part, that's by design: the problems facing the university today are larger and more complicated than can be solved by any one mind working alone. They're going to require all of us, thinking together, building one one another's ideas, in order to create something new. And so I'm going to stop here, in the hopes that we might use our discussion period to move from what *I say* to what *we say.* I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we might encourage more generous ways of being across the university.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
+
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+ Sustainability and Solidarity
+
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+
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+## Sustainability and Solidarity
+---
+### Toward a Common Good
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start today by thanking the conference organizing team for inviting me to join you here today. I'm really looking forward to the conversations that develop over the course of things. I've done a fair bit of thinking and writing about obsolescence over the years, and while I've gradually moved away from that work -- in fact, I'm about to publish my first book that does NOT have "obsolescence" in the title -- I'm glad to have the opportunity to revisit some of that thinking from a slightly different angle, which has surfaced some connections for me that I wasn't fully aware of.
+
+
+
+
+Note: In my first book, the obsolescence that I explored was something of an ideological construct. The declaration of the novel's obsolescence in the age of television, that is to say, was thus neither a material fact nor even a cultural likelihood, but rather a position assumed by a subset of late-twentieth century American novelists as a means of shoring up their priority in an era of proliferating and competing media forms.
+
+
+
+
+Note: In my second book, which turned from thinking about the state of contemporary American fiction to thinking about the state of contemporary scholarly communication, the notion of obsolescence with which I dealt was a bit more ambiguous. New internet-based communication practices were highlighting the somewhat dated ways in which scholars conventionally disseminate their work, and those practices bore some careful examination if they were to keep up with and even take advantage of the networks through which that work was increasingly beginning to move and create interaction.
+
+
+
+
+Note: In both cases, the seemingly obsolete object -- the novel, or the scholarly monograph -- continues along just fine, because there's no real threat to the former and because the latter still serves some key purposes for its audience, even if that audience is shrinking. The novel renews itself even as it stays the same, and the scholarly monograph is being reinvented by a number of presses that are experimenting with new, open, interactive platforms that allow it to do its work in net-native ways.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Though the new book, which will be out early next year, doesn't mention obsolescence at all, it actually deals with what is coming to seem a far more threatened object: the university as we once knew it, and especially the American public university that served in the middle of the twentieth century as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed reported just this week as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be understood as evidence that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. The crisis in higher education today stems both from the incommensurability of these two paradigms and from the fact that _both of them are failing_, if in different ways.
+
+
+## Thomas Kuhn
+
+Note: As Thomas Kuhn noted in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, the failure of a scientific paradigm, as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account, throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely, one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the "period of pronounced professional insecurity" that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift, the cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. And my argument is that we are desperately in need of such a paradigm shift if higher education as we want it to be is to survive.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The book explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education -- faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more -- to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead focus on the university's role in building community.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So some of my thoughts here today grow out of this aspect of _Generous Thinking_, but some stem more pragmatically from my work over the last several years on _Humanities Commons_, which is a non-profit, community-developed and governed network serving humanities scholars and organizations.
+
+
+## public
+
+Note: Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of _Generous Thinking_: first, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has not just overtaken them, but that threatens them with a very real and all too material obsolescence, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation can allow universities to build the kind of community that can sustain them.
+
+
+## community-supported infrastructure
+
+Note: And part of resisting privatization, for both scholars and their institutions, involves turning away from some of the commercial systems on which we have been led to rely. For scholars, this involves finding open, nonprofit, academy-led alternatives to the venture-capital funded services like academia dot edu and research gate, as well as refusing to donate our labor to corporate entities that profit at the academy's expense. For our institutions, this move requires not just finding those alternative systems for knowledge production and dissemination but in fact supporting them, focusing on the collaborative development of the shared, publicly oriented systems that might better serve the academy's needs. Such systems -- community supported and academy owned -- might set the stage for new modes of open knowledge sharing, and might help higher education return to its mission of public service. But developing this form of community-supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it, and the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable, and that's the project I have ahead.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Though the issues that I'm discussing long predate this particular moment, they came into stark visibility in August 2017, when bepress, a company that provided a rich suite of publishing and repository tools used widely by college and university libraries, announced that it had been purchased by the RELX Group, the multi-national parent company of publishing behemoth Elsevier.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Why was this a big deal? Bepress, originally known as the Berkeley Electronic Press, was established in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open-access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. Bepress thus grew out of the academy, and was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at its heart.
+
+
+
+
+Note: As the bepress website notes, over 500 institutions have purchased bepress services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly-accessible ways. And in one fell swoop, these 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing behemoths such as Elsevier.
+
+
+
+
+Note: The reaction among libraries was swift and clear: this was not what they'd signed on for. What had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure -- built and run by academics, for the academic community -- had been turned on them. That isn't to say that librarians had been unaware that bepress was a commercial service all along, but they'd calculated its costs against the often impossible task of maintaining their own repository and publishing systems, and decided that it was worth it. Bepress provided what many saw as best-of-breed functionality at a reasonable price, and it supported libraries' desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But the acquisition of bepress by Elsevier not only put libraries in the position of supporting a growing corporate monopoly not just on scholarly publishing but on the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery through production to communication; it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely for collecting and disseminating the work they're doing to promote greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. As a result, several libraries, led by Penn, began investigating a move to "beprexit," hoping to leave the platform behind in favor of open-source, academy-owned and controlled infrastructure.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is not an impossible move, by any stretch, but it's harder than it might at first appear. There are several long-standing open access, open infrastructure projects that we might learn from, including arxiv.org, the pre-print server serving physics, math, and several related fields. ArXiv was founded in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; when Ginsparg took an appointment at Cornell in 2001, arXiv moved with him, where it was hosted and supported by the Cornell University Library.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Over the years, use of arXiv vastly accelerated, resulting in significant pressure on the system's storage, bandwidth, and other aspects of its infrastructure. And while the library was committed to sustaining what had come to be a crucial, paradigm-shifting project in scholarly communication, it was becoming increasingly difficult to do so on their own.
+
+
+
+
+Note: In 2011, facing not just growing annual operating costs -- which were about 500,000 dollars then, and are approaching 1.2 million dollars today -- but also a mounting technical debt (as that budget was entirely devoted to day-to-day maintenance and management, and not upgrades or future development), the arXiv team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This model has largely been successful but has required active investment in the kinds of community-building to which our institutions are largely unaccustomed, another form of labor on top of maintaining the system itself. ArXiv has recently announced that it will in January be moving from the Library to Cornell Computing and Information Science, which will take a strong role in guiding the project's technical development, but the challenges of maintaining a coalition will remain.
+
+
+
+
+Note: We might find another example, with a quite different narrative, in the Samvera project. Samvera is an open-source repository platform being developed collaboratively by the library community, focusing precisely on the need for alternatives to commercial products like bepress. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories rely, developers at a number of institutions have come together to create a collective solution. As the proverb and their website have it, if you want to go far, go together.
+
+
+
+
+Note: That is not to say that this distributed developer community hasn't faced significant challenges in coordination, challenges that have caused it, as the proverb also reminds us, to go more slowly than it might. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers but of the institutions for which the developers actually work to this shared project is not a simple matter.
+
+
+# sustainability
+
+Note: The foundation of the challenges that both arXiv and Samvera have faced is similar, though it has manifested differently. And it's the fundamental challenge faced by any number of projects and programs and initiatives: sustainability. This is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late, as my colleagues and I have been working to ensure that Humanities Commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And those attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point; they too would like to see the network thrive, but they cannot support it indefinitely. We need, they reasonably suggest, a plan for demonstrating that the network will, at some point in the future, be able to support itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models, in business plans, in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a non-profit entity forever tied to the economic and, as a result, forever precarious. One small miscalculation can make the difference between survival and collapse.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But sustainability extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed -- or more waste produced -- than can be developed or managed in the near term.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There's technological sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects' future stability and growth.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All of these forms of sustainability are important, to varying degrees, to providing for the future of non-profit and open-source projects. But there's another form that gets a good bit less attention, and that I increasingly think precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability: social sustainability. The social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Ensuring that these commitments are sustained is, I increasingly think, a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward.
+
+
+# community
+
+Note: This notion -- of the role of "community" in community-supported software, and of the best ways of building and sustaining it -- raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. As Miranda Joseph argues in _Against the Romance of Community_, the concept is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life, a set of ostensibly organic felt relationships that harken back to a mythical premodern moment in which people lived and worked in direct connection with one another, without the mediating forces of modern capitalism.
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: "Community" is in this sense, in Benedict Anderson's sense, an imagined relationship, and even an imaginary one, as its invocation is designed to yoke together bodies whose existence as a group is largely constructed. It's a concept often used both idealistically and as a form of discipline, a claim of unity that smooths over and thus suppresses internal difference and disagreement. And, as Joseph points out, the notion of community is often deployed as if the relationships that it describes could provide an antidote to or an escape from the problems created by contemporary political and economic life. But this suggestion serves to distract us from the supplementary role that community in fact actually serves with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network–based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises, rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education. "Community" becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So it's important to be careful in issuing calls to build community: such calls, issued uncritically, not only run the risk of enabling the institutions that structure contemporary life to absolve themselves of responsibility for public care, but they also risk essentializing a highly complex and intersectional set of social relations, treating those relations as if they were a simple, single thing. At the same time, though, there are some important uses for the notion of community that remain, uses that might benefit from an analogy to Gayatri Spivak's "strategic essentialism." In these uses we might simultaneously recognize that our calls to community are flawed, in fact impossible, but nonetheless useful as organizing tools.
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: We might thus begin to think of the call to community not as an invocation of organic unity but instead as a form of coalition-building, of a developing solidarity. Solidarity itself is a challenged concept, of course; there are important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom, and for whom.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Women of color, for instance, have pointed out the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests, leading author Mikki Kendall to establish the Twitter hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen. So I don't want to make it sound as though "solidarity" can serve as an unproblematic substitute for "community."
+
+
+
+
+Note: But I remain convinced that there are stronger forms of solidarity to be found, forms that do not demand that others drop their own issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those others are all of our issues too, and that we must stand together in support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this is the form of solidarity that I'm seeking, a form that I am convinced is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
+
+
+
+
+Note: What's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom was not just, as the UBS Nobel Perspectives website has it, the first female Nobel laureate in economics; she remains to date the _only_ female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place.
+
+
+## common-pool resources
+
+Note: It's important first to understand a bit about what is meant by the notion of common-pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" -- the overuse of shared natural resources -- can apply.
+
+
+## the "free rider" problem
+
+Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization.
+
+
+## _Governing the Commons_
+
+Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book _Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action_, this model -- like other such models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
+
+
+> What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies. (Ostrom 6-7)
+
+Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned software projects -- like arXiv, like Samvera, like Humanities Commons -- on which they should be able to rely.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, as with arXiv, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the problem that community-developed projects were developed to evade. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Brett Bobley recently tweeted a question about ways of sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Cayless --
+
+
+
+
+Note: -- noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining such projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in _Generous Thinking_, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
+
+
+## collaboration
+
+Note: But getting institutions to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside, is a huge part of what I've tried to do in _Generous Thinking_, and it's a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
+
+
+
+
+Note: A bit of background, for those of you who may not be fully familiar with the project. The MLA is the largest scholarly society in the humanities, representing around 25,000 members across North America and around the world, members who teach and study a very wide range of languages, literatures, and cultures. (The MLA is also my former employer.) With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 to provide members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at our annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching the platform, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with colleagues in other areas in the humanities, so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields.
+
+
+
+
+Note: With further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons spaces developed for the members of the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the College Art Association. But beyond working with these partners, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work, and so we made the decision to open the network's hub to anyone who wants to join -- across the disciplines, around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership.
+
+
+
+
+Note: All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites, and they can deposit and share their work in the network's open-access repository. This fusion of a social network with a library-quality repository (adhering to commonly accepted metadata standards, employing digital object identifiers, and so on) means that not only is stuff being put into the repository, and not only can that stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used, as there's a community there with which it can be shared.
+
+
+
+
+Note: But while fully opening the Humanities Commons hub to free participation by any interested scholar or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use -- not quite two years later, we have over 15,000 members -- it has created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms Humanities Commons from a common-pool resource into a club good, one whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the network if it were an exclusive service see the openness of the hub as diminishing the network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So we've been at work on a sustainability plan for the network over the last year, hoping to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
+
+
+## sustainability and solidarity
+
+Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. My arguments to this end, probably needless to say, have a tough road ahead of them, but I remain hopeful, and determined, that those of us working on projects like Humanities Commons --
+
+
+# together
+
+Note: -- can together -- ah! together! -- find ways to go far.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
diff --git a/ubc.html b/ubc.html
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+
+ Generous Thinking: Working in Public
+
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diff --git a/ubc.md b/ubc.md
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+# Working in Public
+---
+---
+## Kathleen Fitzpatrick
+@kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+Slides available at https://kfitz.info/presentations/ubc.html
+
+Note: Thank you. I would like to begin with a collective acknowledgment that Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. In particular, the University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. We recognize, support, and advocate for the sovereignty of Michigan’s twelve federally-recognized Indian nations, for historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, for Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. By offering this Land Acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold Michigan State University more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples. // Before I begin, I want to thank Mary and Susan for inviting me to be part of the Open Scholarship in Practice Week, and to thank Leonora and Heather for all their support; I'm delighted to have this chance to talk a bit about the kinds of work, and the kinds of futures, that making scholarly work more open could make possible.
+
+
+
+Generous Thinking (https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous-thinking)
+
+Note: Part of what I hope to address today stems from my recent book, _Generous Thinking_. The book as a whole argues that the future of the university as we have known it depends heavily on rebuilding relationships of trust between our institutions and the publics that they serve. The book addresses lots of aspects of those relationships and ways they might be fostered, but the key bit for today is that the networks and spaces that support digital scholarship are crucial to building and maintaining connections with a range of broader publics in the context of the work we do on campus.
+
+
+# background
+
+Note: I come to this work through a slightly idiosyncratic path. Back in 2002, I'd just finished the long process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and there seemed the very real possibility that no one else might ever read it. (I wasn't wrong -- it took another four years to get the thing published, for a lot of complicated reasons.) And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience. People read it, and I knew they read it because they left comments responding to and interacting with him. And I thought, wow, that's it.
+
+
+
+(http://plannedobsolescence.net 2002)
+
+Note: My blog, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up doing something more interesting than I expected: it helped me build a small community. I found a number of other early academic bloggers, all of whom were in ongoing comment-and-crosslink conversations. Those relationships, which opened out into a growing network of scholars working online, were crucial to me as a somewhat isolated assistant professor. I had struggled to make the intellectual and professional connections that might help my writing develop, and it was the blog that provided the first real opportunity. Even more, posts I published there were the first pieces of my writing to be cited in more formal academic settings.
+
+
+
+(http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/introduction/undead/)
+
+Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I'd just finished the draft of my second book. Rather than simply have the manuscript sent out for anonymous peer review, I asked my press to let me post the draft online for open comment too. I get asked a lot about that decision, especially how I worked up the courage to release something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth of the matter is that the risks didn't figure into my thinking. What I knew was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, with whom I'd had productive, engaging interactions that contributed to the book's development, and I wanted to hear their thoughts about where I'd wound up. I trusted them to help me--and they did, overwhelmingly so.
+
+
+# 2009
+
+Note: It's important to acknowledge the entire boatload of privilege not-thinking about the risks requires; I was writing from a sufficiently safe position that allowing flaws in my work-in-progress to be publicly visible wasn't a real threat. It's also not incidental that this was 2009--a much more naive hour in the age of the Internet. The events of the last few years, from GamerGate to the 2016 presidential campaign and on into 2020, have made the risks of opening one's work up online all too palpable. But my experiences with the blog, with the book manuscript, and with other projects I've opened to online discussion, still leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kind of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work's development. And--perhaps most importantly today--willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+
+(https://generousthinking.hcommons.org)
+
+Note: I tested that belief in 2018 by opening the draft of _Generous Thinking_ to a similar open review. Between early February and the end of March, I staged a process in which I first invited a group of readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, after which I opened the project to the world for discussion. In the end, 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own), giving me a rich view of the revision process that lay ahead. It wasn't all rainbows and unicorns: there are a few comments that sting, and a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking had been a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is better for having gone through this public process.
+
+
+
+GDJ (https://pixabay.com/vectors/social-media-connections-networking-3846597)
+
+Note: So what I'm focused on is the ways that networks supporting digital scholarship can can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that do not just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
+
+
+
+Andrei Lacatusu (https://www.behance.net/andreilacatusu)
+
+Note: There are, of course, real obstacles that have to be faced in this process. Some of them reflect the communication platforms that we use today. Blogs don't readily produce the same level of engagement that they did in the early 2000s. In part this has to do with their massive proliferation, and in part it has to do with the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks. As a result, online communities of readers and writers are unlikely to develop spontaneously; instead, building community around online work has to be far more deliberate, reaching out to potential readers and participants and finding ways to draw them, and ourselves, back into sustained conversation.
+
+
+
+Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Troll_Warning.jpg)
+
+Note: And of course the nature of internet discourse has changed in recent years as much as has its location. Trolls are not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one's work public can involve significant risk--especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
+
+
+
+Nick Youngson (http://alphastockimages.com)
+
+Note: I do not have easy answers to these problems; I do not have a perfect platform to offer, and I do not know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. Countering these destructive forces requires advance preparation and focused responses. Ensuring that public discourse about scholarly work remains productive requires a tremendous amount of collective labor, and the careful development and maintenance of trust, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But there are several other challenges that I want to explore a bit today, challenges that are about the ways that we as scholars do our work, the ways that we can draw a range of broader publics to that work, and the ways that we can ensure that the work we do together is supported in an ongoing way.
+
+
+# access
+
+Note: The first is the need to ensure that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it is impossible for anyone to care about what we do if they cannot see it. And yet, perhaps because we assume we are mostly writing for one another, the results of our work end up overwhelmingly in places where it cannot be found--and even if it is found, where it cannot be accessed--by members of the broader public.
+
+
+# accessibility
+
+Note: The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to get their hands on it, but enabling them to see in it the things that they might care about. We often resent the ways that academic work gets "dumbed down" in public venues, but we might think instead about ways that we can productively mainstream our arguments, engaging readers where they are, rather than always forcing them to come find us, in our venues and on our terms.
+
+
+# participation
+
+Note: Beyond access and accessibility, however, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural creation by more kinds of public thinkers. In other words, we need to focus not just on the public's potential consumption of the work that is done by the university, but also about potential modes of co-production that involve communities in the work of the university. Such collaborations might serve as a style of work that our universities can fruitfully model for the rest of our culture: new modes of scholarship done not just for but with the world.
+
+
+
+John Barkiple (https://unsplash.com/photos/l090uFWoPaI)
+
+Note: Networks for digital scholarship have the potential to create the conditions for greater access, for greater accessibility, and for greater public participation in the work that we all do as scholars. By encouraging this kind of work, I don't mean to suggest that there is no room for more traditional modes of internal exchange among field-based experts; there is, and should be. But the twenty-first century university must provide means by which the results of those exchanges can become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. Our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone at all times, of course, but different aspects of our work might engage with different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences--and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors--is a crucial skill for today's scholars, and a skill that needs to be cultivated and supported.
+
+
+
+
Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/open-access/open-access-logo/)
+
+Note: The simplest way of making more scholarly work more available to the public is by making that work available through open access venues. There's a long history to the open access movement, of course, and in the book I dig into that history and the ties the movement created between its altruistic goals -- establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge -- and it more pragmatic arguments about the impact that public access might have on the advancement of research. The key point is that what's good for the public turns out to be good for scholarship, too.
+
+
+
+ Vinicius Amano (https://unsplash.com/photos/WKodoLFmLyI)
+
+Note: If we publish in ways that enable any interested reader to access our work, that work will be more read, more cited, creating more impact for us and for our fields. Making our work more openly accessible enables scholars in areas of the world without extensive library budgets, as well as U.S.-based instructors and students at undergraduate teaching institutions and secondary schools, to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. All of this can produce an expansion in our readership and an expansion in our influence -- an unmitigatedly good thing.
+
+
+
+Markus Spiske (https://unsplash.com/photos/WWX2bPqP-z4)
+
+Note: Any yet, it's clear that we often resist opening our work to broader publics, for a variety of reasons. Many of us keep our work restricted to our own discourse communities because we fear the consequences of making it available to broader publics--and not without justification. The public often seems determined to misunderstand us, to interpret what we say with focused hostility or, nearly as bad, utter dismissiveness. Because the subject matter of much of the humanities and social sciences seems as though it should be accessible, our determination to wrestle with difficult or highly politicized questions and our use of expert methods and vocabularies can feel threatening to many readers. They fail to understand us; we take their failure to understand as an insult. (Admittedly, sometimes it is, but not always.) Given this failure to communicate, we see no harm in keeping our work closed off from the public, arguing that we're only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter?
+
+
+# why it matters
+
+Note: It matters because the more we close our work away from the public, and the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of the academy, the more we undermine the public's willingness to support our research and our institutions. As numerous public humanities scholars including Kathleen Woodward have argued, the major crisis facing the funding of higher education is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good. We wind up strengthening that conviction and worsening the crisis when we treat our work as private. Closing our work away from non-scholarly readers might protect us from public criticism, but it can't protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous in the current economic and political environment. The risks are real, especially for scholars working in politically engaged fields, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public, including our governments, of the relevance of what we do on campus.
+
+
+
+From the Generous Thinking cover
+
+Note: And of course engaging readers in thoughtful discussions about the important issues we study lies at the core of the academic mission. It is at the heart of our values. We don't create knowledge in order to hoard it, but instead, every day, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and in our writing, we embrace an ethic of generosity, of paying forward knowledge that we have received as a gift. We teach, as we were taught; we publish, as we learn from the publications of others. We cannot pay back those who came before us, but we can and do give to those who come after. Our participation in an ethical, voluntary scholarly community is grounded in the obligations we hold for one another, obligations that derive from the generosity we have received.
+
+
+
+(https://pixabay.com/photos/academic-ancient-architecture-2769/)
+
+Note: Okay, idealistic, right? And that kind of idealism is all well and good, but it doesn't adequately account for an academic universe in which we are evaluated based on individual achievement, and in which prestige often overrides all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for and effects of that bias toward prestige in another part of the larger project; here, I want to think a bit about its effects on the individual scholar, as well as that scholar's role in perpetuating this hierarchical status quo. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily shades over into a sense that the more exclusive a publication's audience, the higher its value. // This is, at its most benign, self-defeating; if we privilege exclusivity above all else, we wind up undermining our work's potential cultural impact; as David Parry has commented,
+
+
+"Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge."
+
+Note: "Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge." It is only in giving it away, in making it as publicly available as possible, that we produce knowledge. As it is, most of the players involved in the production of scholarship have always been engaged in a process of "giving it away": authors, reviewers, scholarly editors, and others involved in the process have long offered their work to others without requiring direct compensation. The question, of course, is how we offer it, and to whom.
+
+
+
+Pravin Unagar, the Noun Project (https://thenounproject.com/term/gift-exchange/1005745/)
+
+Note: In fact, the entire system of scholarly communication runs on an engine of generosity, one that demonstrates the ways that private enterprise can never adequately provide for the public good. So rather than committing our work to private channels, signing it over to corporate publishers that profit at higher education's expense, how might all of the members of the university community--researchers, instructors, libraries, presses, and administrations--instead work to develop and support a system based on our highest values? What if we understood sustainability in scholarly communication not as the ability to generate revenue, but instead the ability to keep the engine of generosity running?
+
+
+
+GDJ (https://pixabay.com/vectors/money-typography-currency-5391890/)
+
+Note: It's important, however, to distinguish between this call to generosity and the injunction to work for free produced by the devaluing of much intellectual and professional labor within the so-called information economy. A mode of forced volunteerism has spread throughout contemporary culture, compelling college students and recent graduates to take on unpaid internships in order to "get a foot in the door," compelling creative professionals to do free work in order to "build exposure," thereby restricting opportunity to those who can already afford to seek it. And of course there are too many academic equivalents: vastly underpaid adjunct instructors, overworked graduate assistants, an ever-growing list of mentoring and other service requirements that fall disproportionately on the shoulders of junior faculty, women faculty, and faculty of color.
+
+
+
+Steve Snodgrass (https://www.flickr.com/photos/10710442@N08/3923768114)
+
+Note: Labor, in fact, is the primary reason that we can't just simply make all scholarly publications available for free online. While the scholarship itself might be provided without charge, the authors have by and large been paid by their employers or their granting organizations, and will be compensated with a publication credit, a line on a c.v., a positive annual review outcome. Reviewers are rarely paid (almost never by journals; very modestly by book publishers), but receive insight into developing work and the ability to shape their fields and support their communities by way of compensation. But there is a vast range of other labor that is necessary for the production of publications, even when distributed online: managing submissions, communicating with authors; copyediting, proofreading, website design and maintenance, and so on. We need to understand that labor as professional too and compensate it accordingly.
+
+
+
+(https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-xzilx)
+
+Note: So where I am asking for generosity--for giving it away--it is from those who are fully credited and compensated: those tenured and tenure-track faculty and other fully-employed members of our professions who can and should contribute to the world the products of the labor that they have already been supported in undertaking. Similarly, generosity is called for from those institutions that can and should underwrite the production of scholarship on behalf of the academy and the public at large. It is our mission, and our responsibility, to look beyond our own walls to the world beyond, to enlarge the gifts that we have received by making them public. Doing so requires that we hold the potential for public engagement with our work among our highest values, that we understand such potential engagement as a public good that we can share in creating.
+
+
+
+Eugene Lagunov (https://unsplash.com/photos/sM_vkq6AKCc)
+
+Note: But there are steps beyond simply making work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn't possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that's fine, to an extent: communication within a discourse community plays a crucial role in that community's development, and there must always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But that inwardly-focused sharing of work has been privileged to our detriment. Scholars are not rewarded--and in fact are at times actively punished--for publishing in popular venues. And because the values instantiated by our rewards systems have a profound effect on the ways we train our students, we build the wall between academic and public discourse higher and higher with every passing cohort.
+
+
+
+Public Books (https://publicbooks.org)
+
+Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing publications that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, venues like the _Los Angeles Review of Books_ and _Public Books_. There are also a host of other kinds of digital projects that demonstrate the ways many scholars are already working in multiple registers, engaging with multiple audiences. These venues open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture.
+
+
+
+Green Chameleon (https://unsplash.com/photos/s9CC2SKySJM)
+
+Note: But if we are to open our ideas to larger public audiences, we need to give some serious thought to the mode and voice of our writing. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn't restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many mainstream publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to focus on complexity and nuance, and the result is often lines of argumentation, and lines of prose, that are far from straight-forward. Getting past the accusations of obscurity and irrelevance requires us to open up our rhetoric, to demonstrate to a generally educated reader how and why what we do matters.
+
+
+# accessible
+
+Note: Again, not all academic writing needs to be done in a public register. But we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible to the public. And we are all already called, to varying extents, to be public intellectuals. Our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus and thereby building support for that work. But for that project to be successful, scholars need to be prepared to bridge the communication gaps, by honing our ability to alternate speaking with one another and speaking with different audiences. So we need to think a bit about what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work. Public-facing writing--as many editors of mainstream intellectual publications would note--is very different from academic writing, and by and large it is not something scholars are trained to do. But numerous initiatives are working to help scholarly authors focus and express the ideas contained in their scholarly publications in ways that help broader audiences engage with them. Ideally, this kind of writing should become part of graduate training across the university.
+
+
+
+José Martín Ramírez Carrasco (https://unsplash.com/photos/45sjAjSjArQ)
+
+Note: However, a key component of the work of the public intellectual is not simply addressing but actually helping to build a public in the first place. Nancy Fraser long since noted the fragmentation of contemporary public life into a "plurality of competing counterpublics." We need to consider the possibility that, in retreating from direct engagement with the public, we have actually contributed to the public's fragmentation. As Alan Jacobs has noted, "Subaltern counterpublics are essential for those who have never had seats at the table of power, but they can also be immensely appealing to those who feel that their public presence and authority have waned." The retreat of scholars into private intellectual life has produced a tighter sense of community and the comfort of being understood, but at the cost of withdrawing scholarly issues and perspectives from public view, and with the result of further fragmentation of the public itself. If we are to return to public discourse, if we are to connect with--and perhaps even be responsible for creating--a range of broader publics, we're going to have to contend with those publics' multiplicity, even as we try to draw them into dialogue.
+
+
+
+Cade Martin, Dawn Arlotta, USCDCP (https://pixnio.com/people/crowd/six-people-working-in-office#)
+
+Note: Most importantly, perhaps, we need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. Our processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don't meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, when scholars make the transition to more public prose, their work is frequently underrewarded, if not actively derided, back on campus. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it's likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must "dumb down" key ideas in order to do so. If we're going to make publicly engaged digital scholarship genuinely sustainable, we have to ensure that it's properly respected, and properly rewarded, so that the focus can genuinely be placed on engaging with the communities the work is trying to reach.
+
+
+
+Thomas Szynkiewicz (https://www.flickr.com/photos/dasfotoimaginarium/6772205491)
+
+Note: This is in some ways the heart of the problem: we too often do not know how to reach those publics, because we don't fully understand them. And, as I argue at length in the larger project, this is in no small part because we spend a bit too much time talking and not enough time listening to them. We need to make room for the public in our arguments, and in our prose, but we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having found a way to connect with a broader audience, having helped to transform that audience into something like a public, how do we then activate that public to work on its own behalf?
+
+
+# public scholarship
+
+Note: Here is where our working in public--creating public access, valuing public engagement, becoming public intellectuals--transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, a scholarship that is not simply performed for the public but that includes and is in fact given over to the publics with whom we work. In public scholarship, members of our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants, as stakeholders.
+
+
+
+Seattle Aquarium (https://www.seattleaquarium.org/community-science)
+
+Note: Recent experiments in "citizen science" provide some potentially interesting examples, projects like Galaxy Zoo that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. But what might the citizen humanities look like? It might look like museum exhibits such as Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California, which engaged members of local Pacific communities in the planning and development processes. It might look like The September 11 Digital Archive, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project, which presents first-hand accounts of the events of that day, along with photos, emails, and other archival materials from more than 150,000 participants. It might look like the Baltimore Stories project at UMBC, which used humanities scholarship as a convening force to bring community organizers, educators, and non-profit organizations together to explore narratives of race in American life. What these projects have in common is that each of them explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern belongs to them. The work involved is theirs not just to learn from but to shape and define as well. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
+
+
+# "peers"
+
+Note: By working in publicly engaged ways, and by bringing those publics into the self-reflexive modes of humanities- and social science-based critique, we have the potential to produce a renewed conception of how intellectual life operates in contemporary culture -- but that renewed conception is going to require us to be open to a new understanding of the notion of our "peers." Open, public scholarship might lead us to understand the peer not as a pre-existing credential but instead as a status that emerges through participation in the processes of a community of practice. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we address within that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening the notion of the intellectual, or the peer, to a much broader range of forms of critical inquiry and active project participation has the potential to reshape relations between town and gown, to lay the groundwork for more productive conversations across the borders of the campus, and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work of the academy matters for our culture as a whole.
+
+
+
+GDJ (https://pixabay.com/vectors/social-media-connections-networking-3846597)
+
+Note: And much of that work begins with establishing the networks through which new forms of collaborative, public scholarship can be realized. New institutional structures might enable us to ask what would be possible if we were to open up our scholarly practices up to real public engagement, to deep interdisciplinarity, to new modes of working. How can new networks enable public universities like mine, and like yours, to more genuinely focus on the mission of bringing knowledge to the people of the state? How might such a network draw public support back to the institution by demonstrating the extent to which the work done here is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public? For public universities to win back public support, they must find ways like this--structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just the mission statement but of the actual mission--to place publicly engaged work at the top of its priorities. And that starts with conversations like this, where scholars can come together to explore new work in and with the public.
+
+
+# thank you
+---
+## Kathleen Fitzpatrick
+ @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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+ Toward a More Generous University
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+# Toward a More Generous University
+---
+### (Even in Hard Times)
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/ucsd.html
+
+Note: Thank you, etc.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Much of what follows derives from the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education in the United States -- is going to require those of us who work on campus to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the many publics that it serves.
+
+
+# "radical approach"
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, and that it can't be made incrementally but instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no easy path, no simple tool that can readily take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the purpose of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated population ready to participate in building a better world -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence in our universities shouldn't simply be dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life. Rather, we need to examine the degree to which higher education has for the last several decades operated under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent paradigm, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. Even worse than the conflict between these paradigms, however, is that both of them are failing, if in different ways. If our institutions are to thrive in the decades ahead we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: So the book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves requires re-grounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It requires concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+# listening
+
+Note: So *Generous Thinking* asks us to consider how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+# reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that the critical reading practices we enact on campus might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged research, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns, as well as to transform those communities from passive recipients of the university's knowledge into active collaborators in shared projects.
+
+
+# the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and community engagement. The university must become the kind of institution that can focus less on individual achievement, on educating for individual leadership, and that instead focuses on building community, and indeed on educating for community-building. And this requires a radical rethinking of the reward structures of higher education: what we value and how we demonstrate that we value it.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: Our universities are in many ways structured as collectives, in which each member of the institution is charged with some part of the well-being of the whole. This is how we derive our principles of shared governance, that we each have a contribution to make to the operation of the institution. And yet: when we examine both the kinds of work for which we are actively rewarded, as well as the nature of the rewards themselves, we repeatedly find an emphasis on the individual rather than the whole. For instance, for faculty at an institution like this one the work for which we are most rewarded is our research -- which we pointedly refer to as our "own" work -- and the rewards we receive often pull us away from the collective. If I publish a well-received book or a an article published in a prestigious journal, I might be eligible for a course release or relief from service responsibilities. And all of the other possible rewards I can seek -- promotions, raises, and so forth -- encourage me to retreat from membership in the university community and instead focus on my own work. This is part and parcel of the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university, in which every form of merit -- including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and more -- is determined by what I individually have done, even where I've done it collaboratively.
+
+
+# zero-sum
+
+Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. The result is that we find ourselves in zero-sum game in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
+
+
+# institutions
+
+Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the structures within our institutions privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions are able to distance themselves from the rankings and the other quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that those of us who work for them will likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more generous.
+
+
+# culture change
+
+Note: And this is no easy task. Over the course of the last several years, both while *Generous Thinking* was in press and after it was published, I had the opportunity to speak on a number of college and university campuses where faculty, staff, students, and administrators were thinking about how to create and support a greater sense of connection between their campus communities and their public-facing mission. The folks who invited me -- ranging from the officers of campus AAUP chapters to university presidents and their advisors -- felt a connection with the arguments in *Generous Thinking* not least because they recognized that their institutions require not just better strategic plans but deep culture change. That culture change demands, among other things, a serious rethinking of how we work, why we work the ways we do, how we assess and reward that work, and how we recognize as work things that tend to get dismissed as service but that play a crucial role in building and sustaining collaborative communities. *Generous Thinking*, however, focused pretty tightly on the why and the what of the changes that our university cultures need to make, and spent a whole lot less time on how.
+
+
+# better
+
+Note: For instance: it's clear that making a better, more sustainable institution, in other words, requires us to move away from individualistic ideas of meritorious production -- in fact to step off the Fordist production line that forever asks us to do *more* -- and instead to think in a humane fashion about ways that we can do *better*. Better often in fact requires slowing down, talking with our colleagues and our communities, and most importantly, listening to what others have to say. Better requires engagement, connection, sharing, in ways that more nearly always encourages us to rush past. Turning from more to better can help us access the pleasures -- indeed, the joys -- of our work that life on the production line has required us to push aside. But making that change goes against some of the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us within the university setting, and it's super unclear how we might even begin to make such a change.
+
+
+# generosity in hard times
+
+Note: So I was already thinking that I needed to follow up *Generous Thinking* with something that would dig a bit further into the how of transformation. And then after one of the talks I gave, an attendee asked me a question that made the stakes of thinking about how painfully clear. Her question has been stuck in my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that it's relatively easy to embrace when resources are plentiful, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to think generously 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 saying "you're completely right; that's the real question" and pointing out that 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. But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us -- we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them -- invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I do want the institution to survive, and I want to sustain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
+
+
+# sacrifice
+
+Note: And I also know that however much I may want to keep the institution running, the institution is not thinking the same about me. Our institutions will not, cannot, love us back. However much we sacrifice for them, they will never sacrifice for us. This understanding was clarified for me, again, by Tressie McMillan Cottom, who posted a Twitter thread describing the advice she gives to Black scholars who ask her how to survive in the academy. One point in that thread stuck with me:
+
+
+> "I don't think these institutions can support us or love us. And I honor the many many people who work to make them more humane. But you, alone, can not do that. And you cannot do it, ever, by killing yourself."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom
+
+Note: (Read tweet.) This is especially true for members of minoritized groups working within the academy; it's especially true for faculty without tenure; it's especially true for staff; it's especially true for scholars working in contingent positions; it's especially true for everyone whose positions in the hierarchies of prestige and comfort leave them vulnerable, especially at moments when "we're all in it together" is invoked not in the context of resource-sharing but of sacrifice. Sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and to accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time as we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
+
+
+# big structural change
+
+Note: The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. And this is the deepest goal of _Generous Thinking_, and by extension of the followup project I'm now working on, entitled _Leading Generously_. In this project I'm focusing on how we can work collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. What kinds of leadership are required for us remake the university into an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members, in good times and bad? _Leading Generously_ is in some ways intended to be a practical handbook for putting the ideas of _Generous Thinking_ into action. But in doing so it asks its readers to reconsider some basic concepts that underwrite big structural change. It proposes that, despite the enormity of the transformation that higher education needs today -- large enough to require a revolution -- local changes can begin to make a difference, and that we are capable of making those local changes.
+
+
+# leadership
+
+Note: Among the concepts that demand reconsideration, however, is the very notion of leadership itself. We conventionally associate leadership with the folks at the top of an institutional hierarchy, those with the authority to steer the ship. While I hope that *Leading Generously* might speak to them, the project addresses everyone on campus, beginning with the argument that everyone in an institution has the potential to be a leader, to create local transformative change that can model ways of being that others might learn from and join in with. This conviction places a lot of emphasis on individual actors, however, in ways that may seem a bit at odds with some of today's most important ideas about how power operates. Those critical ideas -- including arguments about race and racism; about sex, gender, and misogyny; about class and power -- understand the issues they explore to be *systemic* rather than *individual*. That is to say, they argue that real change requires social transformation. It requires building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, transforming economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. I am convinced by those arguments, and I have that same end goal: building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world. But the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
+
+
+# agency
+
+Note: The key to this problem is where we locate agency: who has the power to start the process of making significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, there is little agency left to the individual. And it's unquestionably true that the structural problems we face are enormous, and that one individual can't do much to reshape the world. But groups of individuals can. And building those groups starts with individuals who decide to do more, to put what individual agency they do have to work in solidarity with others.
+
+
+# you
+
+Note: And so *Leading Generously* begins with you, where you are. It starts from the position that each of us is equipped to make change in the aspects of our institutions over which we have influence, and that these changes can model new modes of being within our communities.
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: But it recognizes as well that none of us can get far alone. To transform a complex organization, we need to build coalitions, and we need to act with the collective firmly in view. Because of this requirement, it's important to recognize that the object of leadership is not institutions, but people, bringing them together and organizing for change. Building a more generous, deeper sense of "us" asks us to focus our attention on our relationships with our colleagues and with our broader communities, ensuring that we maintain the humanity not just of those we work with and for, but of the structures through which all of us connect.
+
+
+# transformation
+
+Note: The key to transforming our institutions, then, is shoring up the means of moving from "you" to "us," the means of building the coalitions and collectives required to transform our institutions and make them capable of the kinds of community-oriented thinking we most need today. Along the way, we need to consider what we can gain from becoming better listeners, from learning to sit with difficult conversations and even criticism, from assessing our work and the work of those around us based on our deepest values, from cultivating an atmosphere of mutual and renewable trust, and so on. Each of the key concepts I explore in *Leading Generously* -- listening, vulnerability, values, trust, support and more -- is deceptively simple, but with careful consideration can become the foundation for a practice of community building, for thinking through institutional policies and processes and ensuring that they serve the people for whom the institution operates.
+
+
+# people
+
+Note: The necessity of that practice is clear: our institutions cannot survive the crises they currently face unless the people and the relationships that make up the institution thrive. Budgets and bottom lines matter, but without its people -- the students, the staff, the faculty, the community -- the university is nothing. And that's the thing that we need to understand now more than ever, and the thing that the amazing program you have in front of you today is working toward: the recognition that the primary work of the university is connection, and that in hard times the most generous thing we can do is to connect with ourselves and everyone we work with, so that we all might develop the collective strength necessary to return and rebuild.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### A Radical Approach to Saving the University
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/umn.html
+
+Note: I want to start by thanking the folks from the Institute for Advanced Study for inviting me to talk with you today and for all their work in coordinating this event. This talk is a highly compressed overview of my book, _Generous Thinking_, whose overall argument is that the future of higher education demands that those of us on campus pay more attention to building relationships of trust with the publics that the university serves.
+
+
+
+http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
+
+Note: Evidence of the need for rebuilding trusting relationships between universities and the public might be found in an increasing number of reports and studies such as this one, released in 2017 by the Pew Research Center, showing a precipitous decline in the esteem colleges and universities are held in in the United States, primarily on the political right. One frequent on-campus reaction to this kind of report, understandably, is to decry the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture, to turn inward, and to spend more time talking with those who understand us -- meaning us. But in that reaction we run the risk of deepening the divide, allowing those who want to argue that today's colleges and universities are not only irrelevant but actively detrimental to the well-being of the general public to say, "see? They're out of touch. Who needs them anyway?" Because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the problem is not just that the public doesn't understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. So a large part of what I'm after in _Generous Thinking_ is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions _as_ communities, as well as _in interaction with_ communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work: asking us, in other words, to examine how our colleges and universities engage with the world. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot solve on our own.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises, I want to acknowledge, do not always give the impression of being life-threatening, world-historical, or approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we face today. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while some might take my argument, about the importance of generosity for the future of the university, to be a self-indulgent, head-in-the-sand retreat into philosophizing and a refusal of real political action, I hope, in the larger project, to have put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. My argument is that we need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer may lie less in its power to advance knowledge or solve problems in any of its many fields than in our more crucial ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it precisely that we do, and why does it matter? Much of my argument focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But I want to be careful with the ways that I deploy this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." -- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, and that it might become possible for the "we" that I am addressing to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities. But it's important to acknowledge that the "we" that bears the greatest responsibility for caring for the university and for building relationships between the university and the broader publics that it serves, and thus the most immediate antecedent for my "we," is those of us on campus, and especially the faculty.
+
+
+# "them"
+
+Note: Every "we" implies a "them," of course, and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly to serve the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other that at times gets imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that takes in information we provide. What might it mean if we understood them as a complex collection of communities -- not just groups who interact with one another and with us, but groups of which we are in fact a part? How might this lead to a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the university itself as a community, but we don't talk a lot about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. "Community" in the singular -- "the community" -- also runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we are able to understand community instead as multiple and multifarious, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to think of community as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. And this sense of solidarity is a key part of the university's recent past, one of the important elements of its history that has been undone by recent political shifts. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, the student-led calls for institutional change in the 1960s and 1970s in many ways focused on the potential that the university held -- and failed to meet -- for connecting with the communities around it. Instead, our institutions have turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can be built.
+
+
+# liberal education
+
+Note: However, in building those relationships, we have to contend with the fact that what faculty members actually do on our campuses is often a mystery, and indeed a site of profound misunderstanding, for people outside the academic profession, and even at times for one another. One of the key areas of misunderstanding, and one that most needs opening up, is the fundamental purpose of higher education. Public figures such as politicians increasingly discuss colleges and universities as sites of workforce preparation, making it seem as if the provision of career-enhancing credentials were the sole purpose for which our institutions exist, and as if everything else they do that does not lead directly to economic growth were a misappropriation of resources. Those of us who work on campus, however, understand our institutions not as credentialing agencies but as sites of broad-based education: a "liberal" education in the original sense of the term. Of course the very term "liberal education," so natural to those of us who are engaged in it, has itself become profoundly politicized, as if the liberal aspect of higher education were not its breadth but its ideological bent. So we see, for instance, Colorado stripping the term out of official university documents. But even where the concept of liberal education isn't imagined to be a cover for some revolution we're fomenting on campus, there's a widespread misconception about it that's almost worse: it is a mode of education in which we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students' heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path.
+
+
+# humanities
+
+Note: And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities. The portrait I'm about to sketch of the humanities today could be extended to many other areas within the curriculum -- for example, the sciences' focus on "basic science," or science without direct industry applicability, is often imagined to be just as frivolous. But the humanities -- the study of literature, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of culture -- are in certain ways both the core and the limit case of the liberal arts. The humanities cultivate an inquisitive mindset, they teach key skills of reading and interpretation, and they focus on writing in ways that can prepare a student to learn absolutely anything else over the course of their lives -- and yet they are the fields around which no end of hilarious jokes about what a student might actually do with that degree have been constructed. (The answer, of course: absolutely anything. As a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes clear, not only do humanities majors wind up gainfully employed, but they also wind up happy. But I digress.) The key thing to note is that the humanities serve as a bellwether of sorts: what has been happening to them is happening to higher education in general, if a little more slowly. So while I focus a bit on the kinds of arguments that are being made about the humanities in our culture today, it doesn't take too much of a stretch to imagine them being made about sociology, or about physics, or about any other field on campus that isn't named after a specific, well-paying career.
+
+
+# marginalization
+
+Note: The humanities, in any case, have long been lauded as providing students with a rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills with which they can engage the world around them. These skills are increasingly necessary in today's hypermediated, globalized, conflict-filled world -- and yet many humanities departments feel themselves increasingly marginalized within their own institutions. This marginalization is related, if not directly attributable, to the degree to which students, parents, administrators, trustees, politicians, the media, and the public at large have been led in a self-reinforcing cycle to believe that the skills these fields provide are useless in the current economic environment. Someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about all those English majors working at Starbucks; commentators reinforce the sense that humanities majors are worth less than pre-professional degrees; parents strongly encourage their students to turn toward pragmatic fields that seem somehow to describe a job; administrators note a decline in humanities majors and cut budgets and positions; the jobs crisis for humanities PhDs worsens; someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about what all those adjuncts were planning on doing with that humanities PhD anyhow; and the whole thing intensifies. In many institutions, this draining away of majors and faculty and resources has reduced the humanities to a means of ensuring that students studying to become engineers and bankers are reminded of the human ends of their work. This is not a terrible thing in and of itself, but it is not a sufficient ground on which humanities fields can do their best work for the institution.
+
+
+# spreading
+
+Note: And while this kind of cyclical crisis has not manifested to anything like the same extent in the sciences, there are early indications that it may be spreading in that direction. Where once the world at large seemed mostly to understand that scientific research, and the kinds of study that support it, are crucial to the general advancement of knowledge, recent shifts in funder policies and priorities suggest a growing scrutiny of that work's economic rather than educational impact, as well as a growing restriction on research areas that have been heavily politicized. The humanities, again, may well be the canary in the higher education coal mine, and for that reason, it's crucial that we pay close attention to what's happened in those fields, and particularly to the things that haven't worked as the humanities have attempted to remedy the situation.
+
+
+# defense
+
+Note: One of the key things that hasn't worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defenses of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy have been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which have had the desired impact. Calls to save the humanities issued by public figures have frequently left scholars annoyed, as they often begin with a somewhat retrograde sense of what we do and why, and thus frequently give the sense of trying to save our fields from us. (One might see, for instance, a column published in 2016 by the former chairman of the NEH, Bruce Cole, entitled "What's Wrong with the Humanities?", which begins memorably:
+
+
+> "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance." -- Bruce Cole
+
+Note: "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.") But perhaps even worse is the degree to which humanities professors themselves -- those one would think best positioned to make the case -- have failed to find traction with their arguments. As the unsuccessful defenses proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worse,
+
+
+> "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." -- Simon During
+
+Note: leading Simon During to grumble that "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." And maybe we like it that way, as we are often those who take issue with our own defenses, bitterly disagreeing as we frequently do about the purposes and practices of our fields.
+
+
+# definition
+
+Note: Perhaps this is a good moment for us to stop and consider what it is that the humanities do do well, what the humanities are for. I will start with a basic definition of the humanities as a cluster of fields that focus on the careful study and analysis of cultures and their many modes of thought and forms of representation -- writing, music, art, media, and so on -- as they have developed and moved through time and across geographical boundaries, growing out of and adding to our senses of who we are as individuals, as groups, and as nations. The humanities are interested, then, in the ways that representations work, in the relationships between representations and social structures, in all the ways that human ideas and their expression shape and are shaped by human culture. In this definition we might begin to see the possibility that studying literature or history or art or film or philosophy might not be solely about the object itself, but instead about a way of engaging with the world: in the process we develop the ability to read and interpret what we see and hear, the insight to understand the multiple layers of what is being communicated and why, and the capacity to put together for ourselves an appropriate, thoughtful contribution.
+
+
+# disagreement
+
+Note: Now, the first thing to note about this definition is that I am certain that many humanities scholars who hear it will disagree with it -- they will have nuances and correctives to offer -- and it is important to understand that this disagreement does not necessarily mean that my definition is wrong. Nor, however, do I mean to suggest that the nuances and correctives presented would be wrong. Rather, that form of disagreement is at the heart of how we do what we do: we hear one another's interpretations (of texts, of performances, of historical events) and we push back against them. We advance the work in our field through disagreement and revision. This agonistic approach, however, is both a strength of the humanities -- and by extension of the university in general -- and its Achilles' heel, a thought to which I'll return shortly.
+
+
+# sermonizing
+
+Note: For the moment, though, back to Simon During and his sense that the humanities are terrible at self-promotion. During's complaint, levied at the essays included in Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewitt's volume, _The Humanities and Public Life_, is largely that, in the act of self-defense, humanities scholars leave behind doing what they do and instead turn to "sermonizing" (his word) about the value of what they do. He argues that part of the problem is the assumption that the humanities as we practice them ought to have a public life in the first place. He winds up suggesting that we should continue to ensure that there is sufficient state support for the humanities so that students who do not already occupy a position of financial comfort can study our fields, but that we should not stretch beyond that point, arguing for the public importance of studying the humanities, because that importance is primarily, overwhelmingly, private.
+
+
+# privatization
+
+Note: This sense that education in the humanities is of primarily private value is everywhere in today's popular discourse extended to higher education in general: the purpose, we are told, of a college degree is some form of personal enrichment, whether financial or otherwise, rather than a social good. This privatization of higher education's benefits -- part of the general privatization that Chris Newfield has referred to as the academy's "great mistake" -- has been accompanied by a similar shift in its costs from the state to individual families and students, resulting in the downward spiral in funding and other forms of public support in which our institutions and our fields are caught, as well as the astronomically increasing debt load faced by students and their families. As long as a university education is assumed to have a predominantly personal rather than social benefit, it will be argued that making such an education possible is a private rather than a public responsibility. And that mindset will of necessity lead to the devaluation of fields whose benefits are less immediately tangible, less material, less individual. If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.
+
+
+# public good
+
+Note: But what is that public good? We don't do a terribly good job of articulating these things. In fact, despite the role so many of us have as professors, we often seem to have a hard time professing, describing what we do and arguing on behalf of the values that sustain our work. It's hard to express our values without recourse to what feel to us like politically regressive, universalizing master narratives about the nature of the good that have long been used as means of solidifying and perpetuating the social order, with all its injustices and exclusions. And so instead of stating clearly and passionately the ethics and values and goals that we bring to our work, we critique. We protect ourselves with what Lisa Ruddick has described as "the game of academic cool": in order to avoid appearing naïve -- or worse, complicit -- we complicate; we argue; we read against the grain.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: This mode of critique gets mistaken in public discourse for being primarily ideological in intent and effect; this is how our universities come to be accused of "brainwashing" their students, filling their heads with leftist rejections of the basic goodness of the dominant western culture. On campus, we know that's not the case. The political and social commitments behind much of our work are real, and crucial, but even our most critical reading practices turn out to be perfectly compatible with the contemporary political landscape. In fact, I would argue that our critiques of contemporary culture do not simply surface out of our social commitments. Rather, they surface not just despite but because of the conservative-leaning systems and structures in which the university as a whole, and each of us as a result, is mired. Our tendency to read against the grain is part of our makeup precisely because of the ways that we are ourselves subject to politics rather than being able to stand outside and neutrally analyze the political. The politics we are subject to structures all institutions in the contemporary United States, and perhaps especially universities, a politics that makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before. It is a politics structured around competition, and what historian Winfried Fluck has referred to as the race for individual distinction.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives -- on campus and off -- are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. Beginning with college applications, extending through graduate school admissions, fellowship applications, the job market, publication submissions, and, seemingly finally, the tenure and promotion review, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which applicants are measured, and the best -- whatever that might mean in a given context -- are rewarded. In actual practice, however, those metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. Always, in the unconscious of the profession, there is competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can't ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we're working together. The competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed individually, with the result that even those fields whose advancement depends most on team-based efforts are required to develop careful guidelines for establishing credit and priority.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: This competitive individualism contradicts -- and in fact undermines -- all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning, but in actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from their colleagues, from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly managed by administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. This is no way to run a collective. It's also no way to build solidarity among academic units, or across categories of academic employment, or between the academy and the communities with which it engages.
+
+
+# the point
+
+Note: And perhaps that's the point. Perhaps we are locked into this endless competition with one another in order to keep us distracted from the work that we might do if we were truly joined together. The requirement that we continually compare ourselves with one another, that we take on only the work that will lead to our own individual achievement, is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social.
+
+
+# so
+
+Note: So how do we step off of this treadmill? How do we begin to insist upon living our academic lives another way? How do we return to the collective, the social, the communal potential that higher education should enable?
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: This, at last, is where I get to bring in generous thinking, a way of being that I propose as an alternative to the competitive thinking in which the academy is steeped. Generous thinking is not intended to be opposed to critical thinking -- in fact, I argue strongly that the best of our critical thinking is always steeped in generosity. Rather, generous thinking involves the whole-hearted embrace of the deepest values of the humanities -- among them, attention, care, and equity -- in order to create communities that think critically together, both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What is it I mean when I talk about generosity in this context? The book obviously spends much more time exploring this question, but for the moment: I think of generosity as a practice, something to which we have to return again and again. It's an approach to engagement that focuses first and foremost on developing a generosity of mind, an openness to possibility. That openness begins for me by trying to develop a listening presence in the world, which is to say a conversational disposition that is not merely waiting for my next opportunity to speak but instead genuinely paying attention to what is being said. It means caring about the concerns of my interlocutor as much as I care about my own. It means beginning from the assumption that in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn. Generous thinking also means working to think with rather than against the people and texts with whom I'm in dialogue. It means starting an encounter with an idea with _yes_ rather than _no_, with _and_ rather than _but_. _Yes, and_ creates the possibility for genuine dialogue, not only among academic colleagues but with our objects of study, our predecessors, and the many potential publics that surround us. _Yes, and_ asks us to step away from competition, from the race for professional distinction; when we allow ourselves to linger in _yes, and_, we create the possibility of working together to build something entirely new.
+
+
+# together
+
+Note: And it's through working together that we can begin to build the kinds of connections with the publics that might help turn the tide on the declining esteem our institutions, and higher education in general, are held in. This mode of generous thinking is already instantiated in a wide range of projects that focus on fostering public engagement in and through the work done in colleges and universities. Collaborations with the public can work to create a sense of collective ownership of and investment in the university, making the institution's relevance to contemporary communities abundantly clear.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: But this mode of working in public asks a lot of us. It asks us to stop disseminating our work solely in the venues that give us the greatest chance at the forms of individual prestige for which we're rewarded and instead start looking for ways to make our work a gift to the world. It asks us to accept the risk involved in writing for audiences with whom we're less familiar than we are with our colleagues, finding ways to draw them into our concerns and to acquaint ourselves with theirs. It asks us not just to bring our knowledge to those audiences, but to open space for them to become interlocutors, bringing us their own knowledge in response.
+
+
+# vulnerability
+
+Note: It takes a lot of work -- difficult, scary, failure-filled work -- to allow ourselves to become open to this kind of engagement. We're prone as scholars to focus on conversations with those we already know well, and in forms we already know we do well, and there are times when our attempts to address public audiences go badly. It's possible that Simon During is onto something here, when he notes that humanities professors, in the act of public professing, turn away from "doing what they do" and toward "sermonizing" about our fields' value. But the problem isn't assuming that there's a public value in what we do, it's the mode of sermonizing: too much professional public address takes the form or tone of the edifying lecture, instructing the less privileged on better ways of being. If, contra During, we do believe that there is a public value to the work of the humanities, we must find ways to engage the public as equals, without sermonizing. We have to prepare for and accept the vulnerability involved in doing away with the hierarchy of teacher and learner, and find ways to engage in open-ended, multidirectional, generous conversation.
+
+
+# possibility
+
+Note: In that conversation lies the possibility of building solidarity with the concerns of the publics we hope to reach, as well as the possibility of encouraging understanding of our own concerns. In that conversation -- and in the conversations in which you'll be engaging today -- lies the possibility of creating another mode of being for the twenty-first century university and those who care about it. In that conversation lies the possibility of developing a new understanding of how expertise is structured and how it functions. In that conversation lies the possibility of a higher education whose ends are social rather than individual, aimed at community-building rather than personal achievement. In all of those conversations -- in which we engage perspectives other than our own, in which we value the productions and manifestations of our diverse culture, in which we encounter the other in all its irreducible otherness -- lie the best of what the humanities can bring to the university, and the university to the world.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+http://presentations.kfitz.info/umn.html
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+ What Matters? Who Counts?
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+## What Matters?
+## Who Counts?
+---
+#### Generous Thinking and the Future of the University
+---
+
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start by thanking Holly for inviting me to be part of the day you're spending together. This talk draws heavily on various parts of my book, _Generous Thinking_, which was published in February by Johns Hopkins. The overall argument of the project is that the future of higher education depends on institutions, and those of us who are part of them, successfully building engaged, trusting relationships with the publics that the university intended to serve. This is perhaps especially obvious for public colleges and universities, but I believe that it is no less true of private institutions, which depend on various kinds of public support for their success.
+
+
+
+##### http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
+
+Note: That we need to place some emphasis on building these relationships between our institutions and our publics can be seen in the results of an increasing number of reports and studies such as this one, released in 2017 by the Pew Research Center. The report documents a precipitous decline in the esteem colleges and universities are held in in the United States, primarily on the political right. It's not a surprise; we've seen this kind of shift in public opinion taking root for some time. Typically our response to this kind of report, however, has been to decry the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture and to turn inward, to spend more time talking internally with those who understand what we do. In that reaction, however, we run the risk of deepening the divide, allowing those who _want_ us to fade into irrelevance to say "see? They're out of touch. Who needs them anyway?" It's important for us to remember that this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+##### http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the problem is not just that the public fails to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. So a large part of what I'm after in _Generous Thinking_ is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions _as_ communities, as well as _in interaction with_ communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while my argument about the importance of generosity for the future of the university might appear self-indulgent, a head-in-the-sand retreat into philosophizing and a refusal of real political action, I hope, in the book, to have put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." -- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
+
+
+# "them"
+
+Note: So it's important to be careful about how we define "us," precisely because every "us" implies a "them," and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly in service to the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other. Granted, sometimes "they" are imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that benefits from and takes in information we provide. But what might it mean if we understood ourselves, and our institutions, as embedded in and responsible to the complex collection of communities by which we are surrounded? How might we develop a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the university itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis -- god, let this be their apotheosis -- we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
+
+
+# liberal education
+
+Note: However, in building those relationships, we have to contend with the fact that what faculty members actually _do_ on our campuses is often a mystery, and indeed a site of profound misunderstanding, for people outside the academic profession, and even at times for one another. One of the key areas of misunderstanding, and one that most needs opening up, is the fundamental purpose of higher education. Public figures such as politicians increasingly discuss colleges and universities as sites of workforce preparation, making it seem as if the provision of career-enhancing credentials were the sole purpose for which our institutions exist, and as if everything else they do that does not lead directly to economic growth were a misappropriation of funds. Those of us who work on campus, by and large, understand our institutions not as credentialing agencies but as sites of broad-based education: a "liberal" education in the original sense of the term. Of course the very term "liberal education," so natural to those of us steeped in it, has itself become profoundly politicized, as if the liberal aspect of higher education were not its breadth but its ideological bent. So we see, for instance, the state of Colorado stripping the term out of official university documents. But even where the concept of liberal education isn't imagined to be a cover for some revolution we're fomenting on campus, there's a widespread misconception about it that's almost worse: it is a mode of education in which we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students' heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path.
+
+
+# humanities
+
+Note: And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities. The portrait I'm about to sketch of the humanities today could be extended to many other areas within the curriculum -- for example, the sciences' focus on "basic science," or science without direct industry applicability, is often imagined to be just as frivolous. But the humanities -- the study of literature, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of culture -- are in certain ways both the core and the limit case of the liberal arts. The humanities cultivate an inquisitive mindset, they teach key skills of reading and interpretation, and they focus on writing in ways that can prepare a student to learn absolutely anything else over the course of their lives -- and yet they are the fields around which no end of hilarious jokes about what a student might actually do with that degree have been constructed. (The answer, of course: absolutely anything. As a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes clear, not only do humanities majors wind up gainfully employed, but they also wind up happy in their choices. But I digress.) The key thing to note is that the humanities serve as a bellwether of sorts: what has been happening to them is happening to higher education in general, if a little more slowly. So while I'm focused here on the kinds of arguments that are being made about the humanities in our culture today, it doesn't take too much of a stretch to imagine them being made about sociology, or about physics, or about any other field on campus that isn't named after a specific, well-paying career.
+
+
+# marginalization
+
+Note: The humanities, in any case, have long been lauded as providing students with a rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills with which they can engage the world around them. These skills are increasingly necessary in today's hypermediated, globalized, conflict-filled world -- and yet many humanities departments find themselves increasingly marginalized within their own institutions. This marginalization is related, if not directly attributable, to the degree to which students, parents, administrators, trustees, politicians, the media, and the public at large have been led in a self-reinforcing cycle to believe that the skills these fields provide are useless in the current economic environment. Someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about all those English majors working at Starbucks; commentators reinforce the sense that humanities majors are worth less than pre-professional degrees; parents strongly encourage their students to turn toward pragmatic fields that seem somehow to describe a job; administrators note a decline in humanities majors and cut budgets and positions; the jobs crisis for humanities PhDs worsens; someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about what all those adjuncts were planning on doing with that humanities PhD anyhow; and the whole thing intensifies. In many institutions, this draining away of majors and faculty and resources has reduced the humanities to a means of ensuring that students studying to become engineers and bankers are reminded of the human ends of their work. This is not a terrible thing in and of itself, but it is not a sufficient ground on which humanities fields can do their best work for the institution, or for the world.
+
+
+# spreading
+
+Note: And while this kind of cyclical crisis has not manifested to anything like the same extent in the sciences, there are early indications that it may be spreading in that direction. Where once the world at large seemed mostly to understand that scientific research, and the kinds of study that support it, are crucial to the general advancement of knowledge, recent shifts in funder policies and priorities suggest a growing scrutiny of that work's economic rather than educational impact, as well as a growing restriction on research areas that have been heavily politicized. The humanities, again, may well be the canary in the higher education coal mine, and for that reason, it's crucial that we pay close attention to what's happened in those fields, and particularly to the things that haven't worked as the humanities have attempted to remedy the situation.
+
+
+# defense
+
+Note: One of the key things that hasn't worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defenses of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy have been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which have had the desired impact. Calls to save the humanities issued by public figures have frequently left scholars annoyed, as they often begin with a somewhat retrograde sense of what we do and why, and thus frequently give the sense of trying to save our fields from us. (One might see, for instance, a column published in 2016 by the former chairman of the NEH, Bruce Cole, entitled "What's Wrong with the Humanities?", which begins memorably:
+
+
+> "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance." -- Bruce Cole
+
+Note: "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.") But perhaps even worse is the degree to which humanities professors themselves -- those one would think best positioned to make the case -- have failed to find traction with their arguments. As the unsuccessful defenses proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worse,
+
+
+> "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." -- Simon During
+
+Note: leading Simon During to grumble that "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." And maybe we like it that way, as we are often those who take issue with our own defenses, bitterly disagreeing as we frequently do about the purposes and practices of our fields.
+
+
+# definition
+
+Note: Perhaps this is a good moment for us to stop and consider what it is that the humanities do do well, what the humanities are for. I will start with a basic definition of the humanities as a cluster of fields that focus on the careful study and analysis of cultures and their many modes of thought and forms of representation -- writing, music, art, media, and so on -- as they have developed and moved through time and across geographical boundaries, growing out of and adding to our senses of who we are as individuals, as groups, and as nations. The humanities are interested, then, in the ways that representations work, in the relationships between representations and social structures, in all the ways that human ideas and their expression shape and are shaped by human culture. In this definition we might begin to see the possibility that studying literature or history or art or film or philosophy might not be solely about the object itself, but instead about a way of engaging with the world: in the process we develop the ability to read and interpret what we see and hear, the insight to understand the multiple layers of what is being communicated and why, and the capacity to put together for ourselves an appropriate, thoughtful contribution to our culture.
+
+
+# disagreement
+
+Note: Now, the first thing to note about this definition is that I am certain that many humanities scholars who hear it will disagree with it -- they will have nuances and correctives to offer -- and it is important to understand that this disagreement does not necessarily mean that my definition is wrong. Nor, however, do I mean to suggest that the nuances and correctives presented would be wrong. Rather, that form of disagreement is at the heart of how we do what we do: we hear one another's interpretations (of texts, of performances, of historical events) and we push back against them. We advance the work in our field through disagreement and revision. This agonistic approach, however, is both a strength of the humanities -- and by extension of the university in general -- and its Achilles' heel, a thought to which I'll return shortly.
+
+
+# sermonizing
+
+Note: For the moment, though, back to Simon During and his sense that the humanities are terrible at self-promotion. During's complaint, levied at the essays included in Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewitt's volume, _The Humanities and Public Life_, is largely that, in the act of self-defense, humanities scholars leave behind doing what they do and instead turn to "sermonizing" (his word) about the value of what they do. He argues that part of the problem is the assumption that the humanities as we practice them ought to have a public life in the first place. He winds up suggesting that we should continue to ensure that there is sufficient state support for the humanities so that students who do not already occupy a position of financial comfort can study our fields, but that we should not stretch beyond that point by arguing for the public importance of studying the humanities, because that importance is primarily, overwhelmingly, private.
+
+
+# privatization
+
+Note: This sense that education in the humanities is of primarily private value is increasingly in today's popular discourse extended to higher education in general: the purpose, we are told, of a college degree is some form of personal enrichment, whether financial or otherwise, rather than a social good. This privatization of higher education's benefits -- part of the general privatization that Chris Newfield has referred to as the academy's "great mistake" -- has been accompanied by a related shift in its costs from the state to individual families and students, resulting in the downward spiral in funding and other forms of public support in which our institutions and our fields are caught, as well as the astronomically increasing debt load faced by students and their families. As long as a university education is assumed to have a predominantly personal rather than social benefit, it will be argued that making such an education possible is a private rather than a public responsibility. And that mindset will of necessity lead to the devaluation of fields whose benefits are less immediately tangible, less material, less individual. If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.
+
+
+# public good
+
+Note: But what is that public good? We don't always do a terribly good job of articulating these things, of describing what we do and arguing on behalf of the values that sustain our work. That may be in part because it's hard to express our values without recourse to what feel to us like politically regressive, universalizing master narratives about the nature of the good that have long been used as means of solidifying and perpetuating the social order, with all its injustices and exclusions. And so instead of stating clearly and passionately the ethics and values and goals that we bring to our work, we critique. We protect ourselves with what Lisa Ruddick has described as "the game of academic cool": in order to avoid appearing naïve -- or worse, complicit -- we complicate; we argue; we read against the grain.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: One of the things that happens when we engage in this mode of critique is that we get accused of having primarily ideological ends; this is how our universities come to be accused of "brainwashing" their students, filling their heads with leftist rejections of the basic goodness of the dominant western culture. On campus, of course, we know that's not true; our classes in American history and in English literature may strive to teach the full range of that history and that literature, but western culture is far from being marginalized in the curriculum. And, in fact, even our most critical reading practices turn out to be perfectly compatible with the contemporary political landscape. In fact, in the larger project, I argue that our critiques of contemporary culture surface not just despite but because of the conservative-leaning systems and structures in which the university as a whole, and each of us as a result, is mired. Our tendency to read against the grain is part of our makeup precisely because of the ways that we are ourselves subject to politics rather than being able to stand outside and neutrally analyze the political. The politics we are subject to -- one that structures all institutions in the contemporary United States, and perhaps especially universities -- makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before. It is a politics structured around competition, and what historian Winfried Fluck has referred to as the race for individual distinction.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives -- on campus and off -- are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. From college admissions through the entirety of our careers, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which we are measured, and the best -- whatever that might mean in a given context -- are rewarded. In actual practice, however, our metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. We are in constant competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can't ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we're working together. Hence the danger of our agonistic modes of work: too often, that agon is turned on one another, discrediting competing theories rather than building on one another's work.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: This competitive individualism contradicts -- and in fact undermines -- all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning, but in actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from their colleagues, from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly managed by administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. This is no way to run a collective. It's also no way to build solidarity among academic units, or across categories of academic employment, or between the academy and the communities with which it engages.
+
+
+# the point
+
+Note: And perhaps that's the point. Perhaps we are locked into this endless competition with one another in order to keep us distracted from the work that we might do if we were truly joined together. The requirement that we continually compare ourselves with one another, that we take on only the work that will lead to our own individual achievement, is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social.
+
+
+# so
+
+Note: So how do we step off of this treadmill? How do we begin to insist upon living our academic lives another way? How do we return to the collective, the social, the communal potential that higher education should enable?
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: This, at last, is where I get to bring in generous thinking, a way of being that I propose as an alternative to the competitive thinking in which the academy is steeped. Generous thinking is not intended to be opposed to critical thinking -- in fact, I argue strongly that the best of our critical thinking is always steeped in generosity. Rather, generous thinking involves the whole-hearted embrace of the deepest values of the humanities -- among them, attention, care, and equity -- in order to create communities that think critically together, both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What is it I mean when I talk about generosity in this context? The book obviously spends much more time exploring this question, but for the moment: I think of generosity as a practice, something to which we have to return again and again. It's an approach to engagement that focuses first and foremost on developing a generosity of mind, an openness to possibility. That openness begins for me by trying to develop a listening presence in the world, which is to say a conversational disposition that is not merely waiting for my next opportunity to speak but instead genuinely paying attention to what is being said. It means caring about the concerns of my interlocutor as much as I care about my own. It means beginning from the assumption that in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn. Generous thinking also means working to think with rather than against the people and texts with whom I'm in dialogue. It means starting an encounter with an idea with _yes_ rather than _no_, with _and_ rather than _but_. _Yes, and_ creates the possibility for genuine dialogue, not only among academic colleagues but with our objects of study, our predecessors, and the many potential publics that surround us. _Yes, and_ asks us to step away from competition, from the race for professional distinction; when we allow ourselves to linger in _yes, and_, we create the possibility of working together to build something entirely new.
+
+
+# together
+
+Note: And it's through working together that we can begin to build the kinds of connections with the publics that might help turn the tide on the declining esteem our institutions, and higher education in general, are held in. This mode of generous thinking is already instantiated in a wide range of projects that focus on fostering public engagement in and through the work done in colleges and universities. Collaborations with the public can work to create a sense of collective ownership of and investment in the university, making the institution's relevance to contemporary communities abundantly clear.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: But this mode of working in public asks a lot of us. It asks us to stop disseminating our work solely in the venues that give us the greatest chance at the forms of individual prestige for which we're rewarded and instead start looking for ways to make our work a gift to the world. It asks us to accept the risk involved in writing for audiences with whom we're less familiar than we are with our colleagues, finding ways to draw them into our concerns and to acquaint ourselves with theirs. It asks us not just to bring our knowledge to those audiences, but to open space for them to become interlocutors, bringing us their own knowledge in response.
+
+
+# vulnerability
+
+Note: It takes a lot of work -- difficult, scary, failure-filled work -- to allow ourselves to become open to this kind of engagement. We're prone as scholars to focus on conversations with those we already know well, and in forms we already know we do well, and there are times when our attempts to address public audiences go badly. It's possible that Simon During is onto something here, when he notes that humanities professors, in the act of public professing, turn away from "doing what they do" and toward "sermonizing" about our fields' value. But the problem isn't assuming that there's a public value in what we do, it's the mode of sermonizing: too much professional public address takes the form or tone of the edifying lecture, instructing the less privileged on better ways of being. If, contra During, we do believe that there is a public value to the work of the humanities, we must find ways to engage the public as equals, without sermonizing. We have to prepare for and accept the vulnerability involved in doing away with the hierarchy of teacher and learner, and find ways to engage in open-ended, multidirectional, generous conversation.
+
+
+# possibility
+
+Note: In that conversation lies the possibility of building solidarity with the concerns of the publics we hope to reach, as well as the possibility of encouraging understanding of our own concerns. In that conversation -- and in the conversations in which you'll be engaging today -- lies the possibility of creating another mode of being for the twenty-first century university and those who care about it. In that conversation lies the possibility of developing a new understanding of how expertise is structured and how it functions. In that conversation lies the possibility of a higher education whose ends are social rather than individual, aimed at community-building rather than personal achievement. In all of those conversations -- in which we engage perspectives other than our own, in which we value the productions and manifestations of our diverse culture, in which we encounter the other in all its irreducible otherness -- lie the best of what the humanities can bring to the university, and the university to the world.
+
+
+# what's next?
+
+Note: What's next is in your hands. You've got a day of challenging conversations ahead; I will so look forward to rejoining you afterward to find out where all this takes you.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### and the Future of the University
+---
+
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start by thanking President Sands for that generous introduction, as well as thanking Anne Khademian, Karen Roberto, and Sylvester Johnson for everything they did to arrange my visit. This talk draws heavily on various parts of my book, _Generous Thinking_, which was published in February by Johns Hopkins. The overall argument of the project is that the future of higher education depends on institutions, and those of us who are part of them, successfully building engaged, trusting relationships with the publics that the university intended to serve. This is perhaps especially obvious for public colleges and universities, but I believe that it is no less true of private institutions, which depend on various kinds of public support for their success.
+
+
+
+##### http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
+
+Note: That we need to place some emphasis on building these relationships between our institutions and our publics can be seen in the results of an increasing number of reports and studies such as this one, released in 2017 by the Pew Research Center. The report documents a precipitous decline in the esteem colleges and universities are held in in the United States, primarily on the political right. It's not a surprise; we've seen this kind of shift in public opinion taking root for some time. Typically our response to this kind of report, however, has been to decry the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture and to turn inward, to spend more time talking internally with those who understand what we do. In that reaction, however, we run the risk of deepening the divide, allowing those who _want_ us to fade into irrelevance to say "see? They're out of touch. Who needs them anyway?" It's important for us to remember that this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
+
+
+
+##### http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the problem is not just that the public fails to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. So a large part of what I'm after in _Generous Thinking_ is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions _as_ communities, as well as _in interaction with_ communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while my argument about the importance of generosity for the future of the university might appear self-indulgent, a head-in-the-sand retreat into philosophizing and a refusal of real political action, I hope, in the book, to have put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
+
+
+# "we"
+
+Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
+
+
+> "The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." -- Helen Small
+
+Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
+
+
+# "them"
+
+Note: So it's important to be careful about how we define "us," precisely because every "us" implies a "them," and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly in service to the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other. Granted, sometimes "they" are imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that benefits from and takes in information we provide. But what might it mean if we understood ourselves, and our institutions, as embedded in and responsible to the complex collection of communities by which we are surrounded? How might we develop a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
+
+
+# "community"
+
+Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the university itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
+
+
+# solidarity
+
+Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis -- god, let this be their apotheosis -- we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
+
+
+# liberal education
+
+Note: However, in building those relationships, we have to contend with the fact that what faculty members actually _do_ on our campuses is often a mystery, and indeed a site of profound misunderstanding, for people outside the academic profession, and even at times for one another. One of the key areas of misunderstanding, and one that most needs opening up, is the fundamental purpose of higher education. Public figures such as politicians increasingly discuss colleges and universities as sites of workforce preparation, making it seem as if the provision of career-enhancing credentials were the sole purpose for which our institutions exist, and as if everything else they do that does not lead directly to economic growth were a misappropriation of funds. Those of us who work on campus, by and large, understand our institutions not as credentialing agencies but as sites of broad-based education: a "liberal" education in the original sense of the term. Of course the very term "liberal education," so natural to those of us steeped in it, has itself become profoundly politicized, as if the liberal aspect of higher education were not its breadth but its ideological bent. So we see, for instance, the state of Colorado stripping the term out of official university documents. But even where the concept of liberal education isn't imagined to be a cover for some revolution we're fomenting on campus, there's a widespread misconception about it that's almost worse: it is a mode of education in which we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students' heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path.
+
+
+# humanities
+
+Note: And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities. The portrait I'm about to sketch of the humanities today could be extended to many other areas within the curriculum -- for example, the sciences' focus on "basic science," or science without direct industry applicability, is often imagined to be just as frivolous. But the humanities -- the study of literature, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of culture -- are in certain ways both the core and the limit case of the liberal arts. The humanities cultivate an inquisitive mindset, they teach key skills of reading and interpretation, and they focus on writing in ways that can prepare a student to learn absolutely anything else over the course of their lives -- and yet they are the fields around which no end of hilarious jokes about what a student might actually do with that degree have been constructed. (The answer, of course: absolutely anything. As a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes clear, not only do humanities majors wind up gainfully employed, but they also wind up happy in their choices. But I digress.) The key thing to note is that the humanities serve as a bellwether of sorts: what has been happening to them is happening to higher education in general, if a little more slowly. So while I'm focused here on the kinds of arguments that are being made about the humanities in our culture today, it doesn't take too much of a stretch to imagine them being made about sociology, or about physics, or about any other field on campus that isn't named after a specific, well-paying career.
+
+
+# marginalization
+
+Note: The humanities, in any case, have long been lauded as providing students with a rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills with which they can engage the world around them. These skills are increasingly necessary in today's hypermediated, globalized, conflict-filled world -- and yet many humanities departments find themselves increasingly marginalized within their own institutions. This marginalization is related, if not directly attributable, to the degree to which students, parents, administrators, trustees, politicians, the media, and the public at large have been led in a self-reinforcing cycle to believe that the skills these fields provide are useless in the current economic environment. Someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about all those English majors working at Starbucks; commentators reinforce the sense that humanities majors are worth less than pre-professional degrees; parents strongly encourage their students to turn toward pragmatic fields that seem somehow to describe a job; administrators note a decline in humanities majors and cut budgets and positions; the jobs crisis for humanities PhDs worsens; someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about what all those adjuncts were planning on doing with that humanities PhD anyhow; and the whole thing intensifies. In many institutions, this draining away of majors and faculty and resources has reduced the humanities to a means of ensuring that students studying to become engineers and bankers are reminded of the human ends of their work. This is not a terrible thing in and of itself, but it is not a sufficient ground on which humanities fields can do their best work for the institution, or for the world.
+
+
+# spreading
+
+Note: And while this kind of cyclical crisis has not manifested to anything like the same extent in the sciences, there are early indications that it may be spreading in that direction. Where once the world at large seemed mostly to understand that scientific research, and the kinds of study that support it, are crucial to the general advancement of knowledge, recent shifts in funder policies and priorities suggest a growing scrutiny of that work's economic rather than educational impact, as well as a growing restriction on research areas that have been heavily politicized. The humanities, again, may well be the canary in the higher education coal mine, and for that reason, it's crucial that we pay close attention to what's happened in those fields, and particularly to the things that haven't worked as the humanities have attempted to remedy the situation.
+
+
+# defense
+
+Note: One of the key things that hasn't worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defenses of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy have been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which have had the desired impact. Calls to save the humanities issued by public figures have frequently left scholars annoyed, as they often begin with a somewhat retrograde sense of what we do and why, and thus frequently give the sense of trying to save our fields from us. (One might see, for instance, a column published in 2016 by the former chairman of the NEH, Bruce Cole, entitled "What's Wrong with the Humanities?", which begins memorably:
+
+
+> "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance." -- Bruce Cole
+
+Note: "Let's face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.") But perhaps even worse is the degree to which humanities professors themselves -- those one would think best positioned to make the case -- have failed to find traction with their arguments. As the unsuccessful defenses proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worse,
+
+
+> "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." -- Simon During
+
+Note: leading Simon During to grumble that "Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." And maybe we like it that way, as we are often those who take issue with our own defenses, bitterly disagreeing as we frequently do about the purposes and practices of our fields.
+
+
+# definition
+
+Note: Perhaps this is a good moment for us to stop and consider what it is that the humanities do do well, what the humanities are for. I will start with a basic definition of the humanities as a cluster of fields that focus on the careful study and analysis of cultures and their many modes of thought and forms of representation -- writing, music, art, media, and so on -- as they have developed and moved through time and across geographical boundaries, growing out of and adding to our senses of who we are as individuals, as groups, and as nations. The humanities are interested, then, in the ways that representations work, in the relationships between representations and social structures, in all the ways that human ideas and their expression shape and are shaped by human culture. In this definition we might begin to see the possibility that studying literature or history or art or film or philosophy might not be solely about the object itself, but instead about a way of engaging with the world: in the process we develop the ability to read and interpret what we see and hear, the insight to understand the multiple layers of what is being communicated and why, and the capacity to put together for ourselves an appropriate, thoughtful contribution to our culture.
+
+
+# disagreement
+
+Note: Now, the first thing to note about this definition is that I am certain that many humanities scholars who hear it will disagree with it -- they will have nuances and correctives to offer -- and it is important to understand that this disagreement does not necessarily mean that my definition is wrong. Nor, however, do I mean to suggest that the nuances and correctives presented would be wrong. Rather, that form of disagreement is at the heart of how we do what we do: we hear one another's interpretations (of texts, of performances, of historical events) and we push back against them. We advance the work in our field through disagreement and revision. This agonistic approach, however, is both a strength of the humanities -- and by extension of the university in general -- and its Achilles' heel, a thought to which I'll return shortly.
+
+
+# sermonizing
+
+Note: For the moment, though, back to Simon During and his sense that the humanities are terrible at self-promotion. During's complaint, levied at the essays included in Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewitt's volume, _The Humanities and Public Life_, is largely that, in the act of self-defense, humanities scholars leave behind doing what they do and instead turn to "sermonizing" (his word) about the value of what they do. He argues that part of the problem is the assumption that the humanities as we practice them ought to have a public life in the first place. He winds up suggesting that we should continue to ensure that there is sufficient state support for the humanities so that students who do not already occupy a position of financial comfort can study our fields, but that we should not stretch beyond that point by arguing for the public importance of studying the humanities, because that importance is primarily, overwhelmingly, private.
+
+
+# privatization
+
+Note: This sense that education in the humanities is of primarily private value is increasingly in today's popular discourse extended to higher education in general: the purpose, we are told, of a college degree is some form of personal enrichment, whether financial or otherwise, rather than a social good. This privatization of higher education's benefits -- part of the general privatization that Chris Newfield has referred to as the academy's "great mistake" -- has been accompanied by a related shift in its costs from the state to individual families and students, resulting in the downward spiral in funding and other forms of public support in which our institutions and our fields are caught, as well as the astronomically increasing debt load faced by students and their families. As long as a university education is assumed to have a predominantly personal rather than social benefit, it will be argued that making such an education possible is a private rather than a public responsibility. And that mindset will of necessity lead to the devaluation of fields whose benefits are less immediately tangible, less material, less individual. If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.
+
+
+# public good
+
+Note: But what is that public good? We don't always do a terribly good job of articulating these things, of describing what we do and arguing on behalf of the values that sustain our work. That may be in part because it's hard to express our values without recourse to what feel to us like politically regressive, universalizing master narratives about the nature of the good that have long been used as means of solidifying and perpetuating the social order, with all its injustices and exclusions. And so instead of stating clearly and passionately the ethics and values and goals that we bring to our work, we critique. We protect ourselves with what Lisa Ruddick has described as "the game of academic cool": in order to avoid appearing naïve -- or worse, complicit -- we complicate; we argue; we read against the grain.
+
+
+# critique
+
+Note: One of the things that happens when we engage in this mode of critique is that we get accused of having primarily ideological ends; this is how our universities come to be accused of "brainwashing" their students, filling their heads with leftist rejections of the basic goodness of the dominant western culture. On campus, of course, we know that's not true; our classes in American history and in English literature may strive to teach the full range of that history and that literature, but western culture is far from being marginalized in the curriculum. And, in fact, even our most critical reading practices turn out to be perfectly compatible with the contemporary political landscape. In fact, in the larger project, I argue that our critiques of contemporary culture surface not just despite but because of the conservative-leaning systems and structures in which the university as a whole, and each of us as a result, is mired. Our tendency to read against the grain is part of our makeup precisely because of the ways that we are ourselves subject to politics rather than being able to stand outside and neutrally analyze the political. The politics we are subject to -- one that structures all institutions in the contemporary United States, and perhaps especially universities -- makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before. It is a politics structured around competition, and what historian Winfried Fluck has referred to as the race for individual distinction.
+
+
+# individualism
+
+Note: However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives -- on campus and off -- are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. From college admissions through the entirety of our careers, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which we are measured, and the best -- whatever that might mean in a given context -- are rewarded. In actual practice, however, our metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. We are in constant competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can't ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we're working together. Hence the danger of our agonistic modes of work: too often, that agon is turned on one another, discrediting competing theories rather than building on one another's work.
+
+
+# competition
+
+Note: This competitive individualism contradicts -- and in fact undermines -- all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning, but in actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from their colleagues, from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly managed by administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. This is no way to run a collective. It's also no way to build solidarity among academic units, or across categories of academic employment, or between the academy and the communities with which it engages.
+
+
+# the point
+
+Note: And perhaps that's the point. Perhaps we are locked into this endless competition with one another in order to keep us distracted from the work that we might do if we were truly joined together. The requirement that we continually compare ourselves with one another, that we take on only the work that will lead to our own individual achievement, is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social.
+
+
+# so
+
+Note: So how do we step off of this treadmill? How do we begin to insist upon living our academic lives another way? How do we return to the collective, the social, the communal potential that higher education should enable?
+
+
+# generous thinking
+
+Note: This, at last, is where I get to bring in generous thinking, a way of being that I propose as an alternative to the competitive thinking in which the academy is steeped. Generous thinking is not intended to be opposed to critical thinking -- in fact, I argue strongly that the best of our critical thinking is always steeped in generosity. Rather, generous thinking involves the whole-hearted embrace of the deepest values of the humanities -- among them, attention, care, and equity -- in order to create communities that think critically together, both on campus and across the campus borders.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: What is it I mean when I talk about generosity in this context? The book obviously spends much more time exploring this question, but for the moment: I think of generosity as a practice, something to which we have to return again and again. It's an approach to engagement that focuses first and foremost on developing a generosity of mind, an openness to possibility. That openness begins for me by trying to develop a listening presence in the world, which is to say a conversational disposition that is not merely waiting for my next opportunity to speak but instead genuinely paying attention to what is being said. It means caring about the concerns of my interlocutor as much as I care about my own. It means beginning from the assumption that in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn. Generous thinking also means working to think with rather than against the people and texts with whom I'm in dialogue. It means starting an encounter with an idea with _yes_ rather than _no_, with _and_ rather than _but_. _Yes, and_ creates the possibility for genuine dialogue, not only among academic colleagues but with our objects of study, our predecessors, and the many potential publics that surround us. _Yes, and_ asks us to step away from competition, from the race for professional distinction; when we allow ourselves to linger in _yes, and_, we create the possibility of working together to build something entirely new.
+
+
+# together
+
+Note: And it's through working together that we can begin to build the kinds of connections with the publics that might help turn the tide on the declining esteem our institutions, and higher education in general, are held in. This mode of generous thinking is already instantiated in a wide range of projects that focus on fostering public engagement in and through the work done in colleges and universities. Collaborations with the public can work to create a sense of collective ownership of and investment in the university, making the institution's relevance to contemporary communities abundantly clear.
+
+
+# working in public
+
+Note: But this mode of working in public asks a lot of us. It asks us to stop disseminating our work solely in the venues that give us the greatest chance at the forms of individual prestige for which we're rewarded and instead start looking for ways to make our work a gift to the world. It asks us to accept the risk involved in writing for audiences with whom we're less familiar than we are with our colleagues, finding ways to draw them into our concerns and to acquaint ourselves with theirs. It asks us not just to bring our knowledge to those audiences, but to open space for them to become interlocutors, bringing us their own knowledge in response.
+
+
+# vulnerability
+
+Note: It takes a lot of work -- difficult, scary, failure-filled work -- to allow ourselves to become open to this kind of engagement. We're prone as scholars to focus on conversations with those we already know well, and in forms we already know we do well, and there are times when our attempts to address public audiences go badly. It's possible that Simon During is onto something here, when he notes that humanities professors, in the act of public professing, turn away from "doing what they do" and toward "sermonizing" about our fields' value. But the problem isn't assuming that there's a public value in what we do, it's the mode of sermonizing: too much professional public address takes the form or tone of the edifying lecture, instructing the less privileged on better ways of being. If, contra During, we do believe that there is a public value to the work of the humanities, we must find ways to engage the public as equals, without sermonizing. We have to prepare for and accept the vulnerability involved in doing away with the hierarchy of teacher and learner, and find ways to engage in open-ended, multidirectional, generous conversation.
+
+
+# possibility
+
+Note: In that conversation lies the possibility of building solidarity with the concerns of the publics we hope to reach, as well as the possibility of encouraging understanding of our own concerns. In that conversation -- and in the conversations in which you'll be engaging today -- lies the possibility of creating another mode of being for the twenty-first century university and those who care about it. In that conversation lies the possibility of developing a new understanding of how expertise is structured and how it functions. In that conversation lies the possibility of a higher education whose ends are social rather than individual, aimed at community-building rather than personal achievement. In all of those conversations -- in which we engage perspectives other than our own, in which we value the productions and manifestations of our diverse culture, in which we encounter the other in all its irreducible otherness -- lie the best of what the humanities can bring to the university, and the university to the world.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### and Diversity and Inclusion
+---
+
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start by thanking Dean Learman and Karen Eley Sanders for making this conversation possible. I'm going to start with a few brief thoughts about the relationship between generous thinking and the questions of diversity and inclusion that many universities are grappling with today, and then I hope that we can open this up into discussion.
+
+
+
+##### http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
+
+Note: - The problem: the Pew Research Center has recently reported a “larger than normal” decline in public opinion regarding higher education in the United States.
+- This decline in public opinion is of a piece with contemporary rejections of many forms of expertise, as documented by Tom Nichols in _The Death of Expertise_: not just an assumption that one opinion is as good as any other, but an active refusal of anything that presents itself as expert knowledge
+- And worse, it’s resulting in slashed public university budgets and a range of other political attacks on institutions of higher education
+- The result is that these universities, which were founded to serve the people of their states, or regions, or communities, are decreasingly able to do so
+
+
+
+
+Note: - My argument is that the future of the university, and of the work we do within it, depends on our ability to rebuild caring, trusting relationships with the publics by which our institutions are surrounded, and that the process of doing so asks us to think differently about how we wield our expertise in those relationships
+- My sense is that a lot of what I’ve just described could easily be translated to thinking about the medical professions and how they interact with and are seen by the communities they serve
+- In the book, I advocate for bringing what I call “generous thinking” to bear in all of the ways that we work, both with one another and with the publics we engage
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: - “Generous thinking” is, as I define it, a set of regular practices like meditating or exercise, something that’s never quite complete but to which we return again and again
+- So generosity in this sense is not about giving, or about volunteerism, but instead about a willingness to listen, taking “yes, and” rather than “no, but” as the starting place for our responses
+- It means a deeper, more complex approach to empathy than is popular represented: not “I feel your pain” but instead “I know I can’t ever really feel your pain but I hear and take seriously your expression of it”
+- And it means valuing the experiences of everyone around us, especially those whose experiences are radically different from our own
+
+
+# diversity and inclusion
+
+Note: - Through this kind of generosity, we can begin to build real diversity and inclusion: not just welcoming others into our way of doing things, but opening up the ways we do things to recognize and honor the experiences and values that others bring to the work
+
+
+- What experiences of misunderstanding or disagreement have you had in the classroom? In clinical settings? What have you taken away from those moments?
+- How can bringing more perspectives and experiences to bear within university settings improve the quality of higher education?
+- How can bringing more perspectives and experiences to bear in clinical settings improve the quality of patient care?
+- How can generous thinking be made a key value of the medical and life sciences community? How can generosity help you grapple with your responsibilities both within this community and to the communities that you serve?
+
+Note: This is where I'd like to open discussion. I've listed a number of questions here, but you may have questions or issues of your own you'd like to discuss. What I'm going to ask you to do is take five minutes or so to talk with your neighbors, and think together about what you'd like to share with the larger group.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### and External Partnerships
+---
+
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: I want to start by Anne for chauffeuring me around for the last two days and for making this tour of Virginia Tech possible. I'm going to start with a very brief overview of the concepts I'm working with in Generous Thinking, and then I hope that we can open this up into discussion about the kinds of work you're doing here.
+
+
+
+##### http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
+
+Note: - The problem: the Pew Research Center has recently reported a “larger than normal” decline in public opinion regarding higher education in the United States.
+- This decline in public opinion is of a piece with contemporary rejections of many forms of expertise, as documented by Tom Nichols in _The Death of Expertise_: not just an assumption that one opinion is as good as any other, but an active refusal of anything that presents itself as expert knowledge
+- And worse, it’s resulting in slashed public university budgets and a range of other political attacks on institutions of higher education
+- The result is that these universities, which were founded to serve the people of their states, or regions, or communities, are decreasingly able to do so
+
+
+
+
+Note: - My argument is that the future of the university, and of the work we do within it, depends on our ability to rebuild caring, trusting relationships with the publics by which our institutions are surrounded, and that the process of doing so asks us to think differently about how we wield our expertise in those relationships
+- In the book, I advocate for bringing what I call “generous thinking” to bear in all of the ways that we work, both with one another and with the publics we engage
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: - “Generous thinking” is, as I define it, a set of regular practices like meditating or exercise, something that’s never quite complete but to which we return again and again
+- So generosity in this sense is not about giving, or about volunteerism, but instead about a willingness to listen, taking “yes, and” rather than “no, but” as the starting place for our responses
+- It's in large part about listening to the communities of which the university is a part, finding out more about their values and needs and how we might be able to work together to solve some of our common problems
+- And in the process it means enabling the publics around us to believe that the university really belongs to them
+
+
+# partnerships
+
+Note: - So it means working in real partnership with the communities that we're engaged with, finding ways to work together on problems that none of us can solve alone
+- But partnerships can be difficult in lots of ways: there are partners who have the potential to bring resources to the university but then want to control the ways those resources are used; there are partners whose changing interests can shift the university away from its core mission
+
+
+- What kinds of partners does the university currently work with, and what kinds of partners *should* it work with?
+- What kinds of problems could be approached through new kinds of partnerships that can't be tackled without them?
+- What challenges have surfaced in your experiences of external partnerships, and how might those challenges be addressed?
+
+Note: So this is where I'd like to open discussion. I've listed a few questions here, but you may have questions or issues of your own you'd like to discuss. What I'm going to ask you to do is take five minutes or so to talk with your neighbors, and think together about what you'd like to share with the larger group.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+ Generous Thinking: Working in Public
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Working in Public
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Before I get started, I want to thank Cheryl for inviting me to speak here with you today; I'm delighted to have this chance to talk a bit about the kinds of work, and the kinds of futures, that greater public engagement in scholarly work could make possible.
+
+
+
+
+Note: Part of what I hope to address today stems from my recent book, _Generous Thinking_. The book as a whole argues that the future of the university as we have known it depends heavily on rebuilding relationships of trust between our institutions and the publics that they serve. The book addresses lots of aspects of those relationships and ways they might be fostered, but the key bit for today is that the networks and spaces that support digital scholarship are crucial to building and maintaining connections with a range of broader publics in the context of the work we do on campus.
+
+
+# background
+
+Note: I come to this work through a slightly idiosyncratic path. Back in 2002, I'd just finished the long process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and there seemed the very real possibility that no one else might ever read it. (I wasn't wrong -- it took another four years to get the thing published, for a lot of complicated reasons.) And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience. People read it, and I knew they read it because they left comments responding to and interacting with him. And I thought, wow, that's it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: My blog, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up doing something more interesting than I expected: it helped me build a small community. I found a number of other early academic bloggers, all of whom were in ongoing comment-and-crosslink conversations. Those relationships, which opened out into a growing network of scholars working online, were crucial to me as a somewhat isolated assistant professor. I had struggled to make the intellectual and professional connections that might help my writing develop, and it was the blog that provided the first real opportunity. Even more, posts I published there were the first pieces of my writing to be cited in more formal academic settings.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I'd just finished the draft of my second book. Rather than simply have the manuscript sent out for anonymous peer review, I asked my press to let me post the draft online for open comment too. I get asked a lot about that decision, especially how I worked up the courage to release something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth of the matter is that the risks didn't figure into my thinking. What I knew was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, with whom I'd had productive, engaging interactions that contributed to the book's development, and I wanted to hear their thoughts about where I'd wound up. I trusted them to help me--and they did, overwhelmingly so.
+
+
+# 2009
+
+Note: It's important to acknowledge the entire boatload of privilege not-thinking about the risks requires; I was writing from a sufficiently safe position that allowing flaws in my work-in-progress to be publicly visible wasn't a real threat. It's also not incidental that this was 2009, not 2019--a much more naive hour in the age of the Internet. The events of the last few years, from GamerGate to the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, have made the risks of opening one's work up online all too palpable. But my experiences with the blog, with the book manuscript, and with other projects I've opened to online discussion, still leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kind of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work's development. And--perhaps most importantly today--willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I tested that belief in 2018 by opening the draft of _Generous Thinking_ to a similar open review. Between early February and the end of March, I staged a process in which I first invited a group of readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, after which I opened the project to the world. In the end, 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own), giving me a rich view of the revision process that lay ahead. It wasn't all rainbows and unicorns: there are a few comments that sting, and a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking had been a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is better for having gone through this public process.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: So what I'm focused on is the ways that a digital scholarship network like this one can can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that do not just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
+
+
+# obstacles
+
+Note: There are, of course, real obstacles that have to be faced in this process. Some of them reflect the communication platforms that we use today. Blogs don't readily produce the same level of engagement that they did in the early 2000s. In part this has to do with their massive proliferation, and in part it has to do with the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks. As a result, online communities of readers and writers are unlikely to develop spontaneously; instead, building community around online work has to be far more deliberate, reaching out to potential readers and participants and finding ways to draw them, and ourselves, back into sustained conversation.
+
+
+# trolls
+
+Note: And of course the nature of internet discourse has changed in recent years as much as has its location. Trolls are not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one's work public can involve significant risk--especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
+
+
+# no easy answers
+
+Note: I do not have easy answers to these problems; I do not have a perfect platform to offer, and I do not know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. Countering these destructive forces requires advance preparation and focused responses. Ensuring that public discourse about scholarly work remains productive requires a tremendous amount of collective labor, and the careful development and maintenance of trust, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But there are several other challenges that I want to explore a bit today, challenges that are about the ways that we as scholars do our work, the ways that we can draw a range of broader publics to that work, and the ways that we can ensure that the work we do together is supported in an ongoing way.
+
+
+# access
+
+Note: The first is the need to ensure that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it is impossible for anyone to care about what we do if they cannot see it. And yet, perhaps because we assume we are mostly writing for one another, the results of our work end up overwhelmingly in places where it cannot be found--and even if it is found, where it cannot be accessed--by members of the broader public.
+
+
+# accessibility
+
+Note: The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to get their hands on it, but enabling them to see in it the things that they might care about. We often resent the ways that academic work gets "dumbed down" in public venues, but we might think instead about ways that we can productively mainstream our arguments, engaging readers where they are, rather than always forcing them to come find us, in our venues and on our terms.
+
+
+# participation
+
+Note: Beyond access and accessibility, however, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural creation by more kinds of public thinkers. In other words, we need to focus not just on the public's potential consumption of the work that is done by the university, but also about potential modes of co-production that involve communities in the work of the university. Such collaborations might serve as a style of work that our universities can fruitfully model for the rest of our culture: new modes of scholarship done not just for but with the world.
+
+
+# networks
+
+Note: Networks for digital scholarship have the potential to create the conditions for greater access, for greater accessibility, and for greater public participation in the work that we all do as scholars. By encouraging this kind of work, I don't mean to suggest that there is no room for more traditional modes of internal exchange among field-based experts; there is, and should be. But the twenty-first century university must provide means by which the results of those exchanges can become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. Our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone at all times, of course, but different aspects of our work might engage with different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences--and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors--is a crucial skill for today's scholars, and a skill that needs to be cultivated and supported.
+
+
+# open access
+
+Note: The simplest way of making more scholarly work more available to the public is by making that work available through open access venues. There's a long history to the open access movement, of course, and in the book I dig into that history and the ties the movement created between its altruistic goals -- establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge -- and it more pragmatic arguments about the impact that public access might have on the advancement of research. The key point is that what's good for the public turns out to be good for scholarship, too.
+
+
+# engagement
+
+Note: If we publish in ways that enable any interested reader to access our work, that work will be more read, more cited, creating more impact for us and for our fields. Making our work more openly accessible enables scholars in areas of the world without extensive library budgets, as well as U.S.-based instructors and students at undergraduate teaching institutions and secondary schools, to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. All of this can produce an expansion in our readership and an expansion in our influence -- an unmitigatedly good thing.
+
+
+# resistance
+
+Note: Any yet, it's clear that we often resist opening our work to broader publics, for a variety of reasons. Many of us keep our work restricted to our own discourse communities because we fear the consequences of making it available to broader publics--and not without justification. The public often seems determined to misunderstand us, to interpret what we say with focused hostility or, nearly as bad, utter dismissiveness. Because the subject matter of much of the humanities and social sciences seems as though it should be accessible, our determination to wrestle with difficult or highly politicized questions and our use of expert methods and vocabularies can feel threatening to many readers. They fail to understand us; we take their failure to understand as an insult. (Admittedly, sometimes it is, but not always.) Given this failure to communicate, we see no harm in keeping our work closed off from the public, arguing that we're only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter?
+
+
+# why
+
+Note: It matters because the more we close our work away from the public, and the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of the academy, the more we undermine the public's willingness to support our research and our institutions. As numerous public humanities scholars including Kathleen Woodward have argued, the major crisis facing the funding of higher education is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good. We wind up strengthening that conviction and worsening the crisis when we treat our work as private. Closing our work away from non-scholarly readers might protect us from public criticism, but it can't protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous in the current economic and political environment. The risks are real, especially for scholars working in politically engaged fields, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public, including our governments, of the relevance of what we do on campus.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: And of course engaging readers in thoughtful discussions about the important issues we study lies at the core of the academic mission. It is at the heart of our values. We don't create knowledge in order to hoard it, but instead, every day, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and in our writing, we embrace an ethic of generosity, of paying forward knowledge that we have received as a gift. We teach, as we were taught; we publish, as we learn from the publications of others. We cannot pay back those who came before us, but we can and do give to those who come after. Our participation in an ethical, voluntary scholarly community is grounded in the obligations we hold for one another, obligations that derive from the generosity we have received.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: Okay, idealistic, right? And that kind of idealism is all well and good, but it doesn't adequately account for an academic universe in which we are evaluated based on individual achievement, and in which prestige often overrides all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for and effects of that bias toward prestige in another part of the larger project; here, I want to think a bit about its effects on the individual scholar, as well as that scholar's role in perpetuating this hierarchical status quo. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily shades over into a sense that the more exclusive a publication's audience, the higher its value. // This is, at its most benign, self-defeating; if we privilege exclusivity above all else, we wind up undermining our work's potential cultural impact; as David Parry has commented,
+
+
+"Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge."
+
+Note: "Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge." It is only in giving it away, in making it as publicly available as possible, that we produce knowledge. As it is, most of the players involved in the production of scholarship have always been engaged in a process of "giving it away": authors, reviewers, scholarly editors, and others involved in the process have long offered their work to others without requiring direct compensation. The question, of course, is how we offer it, and to whom.
+
+
+# gift economy
+
+Note: In fact, the entire system of scholarly communication runs on an engine of generosity, one that demonstrates the ways that private enterprise can never adequately provide for the public good. So rather than committing our work to private channels, signing it over to corporate publishers that profit at higher education's expense, how might all of the members of the university community--researchers, instructors, libraries, presses, and administrations--instead work to develop and support a system based on our highest values? What if we understood sustainability in scholarly communication not as the ability to generate revenue, but instead the ability to keep the engine of generosity running?
+
+
+# free
+
+Note: It's important, however, to distinguish between this call to generosity and the injunction to work for free produced by the devaluing of much intellectual and professional labor within the so-called information economy. A mode of forced volunteerism has spread throughout contemporary culture, compelling college students and recent graduates to take on unpaid internships in order to "get a foot in the door," compelling creative professionals to do free work in order to "build exposure," thereby restricting opportunity to those who can already afford to seek it. And of course there are too many academic equivalents: vastly underpaid adjunct instructors, overworked graduate assistants, an ever-growing list of mentoring and other service requirements that fall disproportionately on the shoulders of junior faculty, women faculty, and faculty of color.
+
+
+# labor
+
+Note: Labor, in fact, is the primary reason that we can't just simply make all scholarly publications available for free online. While the scholarship itself might be provided without charge, the authors have by and large been paid by their employers or their granting organizations, and will be compensated with a publication credit, a line on a c.v., a positive annual review outcome. Reviewers are rarely paid (almost never by journals; very modestly by book publishers), but receive insight into developing work and the ability to shape their fields and support their communities by way of compensation. But there is a vast range of other labor that is necessary for the production of publications, even when distributed online: managing submissions, communicating with authors; copyediting, proofreading, website design and maintenance, and so on. We need to understand that labor as professional too and compensate it accordingly.
+
+
+# responsibility
+
+Note: So where I am asking for generosity--for giving it away--it is from those who are fully credited and compensated: those tenured and tenure-track faculty and other fully-employed members of our professions who can and should contribute to the world the products of the labor that they have already been supported in undertaking. Similarly, generosity is called for from those institutions that can and should underwrite the production of scholarship on behalf of the academy and the public at large. It is our mission, and our responsibility, to look beyond our own walls to the world beyond, to enlarge the gifts that we have received by making them public. Doing so requires that we hold the potential for public engagement with our work among our highest values, that we understand such potential engagement as a public good that we can share in creating.
+
+
+# interest
+
+Note: But there are steps beyond simply making work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn't possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that's fine, to an extent: communication within a discourse community plays a crucial role in that community's development, and there must always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But that inwardly-focused sharing of work has been privileged to our detriment. Scholars are not rewarded--and in fact are at times actively punished--for publishing in popular venues. And because the values instantiated by our rewards systems have a profound effect on the ways we train our students, we build the wall between academic and public discourse higher and higher with every passing cohort.
+
+
+# public-facing
+
+Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing publications that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, venues like the _Los Angeles Review of Books_ and _Public Books_. There are also a host of other kinds of digital projects that demonstrate the ways many scholars are already working in multiple registers, engaging with multiple audiences. These venues open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture.
+
+
+# writing
+
+Note: But if we are to open our ideas to larger public audiences, we need to give some serious thought to the mode and voice of our writing. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn't restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many mainstream publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to focus on complexity and nuance, and the result is often lines of argumentation, and lines of prose, that are far from straight-forward. Getting past the accusations of obscurity and irrelevance requires us to open up our rhetoric, to demonstrate to a generally educated reader how and why what we do matters.
+
+
+# accessible
+
+Note: Again, not all academic writing needs to be done in a public register. But we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible to the public. And we are all already called, to varying extents, to be public intellectuals. Our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus and thereby building support for that work. But for that project to be successful, scholars need to be prepared to bridge the communication gaps, by honing our ability to alternate speaking with one another and speaking with different audiences.
+
+
+# learn
+
+Note: So we need to think a bit about what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work. Public-facing writing--as many editors of mainstream intellectual publications would note--is very different from academic writing, and by and large it is not something scholars are trained to do. But numerous initiatives are working to help scholarly authors focus and express the ideas contained in their scholarly publications in ways that help broader audiences engage with them. Ideally, this kind of writing should become part of graduate training across the university.
+
+
+# publics
+
+Note: However, a key component of the work of the public intellectual is not simply addressing but actually helping to build a public in the first place. Nancy Fraser long since noted the fragmentation of contemporary public life into a "plurality of competing counterpublics." We need to consider the possibility that, in retreating from direct engagement with the public, we have actually contributed to the public's fragmentation. As Alan Jacobs has noted, "Subaltern counterpublics are essential for those who have never had seats at the table of power, but they can also be immensely appealing to those who feel that their public presence and authority have waned." The retreat of scholars into private intellectual life has produced a tighter sense of community and the comfort of being understood, but at the cost of withdrawing scholarly issues and perspectives from public view, and with the result of further fragmentation of the public itself. If we are to return to public discourse, if we are to connect with--and perhaps even be responsible for creating--a range of broader publics, we're going to have to contend with those publics' multiplicity, even as we try to draw them into dialogue.
+
+
+# work
+
+Note: Most importantly, perhaps, we need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. Our processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don't meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, when scholars make the transition to more public prose, their work is frequently underrewarded, if not actively derided, back on campus. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it's likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must "dumb down" key ideas in order to do so. If we're going to make publicly engaged digital scholarship genuinely sustainable, we have to ensure that it's properly respected, and properly rewarded, so that the focus can genuinely be placed on engaging with the communities the work is trying to reach.
+
+
+# understanding
+
+Note: This is in some ways the heart of the problem: we too often do not know how to reach those publics, because we don't fully understand them. And, as I argue at length in the larger project, this is in no small part because we spend a bit too much time talking and not enough time listening to them. We need to make room for the public in our arguments, and in our prose, but we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having found a way to connect with a broader audience, having helped to transform that audience into something like a public, how do we then activate that public to work on its own behalf?
+
+
+# public scholarship
+
+Note: Here is where our working in public--creating public access, valuing public engagement, becoming public intellectuals--transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, a scholarship that is not simply performed for the public but that includes and is in fact given over to the publics with whom we work. In public scholarship, members of our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants, as stakeholders.
+
+
+# citizen humanities
+
+Note: Recent experiments in "citizen science" provide some potentially interesting examples, projects like Galaxy Zoo that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. But what might the citizen humanities look like? It might look like museum exhibits such as Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California, which engaged members of local Pacific communities in the planning and development processes. It might look like The September 11 Digital Archive, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project, which presents first-hand accounts of the events of that day, along with photos, emails, and other archival materials from more than 150,000 participants. It might look like the Baltimore Stories project at UMBC, which used humanities scholarship as a convening force to bring community organizers, educators, and non-profit organizations together to explore narratives of race in American life. What these projects have in common is that each of them explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern belongs to them. The work involved is theirs not just to learn from but to shape and define as well. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
+
+
+# "peers"
+
+Note: By working in publicly engaged ways, and by bringing those publics into the self-reflexive modes of humanities- and social science-based critique, we have the potential to produce a renewed conception of how intellectual life operates in contemporary culture -- but that renewed conception is going to require us to be open to a new understanding of the notion of our "peers." Open, public scholarship might lead us to understand the peer not as a pre-existing credential but instead as a status that emerges through participation in the processes of a community of practice. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we address within that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening the notion of the intellectual, or the peer, to a much broader range of forms of critical inquiry and active project participation has the potential to reshape relations between town and gown, to lay the groundwork for more productive conversations across the borders of the campus, and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work of the academy matters for our culture as a whole.
+
+
+# networks
+
+Note: And much of that work begins with establishing the networks through which new forms of collaborative, public scholarship can be realized. New institutional structures might enable us to ask what would be possible if we were to open up our scholarly practices up to real public engagement, to deep interdisciplinarity, to new modes of working. How can new networks enable public universities like ours to more genuinely focus on the mission of bringing knowledge to the people of the state? How might such a network draw public support back to the institution by demonstrating the extent to which the work done here is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public? For public universities to win back public support, they must find ways like this--structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just the mission statement but of the actual mission--to place publicly engaged work at the top of its priorities. And that starts in places like this, where scholars can come together to explore new work in and with the public.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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+ What Counts
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+# What Counts
+---
+#### [Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://kfitz.domains.msu)
+[@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitz@msu.edu](mailto:kfitz@msu.edu)
+
+Note: I want to start by thanking Martin for inviting me to talk with you today, as well as thanking Jennifer for everything involved in getting me here.
+
+
+## agenda
+
+1. problems
+2. principles
+
+Note: First, a brief overview of what I'm going to talk about this morning. We're experiencing some problems in our promotion and tenure processes and policies that are being surfaced in many cases by the digital work that many scholars are producing today. I'm going to talk through a few of those problems, and then present a highly opinionated set of principles that I'd like to see applied to our processes and policies in order to make them do the work we actually intend them to do.
+
+
+## contradictions
+
+Note: The largest, and in fact most central of the problems that I am seeing in our tenure and promotion processes and policies today is that they are riven with internal contradictions, contradictions that are in some cases inevitable but that in many cases are engineered into the process for what seem to us like good reasons.
+
+
+## small / large
+
+Note: Among the inevitable contradictions is the fact that they apply to a vanishingly small population, and thus should represent a similarly small problem, and yet for that small population they can support or disrupt an entire career, and so are of the highest possible stakes, making changes to our processes and standards seem like an insurmountably large obstacle to institutional change.
+
+
+## individual / institutional
+
+Note: The enormity of this obstacle to institutional change is heightened by the contradiction between these policies' institutional ownership and their individual implementation; despite the fact that tenure and promotion reviews are conducted and overseen by people with agency within our institutions, those people often feel themselves to be powerless before institutional policy.
+
+
+## personal / impersonal
+
+Note: And as so many institutional policies and processes, they are intended to be neutral, systemic, and impersonal, all in the name of being fair, and yet they are always deeply personal in their application, especially for the scholar undergoing the evaluation.
+
+
+## subjective / objective
+
+Note: As a result, where the tenure and promotion process should at least in theory require scholars and administrators to exercise the greatest, most careful possible judgment -- an inevitably subjective judgment -- we end up, for many highly important reasons, creating and implementing processes that are as objective as possible.
+
+
+## quality / quantity
+
+Note: And in order for those processes to be objective in their design and their implementation, we wind up turning away from assessments of the work's quality to assessments of its quantity.
+
+
+## counting
+
+Note: In other words, we wind up counting things. And we obsess about what counts, what it counts for, what it counts as.
+
+
+## digital
+
+Note: One thing you might note about all of those contradictions and concerns in promotion and tenure policies and processes is that none of them have much to do with the changing nature of scholarship today, or the growing role of digital scholarship. In other words, promotion and tenure is always already problematic, as the French theorists might suggest, and the digital transitions we're seeing today are likely only rendering those contradictions visible.
+
+
+## first
+
+Note: Given that, it would probably be a good idea for us to start by considering what it is we're trying to do in the promotion and tenure process in the first place, so that we might find ways to best surface those purposes and principles in whatever our processes become.
+
+
+## threshold
+
+Note: We've long treated that review as a threshold exercise: an assessment of whether the candidate has done enough to qualify. The result, in too many cases, is burnout and unhappiness in the associate rank.
+
+
+
+
+Note: There’s a reason, after all, why The Onion found this funny, and it’s not just about the privileges of lifetime tenure producing entitled slackers. Assistant professors run the pre-tenure period as a race and, making it over the final hurdle, too often collapse, finding themselves exhausted, without focus or direction, depressed to discover that what is ahead of them is only more of the same. The problem is not the height of the hurdles or the length of the track; it’s the notion that the pre-tenure period should be thought of as a race at all, something with a finish line at which one will either have won or lost, but will anyway be done.
+
+
+## milestone
+
+Note: I believe that we can find a better way of supporting and assessing the careers of junior faculty if we start by approaching the tenure review in a different way entirely, thinking of it not as a threshold exercise but instead as a milestone, a moment of checking in with the progress of a much longer, more sustained and sustainable career.
+
+
+## intellectual leadership
+
+Note: This notion of the milestone comes to me in part from the ways my dean, Chris Long, and my associate dean, Bill Hart-Davidson, have recently talked with faculty from the College of Arts & Letters at MSU about charting their path to intellectual leadership. Charting this path requires first understanding what "intellectual leadership" is (and how it might change over the course of a career), and then establishing some steps to get there. Early in a career, for instance, intellectual leadership might be about establishing a voice within the process; later, it might look more like helping other scholars establish their own voices. And in every case, depending on the scholar's long-term goals, the steps along the path are going to be different. Some of these steps are smaller, stepping stones, things the scholar can control: writing an article, submitting a grant proposal, and so forth. Larger steps toward the long term goal -- steps over which the scholar might not have full control -- are milestones: publishing a book, getting tenure.
+
+
+## goals vs steps
+
+Note: However much these milestones might look like end goals before we get to them, they really are steps along the way. The goal of intellectual leadership remains farther out, on the horizon. Milestones like the tenure review, however, provide moments of checking in to ensure that things are on course.
+
+
+## career
+
+Note: Taking this view requires us to stop and think about the shape of a career overall. The promise of that distinguished career is what we hire junior faculty for, after all -- the promise that they will engage with their material and their colleagues and their students over the long term, that they will use those engagements to come to some kind of prominence in their fields. The tenure review, at the end of the first six years of those careers, should ideally not be a moment of determining whether those candidates have thus far done X quantity of work (where X is enough to earn tenure, allowing the candidate to safely rest). Rather, in an ideal universe, we should use the tenure review to ask whether the promise with which those candidates arrived is beginning to bear out.
+
+
+## beginning
+
+Note: I should say that again: _beginning_ to bear out. The most productive question we can ask in the promotion and tenure review is not whether the full potential of a candidate has been achieved, but rather whether what has been done to this early point gives us sufficient confidence in what will happen over the long haul that we want the candidate to remain a colleague, and do that work with us, for as long as possible.
+
+
+## quality / quantity
+
+Note: In order to figure that out, the questions we ask about the work cannot focus solely on whether there has been enough of it, but rather must focus on its importance, its potential for impact, its quality. We already reach out, in the vast majority of cases, to experts in the candidate's field, requesting their careful evaluation of the work and its significance. Reframing our own assessment practices to foreground not the quantity of work produced but the ways we see it beginning to have an impact on its field can help us transform the exercise into one that supports our most important scholarly goals and values.
+
+
+ ## digital, but not solely
+
+Note: And, not incidentally, such a foregrounding of the potential for impact might help us more fairly evaluate the newer kinds of digital projects in which many scholars today engage. But they also might encourage use to reassess a range of forms of work that go undercredited, encouraging us to acknowledge and properly value forms of intellectual labor that too often get shoved under the category of "service to the field." In my own area of the humanities, such work includes translation, or the production of scholarly editions, or the editing of scholarly journals. None of these forms of work carries the same weight in most review processes as the scholarly monograph, and yet -- just to pick up one of those examples -- what more powerful position in shaping the direction of a field is there than that of the journal editor?
+
+
+## what counts
+
+Note: This is just one of the kinds of problems that we need to encounter. But again, I want to emphasize that it’s not enough simply to add “digital work” or “journal editing” to the list of kinds of work that we accept for tenure and promotion, not least because the impulse then is to apply currently understood standards to those objects: are there kinds of journals that “count,” and kinds that don’t? Does the journal have to have a specified impact factor? Or even where we're more enlightened about our metrics for impact, and we employ a broader range of what get referred to as "alternative metrics," we run the risk of creating new modes of assessment that lead us toward increasing objectivity, perhaps, but also increasing impersonality, increasing (utilitarianism), and increasing rigidity.
+
+
+## what do we value
+
+Note: Instead, I want to approach the problem from a different direction, thinking less about better ways of conducting ostensibly neutral assessment and more about ways of focusing on the things we really care about. This different mode of approach may require us to give up our reliance on some relatively easy, objective, quantitative measures, in favor of seeking out more complex, more subjective qualitative judgments -- but I would suggest that these kinds of complex judgments about research in our fields are the core of our job as scholars, and that we have a particular ethical obligation to take our responsibility for such judgments seriously. This different direction will also require us to think as flexibly as we can about how our practices should not only change now, but continue to evolve as the work that junior scholars produce changes. So what follows are a few principles -- as I said at the outset, some admittedly highly opinionated principles -- that we might consider in thinking about the policies and procedures that will enable us to focus less on what counts and more on what we genuinely value in scholarly work.
+
+
+## (1) Don't let “but we don’t know how to evaluate this kind of work” stand as a reason not to evaluate it.
+
+Note: The first of these is that we simply have to get past the "but I don't know how to evaluate that kind of work" stage of the process. Many disciplinary organizations have developed statements about and guidelines for the evaluation of new kinds of scholarly work. For instance, the MLA’s Committee on Information Technology put forward its first such set of best practices back in 2000, and then updated those guidelines in 2012. The organization has also held numerous workshop on evaluation processes for digital work at its annual convention. And the AHA, CAA, and CCCC all have similar documents and support available. There are also excellent university policies available that can be emulated, including at Emory and at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
+
+
+## (2) Support evaluator learning.
+
+Note: Despite the existence of these excellent criteria and models for evaluating new work, however, many faculty, especially those who have long worked in exclusively traditional forms, need support in beginning to read, interpret, and engage with digital projects and other new forms of scholarly work. This need is of course what led to the MLA's workshops; similar kinds of workshops have been held at the summer seminars of the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Department of Foreign Languages, and at NEH-funded summer workshops. On the local level, my own College of Arts & Letters at MSU has begun holding regular workshops both for candidates and chairs on the review process, surfacing questions and concerns and supporting faculty in producing the best possible environment for evaluation.
+
+
+## (3) Engage with the work on its own terms, and in its own medium.
+
+Note: Supporting evaluators in the process of learning how to engage with new kinds of work is crucial precisely because the work under review must be dealt with as it is, as itself. More or less every year I hear reports from scholars whose work is web-based but who have been asked to print out and three-hole-punch that work in order to have it considered as part of their dossiers -- or the contemporary version thereof: they've been asked to turn a web-based project into a PDF in order to be submitted through the dossier system. Needless to say, eliminating the interaction involved in web-based projects undermines the very thing that makes them work. As the MLA guidelines frame it, “respect medium specificity” -- engage with new work in the ways its form requires.
+
+
+## (4) Dance with the one you brought.
+
+Note: In the same way that the work demands to be dealt with on its own terms, it’s crucial that tenure review processes engage with the candidates we’ve actually hired, rather than trying to transform them into someone else. While it’s tempting to advise junior scholars to take the safer road to tenure by adhering to traditional standards and practices in their work, such advice runs the risk of derailing genuinely transformative projects. In all cases, but perhaps especially when candidates have been hired into positions focused on new forms of research and teaching, or when they have been hired because of their innovative work thus far, they need to be supported in charting their own paths toward intellectual leadership. In creating that support, it’s particularly important to guard against doubling the workload on the candidate by requiring them both to complete the project and to do traditional work as well. This is a recipe for exhaustion and frustration; candidates should be encouraged to focus on the forms of their work that present the greatest promise for impact in their fields.
+
+
+## (5) Prepare and support junior faculty as they “mentor up.”
+
+Note: My emphasis on supporting the candidates that you have doesn’t mean those candidates shouldn't have to persuade their senior colleagues of the importance of their work. Scholars working in innovative modes and formats must be able to articulate the reasons for and the significance of their work to a range of traditional audiences -- and not least, their own campus mentors. In theory, at least, this is the case for all scholars; it’s the purpose that the “personal statement” in the tenure dossier is meant to serve. For scholars working in non-traditional formats, however, there is additional need to explain the work to others, and to give them the context for understanding it. That process cannot begin with, but rather must culminate in, the personal statement. Throughout the pre-tenure period, candidates should be given opportunities to present their work to their colleagues, such that they have lots of experience explaining their work -- and ample responses to their work -- by the time the tenure review begins. They also need champions -- mentors who, having examined the work and coming to understand its value, will help them continue to “mentor up” by arguing on behalf of that work among their colleagues.
+
+
+## (6) Use field-appropriate metrics.
+
+Note: Every field has its own ways of measuring impact, and the measures used in one field will not automatically translate to another. A colleague of mine whose PhD is in literature, and who began her career as a digital humanist, now holds a position that is half situated in an English department and half in an information science department. Her information science colleagues, in beginning her tenure review, calculated her h-index -- and it was abysmal. The good news is that her colleagues then went on to calculate the h-indexes of the top figures in the digital humanities, and discovered that they were all equally terrible. Metrics like the h-index or citation counts simply do not apply across all fields. It’s absolutely necessary that we recognize the distinctive measures of impact used in specific fields and assess work in those fields accordingly.
+
+
+## (7) Maybe be a little suspicious of counting as a method.
+
+Note: As those metrics indicate, we tend to like numbers in our assessment processes. They feel concrete and objective, and some of them are demonstrably bigger than others. The problem is that we tend only to count those things that are countable, and too often, if it can’t be counted, it doesn’t count. But there is an enormous range of significant data that cannot be captured or understood quantitatively. Citation counts, for instance: such metrics can tell us how often an article has been referred to in the subsequent literature, but they can’t tell us whether the article is being praised or buried through those citations, whether it’s being built upon or whether it’s being debunked. So while I’m glad that problematic metrics like journal impact factor are gradually being replaced with a more sophisticated range of article-level metrics, I still want us to be a bit cautious about how we use those numbers. This includes web-based metrics: hits and downloads can be really affirming for scholars, but they don’t necessary indicate how closely the work is being attended to, and they aren’t comparable across fields and subfields of different sizes. If we’re going to use quantitative metrics in the review process, they need careful interpretation and analysis -- and even better, should be accompanied by a range of qualitative data that captures the reception and engagement with the candidate’s work.
+
+
+## (8) Engage appropriate experts in the field to evaluate the work.
+
+Note: It is, by and large, the external reviewers that we have relied upon to produce the qualitative assessment of the tenure dossier. These experts are generally well-placed, more senior members of the candidate’s subfield who are asked to evaluate the quality of the work on its own terms, as well as the place that work has within the current discourses of the subfield. Where candidates present dossiers that include non-traditional work, however, we must seek out external reviewers who are able to evaluate not just the work’s content -- as if it were the equivalent of a series of journal articles or a monograph -- but also its formal aspects, accounting for the technical value of the work and the significance that it has for the field. This kind of medium-specific review is, I would argue, necessary for all forms of nontraditional work: a candidate whose dossier includes translation should have at least one qualified external reviewer asked to focus on the significance of the translation; a candidate whose dossier includes journal editing should have at least one qualified external reviewer asked to focus on the significance of that editorial work for the field.
+
+
+## (9) But do not overvalue the judgments of those experts.
+
+Note: The external reviewers that are engaged by a department or a college to assess the work of a candidate are often in the best place to evaluate the quality of that work, its place within the subfield, its significance and reception, and the like. But all too often these reviewers are called upon -- or take it upon themselves -- to make judgments that are outside the scope of their expertise. It would be best for us to refrain from asking, or even specifically enjoin, reviewers from indicating whether a candidate’s work would merit tenure at their institution, or whether a candidate is among the “top” scholars in their field. Such comparisons rely on false equivalences among institutions and among scholars, and they are invidious at best. // Even more, departments must use the judgments of those experts to inform their own judgment, and not supplant it. Departments know the internal circumstances and values of the institution in ways that external reviewers cannot. And while the members of a departmental tenure review body might not be experts in a candidate’s specific area of interest, bringing in such experts cannot be used absolve them of responsibility for exercising their own judgments, including engaging directly with the candidate’s work themselves.
+
+
+## (10) Be a little suspicious of objectivity.
+
+Note: The desire to externalize judgment -- whether by relying upon quantitative metrics or on the assessments of external reviewers -- is understandable: we want our processes to be as uncontroversial, as scrupulous, and therefore as objective as possible. And there are certain subjective judgments -- such as those around questions of “collegiality” or “fit” -- that should not have any place in our review processes. But aside from those issues, we must recognize that all judgment is inherently subjective. It is only by surfacing, acknowledging, and questioning our own presuppositions that we can find our way to a position that is both subjective and fair. This is a kind of work that scholars -- especially those in the qualitative social sciences and the humanities -- should be well equipped to do, as it’s precisely the kind of inquiry that we bring to our own subject matter. // Moreover -- and this is something that really demands a whole talk of its own -- we need to acknowledge that “peer review” is not itself a singular, objective marker of quality research. And there isn’t just one appropriate way for peer review to be conducted. Many publications and projects are experimenting with modes of review that are providing richer feedback and interaction than can the standard double-blind process; it’s crucial that those new modes of review be assessed on their own merits, according to the evidence of quality work that they produce, and not dismissed as providing insufficiently objective criteria for evaluation.
+
+
+## (11) Reward -- or at least don’t punish -- collaboration.
+
+Note: Along those lines: I have been told by members of university promotion and tenure committees that an open peer review process, or other forms of openly commentable work, would doom a tenure candidate because anyone who participated in that process would be excluded as a potential external reviewer. The intent again is objectivity: any scholar who has had any contact with the candidate’s work, or has engaged in any communication with the candidate, or has participated in any projects with the candidate, could not possibly be at the arms-length distance required to evaluate the work. // This is not only a pretty dubious form of the insistence on objectivity and a highly destructive misunderstanding of the nature of collaboration in highly networked fields today. I understand the impulse, to ensure that the judgment provided by an external reviewer is as focused on the work as possible, without being colored by a personal relationship. But there are degrees, and we need to be able to make distinctions among them. At my own prior institution, the line was one about personal benefit: if potential external reviewers stand to gain in their own careers from a positive outcome in the review process -- a dissertation director who becomes more highly esteemed the more highly placed his former advisees are; a co-author whose work gains greater visibility the more her partner’s career advances, and so forth -- such reviewers should obviously not be engaged. But other levels of interaction should not disqualify reviewers, including co-participants in conference sessions, commenters on online projects, members of advisory boards on which the candidate also serves, and so forth. In fact, a key component of impact on a field is about those kinds of connections: we should want tenure candidates to be developing active relationships with other key members of their fields, to be working with them in a wide variety of ways. Such relationships should be disclosed in the review process, but they should not be used to eliminate the reviewers who might in fact be the best placed to assess the candidate’s work.
+
+
+## in the end
+
+Note: The key thing, in the end, is that the tenure review should be focused on assessing the impact that the candidate’s work is beginning to have on its field, and the confidence that impact to this point gives you about the importance of the work to come. And the ways that we understand and assess impact need to be lifted out of the contradictions in which they've become mired. We need to understand and appreciate that the tenure review process is and ought to be individual, personal, and subjective, and we need to seek ways to be equitable in our practices without trying to impose artificial, and impossible, impersonality and objectivity. We need to reorient our thinking away from what counts
+
+
+## what do we value
+
+Note: and more toward what we value, and why. Each aspect of the standards and processes that we bring to the tenure review process should be reconsidered in that light: are the measures we use, the evaluators we engage, the ways the work is being read or experienced, are all of these aspects producing the best possible way of thinking about how our scholarly values are being manifested in a career in process, and are they guiding us to the most responsible way of considering its future.
+
+
+## these slides
+
+http://kfitz.msu.domains/presentations/whatcounts.html
+
+
+## resources
+
+- [MLA Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media](https://www.mla.org/About-Us/Governance/Committees/Committee-Listings/Professional-Issues/Committee-on-Information-Technology/Guidelines-for-Evaluating-Work-in-Digital-Humanities-and-Digital-Media)
+- [AHA Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians](https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/digital-history-resources/evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-in-history/guidelines-for-the-professional-evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-by-historians)
+- [CAA Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History](http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/evaluating-digital-scholarship-in-art-and-architectural-history.pdf)
+- [CCCC Promotion and Tenure Guidelines for Work with Technology](http://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/promotionandtenure)
+
+
+## resources
+
+- [Emory College Principles and Procedures for Tenure and Promotion](http://college.emory.edu/faculty/documents/faculty-advancement/tenure-track/tenure-and-promotion-principles-and-procedures_11_16.pdf) (see esp. Appendix D)
+- [University of Nebraska at Lincoln Promotion & Tenure Criteria for Assessing Digital Research in the Humanities](https://cdrh.unl.edu/articles/promotion)
+
+
+## thank you
+[Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://kfitz.msu.domains) // [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitz@msu.edu](mailto:kfitz@msu.edu)
+
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+# Working in Public
+---
+### [Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://kfitz.info)
+#### [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitz@msu.edu](mailto:kfitz@msu.edu)
+
+Note: What I want to talk a bit about this afternoon is the importance for 21st century scholars of making connections with the public: with voters who elect legislators and other representatives who determine budgets and set policies that govern our institutions; with parents who encourage or discourage our students in various directions in their educational choices; with employers who hire our students. We need to find ways to make clear to those off-campus constituencies why the work we do in the humanities is important, in order to make sure we keep getting to do it. I explore this issue at much greater length in Generous Thinking; today's thoughts are drawn from a chapter that focuses on the role that making our work more public might serve in that process.
+
+
+## background
+
+Note: First, a bit of background. Back in 2002, I’d just finished the process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and it seemed entirely possible that no one else might ever read it. And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience in active discussion with him. And I thought, wow, that’s it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: My blog, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up helping me build a small community of other scholars working online, a community that was crucial to helping alleviate the isolation I'd been feeling. The connections I forged there helped my writing develop, and the work I published drew the first bits of scholarly recognition my work received.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I’d just finished the draft of my second book and decided (with my press's blessing) to post it online for open review. I get asked a lot what made me take the risk of releasing something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth is that I ignored those risks with privileged abandon. What I knew from my blog was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, whose thoughts I wanted to hear, and who I trusted to help me make the book better. And happily, it worked.
+
+
+## 2009
+
+Note: Okay, that was 2009. The last few years have made the risks of working in the open impossible to ignore. And yet my experiences leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kinds of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work’s development. And -- perhaps most importantly today -- willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I tested that belief in spring 2018 through an open review of the draft of _Generous Thinking_. I first invited a group about of 40 readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, and then opened the project to the world. 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own). The comments are not all rainbows and unicorns: a few of them sting, and there are a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking were a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is going to be better for having gone through this public process.
+
+
+## public
+
+Note: So what I'm focused on today is the ways that working in public can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that don't just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
+
+
+## challenges
+
+Note: There are real challenges to that process, however. Some of them have to do with today's communication platforms. Blogs don't generate the level of engagement that they once did, partly because their massive proliferation, partly thanks to the death of some related technologies like Google Reader, and partly because of the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks.
+
+
+## trolls
+
+Note: And then there are the trolls -- not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one’s work public today can involve real risk -- especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
+
+
+## no easy answers
+
+Note: These problems don't have easy answers. I don't have a perfect platform to offer, and I don't know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. I am convinced, however, that countering these destructive forces will require advance preparation, focused responses, and a tremendous amount of collective labor, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But despite these problems, I want to explore a few ways that we might help draw a range of broader publics to the work that we do.
+
+
+## publics
+
+Note: None of what I'm about to say is meant to imply that there isn't room for internal exchange among academics; there is, and should be. But there should also be means for the results of those exchanges to become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. And by talking about "publics," I mean to indicate that our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone, all the time; rather, different aspects of our work might reach different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences -- and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors -- is a crucial skill for the 21st century academic.
+
+
+## access
+## accessibility
+## participation
+
+Note: So I want to consider three issues in thinking about how those publics might interact with our work. The first is ensuring that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it's impossible for anyone to care about our work if they can't see it. The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to see it, but enabling them to see IN it things that they might care about. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural work by more kinds of public thinkers.
+
+
+## access
+
+Note: So, starting with access. Mobilization around open access began in the scientific community more than twenty years ago and has since spread, with varying degrees of uptake, across the disciplines. I dig into the history and particulars of open access in the book, but the key point is that establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge turns out to increase the impact of work so published. In other words, what's good for the public turns out to be good for research, too, not least because making even the most highly specialized work openly available gives it the greatest opportunity to be found and built upon. Which is to say: the value of open access lies not just in making the most "popular" work publicly available, but in making all work as available as possible, even where that work might seem to have a vanishingly small audience.
+
+
+## economic model
+
+Note: That said, it's important to note that there are some significant challenges to enabling and supporting open access. Freeing journal articles from barriers to access is a relatively attainable goal, but as we know, in many humanities fields the most important work done takes the shape of books rather than articles, and the technologies and economics of book publishing are quite different. Moreover, the economic model into which much open access publishing has settled in the last decade, in which the exchange has bee "flipped" from reader-pays to author-pays, presents problems of its own. This flip has worked in the sciences, where grants are able to cover publication costs, but it's a model that's all but impossible to make work in the humanities. Moreover, the move from reader-pays to author-pays risks shifting the inequities in access from the consumer side to the producer side of the equation, such that researchers in fields without significant grant funding, or at underfunded institutions, can't get their work into circulation in the same way that their more privileged colleagues can.
+
+
+## engagement
+
+Note: So I don’t want to suggest that creating public access is easy, but I don’t want to restrict our sense of the possibilities either. Enabling greater public access to scholarly work is not just about changing its business model but about making public engagement with that work possible. If we publish in ways that enable any interested reader to access our work, that work will be more read, more cited, creating more impact for us and for our fields. Making our work more openly available enables many more scholars, instructors, and students world-wide to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. Expanding our readership in these ways would seem an unmitigatedly good thing.
+
+
+## why it matters
+
+Note: And yet, many of us worry about opening our work to broader publics, sometimes because we fear the consequences of making it open -- and not without justification. The general public often seems determined to misunderstand us, to interpret what we say with focused hostility or, nearly as bad, utter dismissiveness. As a result, we see no harm in keeping our work closed, because we’re only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter? It matters because the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of our campuses, the more we undermine the public’s willingness to support our research and our institutions. If one key component of the crisis facing higher education today is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good, we wind up strengthening that conviction when we treat our work as private. Keeping our work to ourselves might protect us from public criticism, but it can't protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous. This is not to say that working in public doesn’t bear risks, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public of the relevance of our work.
+
+
+## prestige
+
+Note: We work, however, in an environment that often privileges prestige over all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for that bias toward prestige in another part of the project, but I want to think briefly about its effects on us. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily bleeds into a sense that the more exclusive a publication’s audience, the higher its value. Needless to say, this is a self-defeating attitude; if we privilege exclusivity, we can't be surprised when our work fails to make its importance clear to the public.
+
+
+## access
+
+Note: There's much more to be said here, especially about the erasure of labor inherent in assuming that all publications should simply be made available for free online. But the thing that I'm asking us to consider is whether those of us who can afford to be generous -- those fully-employed members of our professions who can and should make a gift of our work to the world -- might be willing to take on the work of creating greater public engagement for our fields by understanding our work as a public good, by creating the greatest possible public access to it.
+
+
+## accessibility
+
+Note: But creating that public good requires more than simply making our work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn’t possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that’s fine, to an extent: there should always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But we've privileged that inwardly-focused sharing of work to our detriment. Scholars are too often not rewarded -- and in fact are at times actively punished -- for publishing in popular venues. And because the values instantiated by our rewards systems have a profound effect on the ways we train our students, we build the wall between academic and public discourse higher and higher with every passing cohort.
+
+
+## public-facing
+
+Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing venues that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, such as _Public Books_, the _Los Angeles Review of Books_, _n+1_, and a host of individual and group blogs and newsletters. These venues open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture. But if we are to open our ideas to larger public audiences, we need to give some serious thought to the ways we write as well. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn’t restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many mainstream publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to highlight complexity and nuance, and the result is often lines of argumentation, and lines of prose, that are far from straight-forward.
+
+
+## public register
+
+Note: This is not to say that all academic writing should be done in a public register. But I do want to argue that we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible. After all, our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus. But for that project to be successful, we need to hone our ability to alternate speaking with one another and with different audiences. We need, in other words, to learn a professional form of code switching.
+
+
+## code-switching
+
+Note: "Code switching" has its origin in linguistics and is used to explore how and why speakers move between multiple languages within individual speech instances. The concept was borrowed by rhetoric and composition as a means of thinking about students’ need to move between vernacular and academic languages in addressing particular audiences at particular moments. However, as many scholars have noted, there is a highly racialized power dynamic deployed in most pedagogical injunctions to code-switch, which carry the assumption that students of color must learn "standard" varieties of English in order to succeed, enforcing a double consciousness that ultimately accommodates, rather than eradicating, racism.
+
+
+## power
+
+Note: The command to code switch in an unequal environment is inevitably a tool of power. But so, I want to argue, is scholars’ assumption that academic English as we perform it is the “standard variety”; in fact, ours is as much a lived vernacular as any, but a vernacular based in privilege, one that risks undermining our ability to build alliances with other communities. This is not to say that we can simply adopt a common language that will make us understood and beloved by all. Nor should we abandon the precise academic languages that undergird the rigor of our work. But it's worth asking how judicious code switching, as a means of acknowledging the effects of our educational and professional privilege and inviting others into our discussions, might become a more regular part of our scholarly work.
+
+
+## learn
+
+Note: It's also worth asking what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work. Public-facing writing -- as many editors of mainstream intellectual publications would note -- is very different from academic writing, and by and large it is not something scholars are trained to do. But numerous initiatives are working to help scholarly authors focus and express the ideas contained in their scholarly publications in ways that help broader audiences engage with them. Ideally, this kind of writing should become part of graduate training across the university.
+
+
+## public / intellectual
+
+Note: We also need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. Our processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don’t meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, public work is frequently underrewarded. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it’s likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must “dumb down” key ideas in order to do so. We need to recognize and appropriately value the work required to make room for the general reader in our arguments, and in our prose.
+
+
+## participation
+
+Note: But we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having worked to engage the public, how can we activate that public to work with us? This is where creating public access and valuing public accessibility transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, work not simply performed for the public but that includes the publics with whom we work, inviting our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants.
+
+
+## citizen humanities
+
+Note: There's been a lot of attention paid to “citizen science” projects of late, projects that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. We might consider what a similar citizen humanities might look like. It might look like museum exhibits such as Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California, which engaged members of local Pacific communities in the planning and development processes. It might look like The September 11 Digital Archive, which presents first-hand accounts along with photos, emails, and other archival materials from more than 150,000 participants. It might look like the Baltimore Stories project at UMBC, which used humanities scholarship as a convening force to bring community organizers, educators, and non-profit organizations together to explore narratives of race in American life. What these projects have in common is that each explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern is theirs, and the resulting work is theirs too, not just to learn from but to shape and define. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
+
+
+## peers
+
+Note: One key thing that this mode of work also does is foster a new understanding of the notion of the "peer," encouraging us to understand our peers not just as credentialed colleagues but instead as participants in a community of practice, whoever those participants may be. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we consider under that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening our sense of who "we" are to a much broader range of participants has the potential to reshape relations between the public and the academy and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work we do matters for our culture as a whole.
+
+
+## finally
+
+Note: So, finally: what might be possible for the 21st century English department if we were to open up our practices to fuller public engagement? What if we were to hold our institutions, especially our public universities, accountable for living up to the mission of bringing knowledge to the people of our states? How might we draw public support back to our institutions by demonstrating the extent to which the work that we do is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public? If the university is to win back public support, it must be prepared -- structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just its mission statement but its actual mission -- to place the public service at the top of its priorities. And that must begin with us, finding ways to do our work in and with the public.
+
+
+## thank you
+
+#### [Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://kfitz.info) // [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitz@msu.edu](mailto:kfitz@msu.edu)
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+ Working in Public
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Working in Public
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Before I get started, I want to thank Jason for inviting me to speak here with you today; I'm delighted to have this chance to talk a bit with you about some of my recent work surrounding open scholarship.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This talk is drawn from my forthcoming book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The book as a whole argues for what I see as some necessary transformations in the approaches taken by scholars and their institutions if we are to rebuild productive relationships between the academy and the broader public. And rebuilding those relationships is absolutely necessary, if higher education as we have known it is to survive.
+
+
+# caveats
+
+Note: I should note a couple of things about what follows: first, it focuses throughout on the work done by the "university." To some extent I mean that term as a placeholder for the many kinds of institutions that make up today's higher education landscape, and so much of what follows is equally applicable to small liberal arts colleges as it is to large research universities. There are aspects of the problem that I'm focused on -- the failure of communication between institutions of higher education and the broader publics they are intended to serve -- that may be most pressing for public institutions rather than private ones, given the nature of their funding, but they have implications for all of our institutions. Moreover, while I'm largely focused in this chunk of the project on the ways that scholars structure and communicate our research, there are also deep implications for teaching and outreach in what I'm going to describe as well. Across all our institutions, and all the forms of work we do in them, we all need to think about ways to ensure that the significance of what we do on campus is far more widely visible than it is today.
+
+
+# background
+
+Note: First, a bit of background. Back in 2002, I’d just finished the long process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and there seemed the very real possibility that no one else might ever read it. And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience. People read it, and I knew they read it because they left comments responding to and interacting with him. And I thought, wow, that’s it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: My blog, _Planned Obsolescence_, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up doing something more interesting than I expected: it helped me build a small community. I found a number of other early academic bloggers, all of whom were in ongoing comment-and-crosslink conversations. Those relationships, which opened out into a growing network of scholars working online, were crucial to me as an assistant professor who felt isolated at a small liberal arts college on the far end of the country. I has struggled to make the intellectual and professional connections that might help my writing develop, and it was the blog that helped build those connections. Even more, posts I published there were the first pieces of my writing to be cited in more formal academic settings.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I’d just finished the draft of my second book, not-so-coincidentally entitled _Planned Obsolescence_. Rather than simply have the manuscript sent out for anonymous peer review, I asked my press to let me post the draft online for open comment too. I get asked a lot about that decision, especially how I worked up the courage to release something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth of the matter is that the risks didn’t figure into my thinking. What I knew was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, with whom I’d had productive, engaging interactions that contributed to the book’s development, and I wanted to hear their thoughts about where I’d wound up. I trusted them to help me--and they did, overwhelmingly so.
+
+
+# 2009
+
+Note: It’s important to acknowledge the entire boatload of privilege not-thinking about the risks requires; I was writing from a sufficiently safe position that allowing flaws in my work-in-progress to be publicly visible wasn’t a real threat. It's also not incidental that this was 2009, not 2018--a much more naive hour in the age of the Internet. The events of the last few years, from GamerGate to the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, have made the risks of opening one’s work up online all too palpable. But my experiences with the blog, with the book manuscript, and with other projects I’ve opened to online discussion, still leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kind of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work’s development. And--perhaps most importantly today--willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I tested that belief this past spring by opening the draft of _Generous Thinking_ to a similar open review. Between early February and the end of March, I staged a process in which I first invited a group about of 40 readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, after which I opened the project to the world. In the end, 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own), giving me a rich view of the revision process that lay ahead. It wasn't all rainbows and unicorns: there are a few comments that sting, and a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking had been a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is going to be better for having gone through this public process.
+
+
+# public
+
+Note: So what I'm focused on here today is the ways that working in public, and with the public, can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that do not just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
+
+
+# obstacles
+
+Note: There are, of course, real obstacles that have to be faced in this process. Some of them reflect the communication platforms that we use today. Blogs don't readily produce the same level of engagement that they did in the early 2000s. In part this has to do with their massive proliferation, and in part it has to do with the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks. As a result, online communities of readers and writers are unlikely to develop spontaneously; instead, building community around online work has to be far more deliberate, reaching out to potential readers and participants and finding ways to draw them, and ourselves, back into sustained conversation.
+
+
+# trolls
+
+Note: And of course the nature of internet discourse has changed in recent years as much as has its location. Trolls are not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one’s work public can involve significant risk--especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
+
+
+# no easy answers
+
+Note: I do not have any easy answers to these problems; though I have worked on the development of a number of online communities, I do not have a perfect platform to offer, and I do not know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. I am convinced, however, that countering these destructive forces will require advance preparation and focused responses. Ensuring that public discourse about scholarly work remains productive will require a tremendous amount of collective labor, and the careful development and maintenance of trust, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But there are three other challenges that I want to linger on today, challenges that are about the ways that we as scholars do our work, and ways that we can draw a range of broader publics to that work.
+
+
+# access
+
+Note: The first is the need to ensure that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it is impossible for anyone to care about what we do if they cannot see it. And yet, perhaps because we assume we are mostly writing for one another, the results of our work end up overwhelmingly in places where it cannot be found--and even if it is found, where it cannot be accessed--by members of the broader public.
+
+
+# accessibility
+
+Note: The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to get their hands on it, but enabling them to see in it the things that they might care about. We often resent the ways that academic work gets "dumbed down" in public venues, but we might think instead about ways that we can productively mainstream our arguments, engaging readers where they are, rather than always forcing them to come find us, in our venues and on our terms.
+
+
+# participation
+
+Note: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural creation by more kinds of public thinkers. In other words, we need to focus not just on the public’s potential consumption of the work that is done by the university, but also about potential modes of co-production that involve communities in the work of the university. Such collaborations might serve as a style of work that our universities can fruitfully model for the rest of our culture: new modes of scholarship done not just for but with the world.
+
+
+# publics
+
+Note: My focus, then, is on the ways that we can facilitate greater public interaction for scholars and scholarship. I don't mean in this focus to suggest that there is no room for internal exchange among field-based experts; there is, and should be. But there should also be means for the results of those exchanges to become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. And when I indicate the multiplicity of that “broader set of publics,” I mean that our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone, at all times; rather, different aspects of our work might reach different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences--and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors--is a crucial skill for the 21st century academic.
+
+
+# open access
+
+Note: This begins by ensuring that the readers we might hope to reach have access to the work that we’re doing. Mobilization around the establishment of what has come to be known as open access began in the scientific community more than twenty years ago, and has since spread, with varying degrees of uptake, across the disciplines. In the chapter from which this talk is drawn, I dig a bit into the history of the open access movement and the relationship that it creates between its more altruistic goals of establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge, on the one hand, and its more pragmatic arguments about the impact that public access might have on the advancement of science and scientific careers. The key point is that what's good for the public turns out to be good for science, too.
+
+
+# indirect rewards
+
+Note: In large part this has to do with the economic model under which most academic research operates: because scientists and scholars are _indirectly_ rewarded for their research outputs--through jobs, promotions, speaking engagements, and so forth--rather than expecting to be directly paid for them, those researchers are free to "microspecialize," focusing their energies on areas that may be of immediate interest to very few people rather than having an obvious market value. As a result, the Internet’s ability to reduce the costs of distribution of texts to near-zero, makes open access to even the most highly specialized work possible, allowing anyone to find and engage with it. And as a result that knowledge has the greatest opportunity to be developed and expanded. Which is to say: the value of open access to scholars lies not just in making the most "popular" work available to the public, but in making all work as freely available as possible, even where that work might seem to have a vanishingly small audience.
+
+
+# differences
+
+Note: That said, it's important to note that there are some significant differences among fields in their abilities to embrace open access. Some of these differences have to do with the obviousness of public impact: the impetus toward open access for medical research is clear, but that for the humanities has been a good bit less so. But there are more pragmatic differences as well. For instance: freeing journal articles from barriers to access is a relatively attainable goal, as the technologies and the business models have been worked out.
+
+
+# books
+
+Note: But as we know, in many humanities fields the most important work done takes the shape of books rather than articles, and the technologies and economics of book publishing are quite different, as are the incentives for authors. While the royalties that authors of open-access books might be required to waive may be modest, the perceived loss in prestige in making work openly available online is more significant. A university-press published book--at many institutions a requirement for tenure and promotion--cannot be pulled out of that publishing system without becoming something else entirely, something that may not be accepted as equivalent, and that university press system still carries significant costs. So new approaches are being explored by open-access publishers such as Punctum Books and Lever Press, open-access ventures at established presses such as Luminos at the University of California Press, and projects such as the AAU, ARL, and AUP’s joint open monograph publishing initiative.
+
+
+# economic model
+
+Note: And it's important to note that the economic model into which much open access publishing has settled in the last decade--in which the exchange gets flipped from a subscription model to a reliance on article-processing fees, or from reader-pays to author-pays--works well enough for the sciences, in which grants fund the vast majority of research and usually cover publication costs, but it's a model that's all but impossible to make work in the humanities, where the available grant funding is too low to accommodate publishing charges and, in fact, the vast majority of research is self-funded. Beyond that, there is an argument to be made that the move from reader-pays to author-pays merely shifts the inequities in access to research publications from the consumer side to the producer side of the equation: researchers who are working in fields in which there is not significant grant funding, or who are at institutions that cannot provide subventions, cannot get their work into circulation in the same way that those in grant-rich fields, or at well-heeled institutions can.
+
+
+# challenges
+
+Note: So I don’t want to erase the challenges that a large-scale transition of scholarly communication to full public access would present. At the same time, however, I don’t want to restrict our sense of the possibilities for a more open future for scholarship because of existing models. Enabling public access to scholarly work is not just about undoing its commercialization but about making public engagement with that scholarship possible.
+
+
+# engagement
+
+Note: The impact of that potential for public engagement should not be underestimated. If we publish in ways that enable any interested reader to access our work, that work will be more read, more cited, creating more impact for us and for our fields. Making our work more openly accessible enables scholars in areas of the world without extensive library budgets, as well as U.S.-based instructors and students at undergraduate teaching institutions and secondary schools, to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. All of this leads to an expansion in our readership and an expansion in our influence -- an unmitigatedly good thing.
+
+
+# resistance
+
+Note: Any yet, we must acknowledge the ways in which we resist opening our work to broader publics and the reasons for that resistance. Many of us keep our work restricted to our own discourse communities because we fear the consequences of making it available to broader publics--and not without justification. The general public often seems determined to misunderstand us, to interpret what we say with focused hostility or, nearly as bad, utter dismissiveness. Because the subject matter of much of the humanities and social sciences seems as though it should be accessible, our determination to wrestle with difficult or highly politicized questions and our use of expert methods and vocabularies can feel threatening to many readers. They fail to understand us; we take their failure to understand as an insult. (Admittedly, sometimes it is, but not always.) Given this failure to communicate, we see no harm in keeping our work closed off from the public, arguing that we’re only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter?
+
+
+# why
+
+Note: It matters because the more we close our work away from the public, and the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of the academy, the more we undermine the public’s willingness to support our research and our institutions. As numerous public humanities scholars including Kathleen Woodward have argued, the major crisis facing the funding of higher education is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good. We wind up strengthening that conviction and worsening the crisis when we treat our work as private. Closing our work away from non-scholarly readers might protect us from public criticism, but it cannot protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous in the current economic and political environment. This is not to say that working in public doesn’t bear risks, especially for scholars working in politically engaged fields, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public, including our governments, of the relevance of our work.
+
+
+# generosity
+
+Note: And of course engaging readers in thoughtful discussions about the important issues we study lies at the core of the academic mission. It is at the heart of our values. We do not create knowledge in order to hoard it, but instead, every day, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and in our writing, we embrace an ethic of generosity, of paying forward knowledge that we have received as a gift. We teach, as we were taught; we publish, as we learn from the publications of others. We cannot pay back those who came before us, but we can and do give to those who come after. Our participation in an ethical, voluntary scholarly community is grounded in the obligations we hold for one another, obligations that derive from the generosity we have received.
+
+
+# prestige
+
+Note: Okay, idealistic, right? And that kind of idealism is all well and good, but it doesn’t adequately account for an academic universe in which we are evaluated based on individual achievement, and in which prestige often overrides all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for and effects of that bias toward prestige in another part of the larger project; here, I want to think a bit about its effects on the individual scholar, as well as that scholar’s role in perpetuating this hierarchical status quo. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily shades over into a sense that the more exclusive a publication’s audience, the higher its value. // This is, at its most benign, a self-defeating attitude; if we privilege exclusivity above all else, we can't be surprised when our work fails to circulate beyond its immediate circles. And when our work fails to circulate, its potential value really does decline; as David Parry has commented,
+
+
+> “Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge.”
+
+Note: “Knowledge that is not public is not knowledge.” It is only in giving it away, in making it as publicly available as possible, that we produce knowledge. As it is, most of the players in the scholarly communication chain have always been engaged in a process of “giving it away”: authors, reviewers, scholarly editors, and others involved in the process have long offered their work to others without requiring direct compensation. The question, of course, is how we offer it, and to whom.
+
+
+# gift economy
+
+Note: In fact, the entire system of scholarly communication runs on an engine of generosity, one that demonstrates the ways that private enterprise can never adequately provide for the public good. So rather than committing our work to private channels, signing it over to corporate publishers that profit at higher education’s expense, might all of the members of the university community--researchers, instructors, libraries, presses, and administrations--instead work to develop and support a system based on our highest values? What if we understood sustainability in scholarly communication not as the ability to generate revenue, but instead the ability to keep the engine of generosity running? What if we were to embrace scholarship’s basis in the gift economy and make a gift of our work to the world?
+
+
+# free
+
+Note: It's important, however, to distinguish between this gift economy and the generous thinking that underwrites it, on the one hand, and on the other, the injunction to work for free produced by the devaluing of much intellectual and professional labor within the so-called information economy. A mode of forced volunteerism has spread throughout contemporary culture, compelling college students and recent graduates to take on unpaid internships in order to “get a foot in the door,” compelling creative professionals to do free work in order to “create a portfolio,” thereby restricting opportunity to those who can already afford to seek it. And of course there are too many academic equivalents: vastly underpaid adjunct instructors, overworked graduate assistants, an ever-growing list of mentoring and other service requirements that fall disproportionately on the shoulders of junior faculty, women faculty, and faculty of color.
+
+
+# labor
+
+Note: Labor, in fact, is the primary reason that we can't just simply make all scholarly publications available for free online. While the scholarship itself might be provided without charge, the authors have by and large been paid by their employers or their granting organizations, and will be compensated with a publication credit, a line on a c.v., a positive annual review outcome. Reviewers are rarely paid (almost never by journals; very modestly by book publishers), but receive insight into developing work and the ability to shape their fields and support their communities by way of compensation. But there is a vast range of other labor that is necessary for the production of publications, even when distributed online: managing submissions, communicating with authors; copyediting, proofreading, website design and maintenance, and so on. We need to understand that labor as professional too and compensate it accordingly.
+
+
+# responsibility
+
+Note: So where I am asking for generosity--for giving it away--it is from those who are fully credited and compensated: those tenured and tenure-track faculty and other fully-employed members of our professions who can and should contribute to the world the products of the labor that they have already been supported in undertaking. Similarly, generosity is called for from those institutions that can and should underwrite the production of scholarship on behalf of the academy and the public at large. It is our mission, and our responsibility, to look beyond our own walls to the world beyond, to enlarge the gifts that we have received by making them public. Doing so requires that we hold the potential for public engagement with our work among our highest values, that we understand such potential engagement as a public good that we can share in creating.
+
+
+# interest
+
+Note: But there are steps beyond simply making our work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn’t possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that’s fine, to an extent: communication within a discourse community plays a crucial role in that community’s development, and thus there must always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But that inwardly-focused sharing of work has been privileged to our detriment. Scholars are not rewarded--and in fact are at times actively punished--for publishing in popular venues. And because the values instantiated by our rewards systems have a profound effect on the ways we train our students, we are building the wall between academic and public discourse higher and higher with every passing cohort.
+
+
+# public-facing
+
+Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing publications that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, venues like the _Los Angeles Review of Books_ and _Public Books_. There are also a host of individual and group blogs that demonstrate the ways many scholars are already working in multiple registers, engaging with multiple audiences. These venues open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture.
+
+
+# writing
+
+Note: But if we are to open our ideas to larger public audiences, we need to give some serious thought to the mode and voice of our writing. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn’t restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many mainstream publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to focus on complexity and nuance, and the result is often lines of argumentation, and lines of prose, that are far from straight-forward. Getting past the accusations of obscurity and irrelevance requires us to open up our rhetoric, to demonstrate to a generally educated reader how and why what we do matters.
+
+
+# accessible
+
+Note: Again, not all academic writing needs to be done in a public register. But we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible to the public. And we are all already called, to varying extents, to be public intellectuals. Our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus and thereby building support for that work. But for that project to be successful, scholars need to be prepared to bridge the communication gaps, by honing our ability to alternate speaking with one another and speaking with different audiences. We need, in other words, to learn a professional form of code switching.
+
+
+# code-switching
+
+Note: "Code switching" has its origin in linguistics and is used to explore how and why speakers move between multiple languages within individual speech instances. The concept was borrowed by scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition as a means of thinking about students’ need to move between vernacular and academic languages in addressing particular audiences at particular moments. However, as many scholars including Vershawn Ashanti Young have noted, there is a highly racialized power dynamic deployed in most pedagogical injunctions to code-switch, which carry the assumption that students of color must learn "standard" varieties of English in order to succeed, enforcing a DuBoisian double consciousness that ultimately accommodates, rather than eradicating, racism.
+
+
+# power
+
+Note: The command to code switch in an unequal environment is inevitably a tool of power. But so, I want to argue, is scholars’ assumption that academic English as we perform it is the “standard variety”; in fact, it is as much a lived vernacular as any, but a vernacular based in privilege. Given that privilege, if we insist that only our expert language can adequately capture our arguments, we wind up excluding the possibility of allying ourselves with other communities. This is not to say that we can simply adopt a common language that will make us understood (and our work beloved) by all. Nor should we abandon the precise academic languages that undergird the rigor of our work. But it is nonetheless worth asking how judicious code switching, as a means of acknowledging the effects of our educational and professional privilege and inviting others into our discussions, might become a more regular part of our scholarly work.
+
+
+# learn
+
+Note: It's also worth asking what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work. Public-facing writing--as many editors of mainstream intellectual publications would note--is very different from academic writing, and by and large it is not something scholars are trained to do. But numerous initiatives are working to help scholarly authors focus and express the ideas contained in their scholarly publications in ways that help broader audiences engage with them. Ideally, this kind of writing should become part of graduate training across the university.
+
+
+# publics
+
+Note: However, a key component of the work of the public intellectual is not simply addressing but actually helping to build a public in the first place. Nancy Fraser long since noted the fragmentation of contemporary public life into a "plurality of competing counterpublics." We need to consider the possibility that, in retreating from direct engagement with the public, we have actually contributed to the public's fragmentation. As Alan Jacobs has noted, “Subaltern counterpublics are essential for those who have never had seats at the table of power, but they can also be immensely appealing to those who feel that their public presence and authority have waned.” The retreat of scholars into private intellectual life has produced a tighter sense of community and the comfort of being understood, but at the cost of withdrawing scholarly issues and perspectives from public view, and with the result of further fragmentation of the public itself. If we are to return to public discourse, if we are to connect with--and perhaps even be responsible for creating--a range of broader publics, we're going to have to contend with those publics' multiplicity, even as we try to draw them together.
+
+
+# work
+
+Note: But we need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. Our processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don’t meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, when scholars make the transition to more public prose, their work is frequently underrewarded, if not actively derided, back on campus. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it’s likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must “dumb down” key ideas in order to do so. As a result, as Mark Greif has pointed out, academics who begin writing publicly too often "merrily (leave) difficulty at home," becoming both "chummy and unctious," assuming the "general reader" to be "someone less adept, ingenious, and critical than themselves."
+
+
+# understanding
+
+Note: This seems to run counter to my earlier point that academic writers need to learn how to code switch, but in fact it cuts to the heart of the problem: we too often do not know how to speak with the general reader, because we do not understand them. And, as I argue at length in the larger project, this is in no small part because we do not listen to them. We need to make room for the general reader in our arguments, and in our prose, but we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having found a way to connect with a broader audience, having helped to transform that audience into something like a public, how do we then activate that public to work on its own behalf?
+
+
+# public scholarship
+
+Note: Here is where our working in public--creating public access, valuing public engagement, becoming public intellectuals--transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, a scholarship that is not simply performed for the public but that includes and is in fact given over to the publics with whom we work. In public scholarship, members of our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants, as stakeholders.
+
+
+# citizen science
+
+Note: Recent experiments in “citizen science” provide some potentially interesting examples; these are projects that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. Galaxy Zoo, for instance initially invited interested volunteers to assist with classifying the hundreds of thousands of galaxies contained in a sample from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and they did that, far faster and more thoroughly than any lab full of grad students and post-docs could have. But those volunteers have been active participants in significant discoveries that have resulted in dozens of published papers over the last decade, including studies of the project itself.
+
+
+# citizen humanities
+
+Note: This might give us a sense of how citizen science can operate, but what might the citizen humanities look like? It might look like museum exhibits such as Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California, which engaged members of local Pacific communities in the planning and development processes. It might look like The September 11 Digital Archive, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project, which presents first-hand accounts of the events of that day, along with photos, emails, and other archival materials from more than 150,000 participants. It might look like the Baltimore Stories project at the UMBC, which used humanities scholarship as a convening force to bring community organizers, educators, and non-profit organizations together to explore narratives of race in American life. What these projects have in common is that each of them explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern belongs to them. The work involved is theirs not just to learn from but to shape and define as well. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
+
+
+# "peers"
+
+Note: By working in publicly engaged ways, and by bringing those publics into the self-reflexive modes of humanities- and social science-based critique, we have the potential to produce a renewed conception of how intellectual life operates in contemporary culture -- but that renewed conception is going to require us to be open to a new understanding of the notion of our "peers." Open, public scholarship might lead us to understand the peer not as a pre-existing credential but instead as a status that emerges through participation in the processes of a community of practice. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we address within that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening the notion of the intellectual, or the peer, to a much broader range of forms of critical inquiry and active project participation has the potential to reshape relations between town and gown, to lay the groundwork for more productive conversations across the borders of the campus, and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work of the academy matters for our culture as a whole.
+
+
+# finally
+
+Note: So, finally: what might be possible if we were to open up our practices--our publishing, our writing, our research--to full engagement with the publics that our institutions serve? What if we were to hold our institutions, especially our public universities, accountable for living up to the mission of bringing knowledge to the people of our states? How might we draw public support back to our institutions by demonstrating the extent to which the work that we do is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public? If the university is to win back public support, it must be prepared--structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just its mission statement but its actual mission--to place the public service at the top of its priorities. And that must begin with us, finding ways to do our work in and with the public.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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+ Writing in Public
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+## Writing in Public
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Happy to be here! Planning to focus today on ways your work might benefit from having a public online presence, and why, starting with my own story.
+
+
+## assistant professor
+
+Note: Start the story in 2002, during my assistant professorship. Doing the thing I was supposed to be doing: finishing my book. One thing that went wrong (at least for a time) and one thing that went unexpectedly right.
+
+
+
+
+Note: One sentence overview of book.
+
+
+## the press
+
+Note: Waiting for press review, peer review, ed board, and nothing, for way longer than you'd think. I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and it seemed entirely possible that no one else might ever read it.
+
+
+## the blog
+
+Note: And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience in active discussion with him. And I thought, wow, that’s it. Started Planned Obsolescence as an exercise in immediate gratification.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So I started a blog out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote. I still keep it up somewhat sporadically these days. In the early days, though, I blogged almost daily (no Twitter, no FB). Blogs were the thing. Though it didn't look so much like this.
+
+
+
+
+Note: This is what it looked like back in 2002, back when I was just getting started, when I thought I was writing somewhat incognito. What it allowed me to do:
+
+
+1. Write more frequently
+2. Get faster responses
+3. Build a community
+
+
+## conversations
+
+Note: Some of what that produced looked a lot like conversations with friends. Wordherders, etc. The blog wound up helping me build a small community of other scholars working online, a community that was crucial to helping alleviate the isolation I'd been feeling. The connections I forged there helped my writing develop.
+
+
+## citations
+
+Note: But the formal academic marker of conversation is citation. First actual citations from blog.
+
+
+## scholarship
+
+Note: So the informal looped back around to the formal: started getting asked to do actual academically-recognized things based on things I'd done on the blog.
+
+
+
+The Valve
+
+Note: And that led to a lot of thinking out loud about the future of scholarly communication, including a guest post on The Valve, then a widely-read group blog in literary studies. And that in turn led to two projects...
+
+
+
+MediaCommons: mediacommons.futureofthebook.org
+
+Note: The first was MediaCommons, an early attempt to create a network connecting scholars in a field, allowing them to write and discuss their work with one another
+
+
+
+
+Note: And the second was my second book, Planned Obsolescence, which explores a potential future for scholarly communication -- in fact, that project started by asking what might happen if scholarly publishing looked more like blogs than like journals
+
+
+
+Planned Obsolescence open review
+
+Note: So in 2009 I decided (with my press's blessing) to post the draft of the book online for open review. I get asked a lot what made me take the risk of releasing something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth is that I ignored those risks with privileged abandon. What I knew from my blog was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, whose thoughts I wanted to hear, and who I trusted to help me make the book better. And happily, it worked.
+
+
+## 2009
+
+Note: Okay, that was 2009, not 2018. The last few years have made the risks of working in the open impossible to ignore. And yet my experiences leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kinds of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work’s development. And -- perhaps most importantly today -- willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+## conversation
+
+Note: But the enormously important part of this was the conversation the process generated, both for helping me think through the revision process and for helping to develop an audience for the book
+
+
+
+http://generousthinking.hcommons.org
+
+Note: So I did it again, with my newest book, which happens to have a chapter in it about Working in Public, if you want to see more of the argument; staged review process focusing on my community and now moving outward
+
+
+
+Humanities Commons: hcommons.org
+
+Note: This process was hosted at Humanities Commons, which is an open-access, open-source, not-for-profit network for scholars and practitioners across the humanities. Info about HC; ways of consolidating professional presence online. HC has 30,000 users worldwide, but is hosted here at MSU...
+
+
+
+MSU Commons: commons.msu.edu
+Note: and has its own MSU instance, with all of the features that HC includes, such as
+
+
+
+https://commons.msu.edu/members/kfitz/
+Note: highly configurable profiles, as well as the ability to participate in group discussions, to create free WordPress sites, to deposit and share work in the repository, and more.
+
+
+## your story
+
+Note: That's my story. Key things about writing in public are the ability to create community, to engage in discussion, and to tell the story of my work in an ongoing way. So in the time we have left together, I'm hoping we can think together about your story, and the ways you might want to tell it
+
+
+## sharing publications
+
+Note: It might be most important to you to get your formal publications into broader circulation
+
+
+## developing new ideas
+
+Note: Or you might want a space in which you can work through new ideas, get feedback on them
+
+
+## collaboration
+
+Note: You might want to do that idea development in concert with others, drawing them into your work
+
+
+## community engagement
+
+Note: Or you might want to reach out to off-campus communities and engage them in collective projects
+
+
+## how do you want to work?
+
+Note: The key is figuring out who you're trying to reach and how you might best reach them. So how do you want to work? Maybe we can start by taking a few minutes to talk about the ways you can and can't imagine writing in public, the ways it would be useful to you and the ways it wouldn't.
\ No newline at end of file
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+ Generous Thinking
+
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### A Radical Approach to Saving the University
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: thanks to Todd; delighted to be here; introductions?
+
+
+
+
+Note: I'm going to start with a brief overview of the book and its goals, and then turn us toward some discussion. The primary goal, as the book's subtitle suggests, is saving the university, and the overall argument is that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and perhaps especially _public_ institutions of higher education, but other kinds of institutions as well -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves.
+
+
+## radical approach
+
+Note: The 'radical approach' part of the subtitle grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
+
+
+> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
--Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
+
+Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago was committed to serving as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
+
+
+
+
+Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that's there too. Rather, I see this decline as a result of the fact that higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously within two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent, more culturally widespread one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. We find ourselves in a situation today, however, in which both of those paradigms are failing, if in different ways, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
+
+
+## generous thinking
+
+Note: The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It's going to require concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
+
+
+## listening
+
+Note: So the book asks us to think about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
+
+
+## reading together
+
+Note: The book goes on to explore ways that our critical reading practices might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
+
+
+## working in public
+
+Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged projects, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns. And this is where some digital tools and technologies will undoubtedly have something to contribute to helping us connect and communicate with those communities.
+
+
+## the university
+
+Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and public engagement. And this is where the need for a paradigm shift -- for politics -- arises.
+
+
+
+http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
+
+Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." We've no doubt all got stories to tell that would support this conclusion, stories that illustrate the ways that the kinds of public-facing, community-oriented work that might best support the university's need for a closer relationship with the public goes un- or under-rewarded by the university.
+
+
+## the anecdote
+
+Note: I tell my version of this story at the beginning of chapter 4, but a quick recap: Right around the time I began sketching the outline for this book, I attended a day-long workshop on new models for university press publishing, for which the provost of a large state research university had been invited to give a keynote address. The talk came during a day of intensive discussions amongst the workshop's participants and university press and university library leaders, all of whom had a real stake in the future of the institution's role in disseminating scholarly work as openly as possible. And the keynote was quite powerful: the provost described his campus's efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty's work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university's singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our work up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
+
+
+## prestige
+
+Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-ranked venues, conventionally understood. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising -- really, reimagining -- all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university's core service mission? The provost's response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
+
+
+## honest
+
+Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it's that there is a shadow mission—competition—that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
+
+
+## the worst of it
+
+Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that _Generous Thinking_ is most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered -- from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press -- to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to "compete all the time" forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
+
+
+## paradigm
+
+Note: That competition is the dominant paradigm under which universities operate today, a paradigm instituted and enforced by those universities' growing privatization. It is competition for faculty, for students, for funding, and above all for rankings, that replaces the public good with the quest for prestige, that turns our institutions from priding themselves on the communities they invite in to bragging about how many they turn away.
+
+
+
+http://chronicle.com
+
+Note: And it is that same concern for reputation that leads so many institutions to protect themselves instead of protecting the publics, the communities, the individuals that they are meant to serve. It is little wonder that universities are held in such low regard by so much of the voting public today: it is not just the rampant anti-intellectualism of contemporary American culture, but also the degree to which our institutions have repeatedly betrayed the trust that the public has placed in them.
+
+
+# us
+
+Note: In us. If we are going to turn this situation around, if we are going to convince the voting public that universities are deserving of public reinvestment, we have to effect a ground-up transformation in our institutions and the ways they work. That transformation cannot begin with new analytics, or new technologies, that derive from the neoliberal paradigm that is responsible for the damage in the first place. It cannot begin with new means of demonstrating the individual, competitive benefits that higher education can confer. It's got to start, instead, with new ways of thinking about who this "us" is, or can be.
+
+
+## community
+
+Note: These new ways of thinking about "us" have to take root both on campus and off, enabling us to understand ourselves both as a community and in a community. We need -- as I urged that provost -- to radically rethink our means of assessment, the relentless spread of metrics through which we are required to demonstrate success, and instead consider what measures might actually begin to reflect the deep values we bring to our work. And we need to contemplate what a higher education whose benefits were genuinely social rather than individual, public rather than private, might look like, and how focusing our work around those social benefits might help us find new means of building solidarity with the publics that our universities are intended to serve.
+
+
+## liberal arts
+
+Note: And all of that work is where the liberal arts come in, in demonstrating the generosity that underlies our critical thinking, and in using that generosity to foster and sustain more engaged, more articulated, more actualized publics. I've obviously got a lot more to say about this -- a whole book's worth -- but for the moment I'll leave things by saying that all of us -- faculty, staff, students, administrators, parents, trustees, and beyond -- have more to gain from abandoning competition, from working together, from understanding ourselves and our institutions as intimately connected, than we have to lose in the rankings.
+
+
+## the workshop part
+
+Note: So this is where I'd like to turn us toward discussion and some more hands-on consideration of what all this might mean locally. What I'm going to ask is for you to take five minutes to talk with the person next to you about the questions or ideas that you'd like to get out on the table. Take this time to work through those thoughts together and come to a question or idea that you'd like to bring back for all of us to wrestle with.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
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+ Working in Public
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+## Generous Thinking
+---
+### Working in Public
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
+
+Note: Thanks so much for being here! Quick introductions?
+
+
+
+
+Note: The thoughts that I'm starting with here are drawn from _Generous Thinking_, which makes the overall argument that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and perhaps especially _public_ institutions of higher education, but other kinds of institutions as well -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves. I want to focus in this afternoon on the good of those public connections, which are crucial both for the publics with whom we work and for us as well. We can help support those publics in thinking through the pressing issues that they face in their communities and in the world today, and they can support our ability to keep doing that work. By working in public, we can demonstrate the good of the humanities to voters who elect legislators and other representatives who determine budgets and set policies that govern our institutions; with parents who encourage or discourage our students in various directions in their educational choices; with employers who hire our students.
+
+
+## background
+
+Note: I come to this argument through a slightly idiosyncratic path. Back in 2002, I’d just finished the process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and it seemed entirely possible that no one else might ever read it. And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience in active discussion with him. And I thought, wow, that’s it.
+
+
+
+
+Note: My blog, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up helping me build a small community of other scholars working online, a community that was crucial to helping alleviate the isolation I'd been feeling. The connections I forged there helped my writing develop, and the work I published drew the first bits of scholarly recognition my work received.
+
+
+
+
+Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I’d just finished the draft of my second book and decided (with my press's blessing) to post it online for open review. I get asked a lot what made me take the risk of releasing something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth is that I ignored those risks with privileged abandon. What I knew from my blog was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, whose thoughts I wanted to hear, and who I trusted to help me make the book better. And happily, it worked.
+
+
+## 2009
+
+Note: It's important to acknowledge the entire boatload of privilege not-thinking about the risks requires; I was writing from a sufficiently safe position that allowing flaws in my work-in-progress to be publicly visible wasn't a real threat. It's also not incidental that this was 2009, not 2019. The last few years have made the risks of working in the open impossible to ignore. And yet my experiences leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kinds of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work’s development. And -- perhaps most importantly today -- willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
+
+
+
+
+Note: I tested that belief in 2018 by opening the draft of _Generous Thinking_ to a similar open review. Between early February and the end of March, I staged a process in which I first invited a group of readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, after which I opened the project to the world. In the end, 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own). The comments are not all rainbows and unicorns: a few of them sting, and there are a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking were a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is better for having gone through this public process.
+
+
+## public
+
+Note: So my focus today is on the ways that working in public can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that don't just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
+
+
+## challenges
+
+Note: There are real challenges to that process, however. Some of them have to do with today's communication platforms. Blogs don't readily produce the same level of engagement that they did in the early 2000s. In part this has to do with their massive proliferation, and in part it has to do with the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks. As a result, online communities of readers and writers are unlikely to develop spontaneously.
+
+
+## trolls
+
+Note: And then there are the trolls -- not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one’s work public today can involve real risk -- especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
+
+
+## no easy answers
+
+Note: These problems don't have easy answers. I don't have a perfect platform to offer, and I don't know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. I am convinced, however, that countering these destructive forces will require advance preparation, focused responses, and a tremendous amount of collective labor, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But despite these problems, I want to explore a few ways that we might help draw a range of broader publics to the work that we do.
+
+
+## publics
+
+Note: None of what I'm about to say is meant to imply that there isn't room for internal exchange among academics; there is, and should be. But there should also be means for the results of those exchanges to become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. And by talking about "publics," I mean to indicate that our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone, all the time; rather, different aspects of our work might reach different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences -- and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors -- is a crucial skill for the 21st century scholar.
+
+
+## access
+## accessibility
+## participation
+
+Note: So I want to consider three issues in thinking about how those publics might interact with our work. The first is ensuring that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it's impossible for anyone to care about our work if they can't see it. The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to see it, but enabling them to see IN it things that they might care about. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural work by more kinds of public thinkers.
+
+
+## access
+
+Note: So, starting with access. Mobilization around open access began in the scientific community more than twenty years ago and has since spread, with varying degrees of uptake, across the disciplines. I dig into the history and particulars of open access in the book, but the key point is that establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge turns out to increase the impact of work so published. In other words, what's good for the public turns out to be good for research, too, not least because making even the most highly specialized work openly available gives it the greatest opportunity to be found and built upon.
+
+
+## economic model
+
+Note: That said, it's important to note that there are some significant challenges to enabling and supporting open access. Freeing journal articles from barriers to access is a relatively attainable goal, but as we know, in many humanities fields the most important work done takes the shape of books rather than articles, and the technologies and economics of book publishing are quite different. Moreover, the economic model into which much open access publishing has settled in the last decade, in which the exchange has bee "flipped" from reader-pays to author-pays, presents problems of its own. This flip has worked in the sciences, where grants are able to cover publication costs, but it's a model that's all but impossible to make work in the humanities. Moreover, the move from reader-pays to author-pays risks shifting the inequities in access from the consumer side to the producer side of the equation, such that researchers in fields without significant grant funding, or at underfunded institutions, can't get their work into circulation in the same way that their more privileged colleagues can.
+
+
+## engagement
+
+Note: So I don’t want to suggest that creating public access is easy, but I don’t want to restrict our sense of the possibilities either, because the public engagement that we have the opportunity to create has enormous potential. Making our work more openly available enables many more scholars, instructors, and students world-wide to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. Expanding our readership in these ways would seem an unmitigatedly good thing.
+
+
+## why it matters
+
+Note: And yet, many of us worry about opening our work. The general public often seems determined to misunderstand us, hostile to or dismissive of our ideas. That dismissiveness in particular leads us to see no harm in keeping our work closed, because we’re only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter? It matters because the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of our campuses, the more we undermine the public’s willingness to support our research and our institutions. If one key component of the crisis facing higher education today is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good, we wind up strengthening that conviction when we treat our work as private. This is not to say that working in public doesn’t bear risks, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public of the relevance of our work.
+
+
+## prestige
+
+Note: We work, however, in an environment that often privileges prestige over all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for that bias toward prestige in another part of the project, but I want to think briefly about its effects on us. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily bleeds into a sense that the more exclusive a publication’s audience, the higher its value. Needless to say, this is a self-defeating attitude; if we privilege exclusivity, we can't be surprised when our work fails to make its importance clear to the public.
+
+
+## access
+
+Note: There's much more to be said here, especially about the erasure of labor inherent in assuming that all publications should simply be made available for free online. But the thing that I'm asking us to consider is whether those of us who can afford to be generous -- those fully-employed members of our professions who can and should make a gift of our work to the world -- might be willing to take on the work of creating greater public engagement for our fields by understanding our work as a public good, by creating the greatest possible public access to it.
+
+
+## accessibility
+
+Note: But creating that public good requires more than simply making our work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn’t possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that’s fine, to an extent: there should always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But we've privileged that inwardly-focused sharing of work to our detriment. Scholars are too often not rewarded -- and in fact are at times actively punished -- for publishing in popular venues. And because the values instantiated by our rewards systems have a profound effect on the ways we train our students, we build the wall between academic and public discourse higher and higher with every passing cohort.
+
+
+## public-facing
+
+Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing venues and projects that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, opening scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrating the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture. But in order to do so, we need to give some serious thought to the ways we write as well. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn’t restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many mainstream publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to highlight complexity and nuance, and the result is often lines of argumentation, and lines of prose, that are far from straight-forward.
+
+
+## public register
+
+Note: This is not to say that all academic writing should be done in a public register. But I do want to argue that we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible. After all, our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus. But for that project to be successful, we need to hone our ability to alternate speaking with one another and with different audiences.
+
+
+## learn
+
+Note: So we need to think about what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work, which by and large is not something scholars are trained to do. There are initiatives that are working to help scholarly authors focus and express the ideas contained in their scholarly publications in ways that help broader audiences engage with them. Ideally, this kind of writing should become part of graduate training across the university.
+
+
+## public / intellectual
+
+Note: We also need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. University processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don’t meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, public work is frequently underrewarded. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it’s likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must “dumb down” key ideas in order to do so. We need to recognize and appropriately value the work required to make room for the general reader in our arguments, and in our prose.
+
+
+## participation
+
+Note: But we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having worked to engage the public, how can we activate that public to work with us? This is where creating public access and valuing public accessibility transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, work not simply performed for the public but that includes the publics with whom we work, inviting our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants.
+
+
+## citizen humanities
+
+Note: We might think about ways to extend and expand the university's ability to convene conversations into the facilitation of the citizen humanities, opening up cultural concerns of compelling interest to the publics that the project engages, precisely because those concerns are theirs, and the resulting work is theirs too, not just to learn from but to shape and define. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
+
+
+## peers
+
+Note: This mode of work also fosters a new understanding of the notion of the "peer," however, encouraging us to understand our peers not just as credentialed colleagues but instead as participants in a community of practice, whoever those participants may be. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we consider under that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening our sense of who "we" are to a much broader range of participants has the potential to reshape relations between the public and the academy and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work we do matters for our culture as a whole.
+
+
+## your turn
+
+Note: So what I'd like to hear a bit about at this point is your projects: what brought you to the Next-Gen program and what you hope to do in connecting your scholarly work with the publics you engage. I'm going to ask you to take two or three minutes to talk a bit with the person next to you, to surface questions or ideas that you'd like to get on the table, and then let's spend the rest of our time together discussing your work.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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