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## No Carrots<br />No Sticks
---
#### Creating a Digital Humanities Consortium on a Shoestring
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu<br /><br />
Ohio State University Digital Humanities Network<br />
29 November 2021</smaller>
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."
![DH@MSU](images/DH@MSU.000.png)
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.
![This slide left blank](images/blank.png)
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:
![MATRIX](images/DH@MSU.001.png)
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
![curricular programs](images/DH@MSU.002.png)
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.
![many units](images/DH@MSU.003.png)
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.
![This slide left blank](images/blank.png)
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.
<p style= "text-align:left"><smallish>"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."</smallish></p>
<p style= "text-align:right"><smallish>——Stephen Ramsay, "Centers of Attention"</smallish></p>
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.
![This slide left blank](images/blank.png)
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
> <smallish>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.</smallish>
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:
> <small>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.</small>
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
> <smallish>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</smallish>
Note: READ SLIDE. and in section 2.1.2, we include
> <smallish>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</smallish>
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.
![This slide left blank](images/blank.png)
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.
![DH@MSU](images/DH@MSU.004.png)
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?
![CDSP](images/DH@MSU.005.png)
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,
![RFN](images/DH@MSU.006.png)
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.
![This slide left blank](images/blank.png)
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
---
<br /><smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller>
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.

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# presentations

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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.
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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." <br /><br /> --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.
![Headline: Falling Confidence in Higher Ed](images/confidence.png)
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.
# <u>you're</u> 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.
![Headline: Republicans skeptical of colleges' impact on US](images/skeptical.png)
##### 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.
![Headline: Education Dept Opens New Investigation Into Michigan State's Handling of Nassar Scandal](images/nassar.png)
##### 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."<br /><br />-- 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."<br /><br />-- 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."<br /><br />-- 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
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
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.
![GitLab's Guide to All-Remote](images/gitlab.png)
<small>https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/</small>
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.
![COVID Tracking Project](images/ctp.png)<!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" --><br />
<small>https://covidtracking.com</small>
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.
![JHU Coronavirus Resource Center](images/jhucovid.png)<!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" --><br />
<small>https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/contact-tracing/principles</small>
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.
![Generous Thinking](images/gtcover.png)
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.
![Humanities Commons](images/humcomm033020.png)
<small>https://hcommons.org</small>
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.
![HC network graphic](images/hchub.jpg)
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.
![HC profile](images/hcprofile.png)
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.
![HC course site](images/hccourse.png)<!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" --><br />
<small>https://engl6560.hcommons.org</small>
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.
![Sustaining the Commons](images/sustaining.png)<!-- .element height="90%" width="90%" --><br />
<small>https://sustaining.hcommons.org</small>
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.
![HC Members](images/hcmembers.png)
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
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller>
Note: Many thanks.

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## Collaborative Software Communities
---
#### Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Common Good
---
<small>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu<br />
Open Apereo<br />
15 June 2020</small>
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.
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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. <br />
> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; --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.
![Alperin et al preprint](images/alperin.png)
<small>http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35</small>
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.
![Headline: Falling Confidence in Higher Ed](images/confidence.png)
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.
![Harvard gates](images/university.jpg)
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.
![Humanities Commons](images/humcomm033020.png)
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.
![The Elsevier research workflow](images/elsevier.png)
<small>http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/</small>
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.
![Elsevier acquires bepress](images/bepress1.png)
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.
![bepress users](images/bepress3.png)
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.
![Tweet: Well, shit.](images/well_shit.png)
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.
![beprexit](images/beprexit.png)
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.
![arXiv.org](images/arxiv.png)
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.
![arXiv use graph](images/arxiv-use.png)
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.
![arXiv sustainability plan](images/arxiv-cornell.png)
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.
![arxiv move to CIS](images/arxiv-cis.png)
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.
![Samvera](images/samvera.png)
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.
![Samvera community](images/samvera-community.png)
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.
![Dollar sign icon](images/econ-sustainability.png)
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.
![Leaf icon](images/env-sustainability.png)
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.
![Chip icon](images/tech-sustainability.png)
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.
![People icon](images/soc-sustainability.png)
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.
![Elinor Ostrom](images/ostrom.png)
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. &nbsp; -- 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.
![Software supply chain](images/softwaresupplychain.png)
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.
![Money tree](images/money-tree.jpg)
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.
![Tweet from Brett Bobley](images/bobley-tweet.png)
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 --
![Tweet from Hugh Cayless](images/cayless-tweet.png)
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.
![Institutions](images/institutions.png)
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.
![MLA Commons logo](images/mlacommons.png)
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.
![Humanities Commons partners](images/hchub.jpg)
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.
![Humanities Commons profile](images/hcprofile.png)
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.
![Humanities Commons partners](images/hchub.jpg)
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.
![Clip art social network](images/network.png)
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
---
### Collective Action and the Common Good
---
<br /><smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
<small>http://kfitz.info/presentations/btaa.html</small>
Note: I want to start today by thanking Maurice and the BIG Collection team for inviting me to talk with you today.
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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. <br /><br />
--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.
![Harvard gates](images/university.jpg)
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.
![Humanities Commons](images/humcomm033020.png)
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.
![The Elsevier research workflow](images/elsevier.png)
<small>http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/</small>
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.
![Sustainability](images/sustainability.png)
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.
![People icon](images/soc-sustainability.png)
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.
![Solidarity](images/solidarity-mag.png)
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.
![Elinor Ostrom](images/ostrom.png)
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.
![Four kinds of resources](images/resources.jpg)
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.
![Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons](images/ostrom-governing.jpg) <!-- .element height="40%" width="40%" -->
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.
> <smaller>"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." <br /><br /> -- Elinor Ostrom</smaller>
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.
![Software supply chain](images/softwaresupplychain.png)
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.
![Money tree](images/money-tree.jpg)
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.
![Institutions](images/institutions.png)
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.
![US News & World Report Rankings](images/usnwr.png)
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.
![Humanities Commons partners](images/hchub.jpg)
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.
![Clip art social network](images/network.png)
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.
![Many small fish are bigger than one big one](images/collectiveaction.jpg)
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
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu<br /><br />
http://presentations.kfitz.info/btaa.html</smaller>
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
---
### 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
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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." <br /><br /> --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.
![Headline: Falling Confidence in Higher Ed](images/confidence.png)
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.
![Alperin et al preprint](images/alperin.png)
<small>http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35</small>
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.
![Education Dept Opens New Investigation Into Michigan State's Handling of Nassar Scandal](images/nassar.png)
<small>http://chronicle.com</small>
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.
![HuMetrics values inforgraphic](images/humanities-values.png) <!-- .element height="50%" width="50%" -->
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
---
### 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.
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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.
![Planned Obsolescence 2002](http://presentations.kfitz.info/images/plannedobs-old.png)
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.
![Planned Obsolescence open review](http://presentations.kfitz.info/images/plannedobs-openrev.png)
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.
![Generous Thinking open review](http://presentations.kfitz.info/images/gt.png)
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
---
### What We Have to Share
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
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.
![Screenshot of Humanities Commons front page](images/humcomm091822.png)
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
![Screenshot of CORE item](images/coreitem.png)
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
![HC hub diagram](images/hchub.jpg)
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
![Screenshot of MSU Commons](images/msucommons.png)
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
![Screenshot of Sustaining site](images/sustaining.png)
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
![Screenshot of NSF grant award record](images/nsf.png)
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
![Graphic of CARE data principles](images/care.png)<!-- .element height="45%" width="45%" --><br />
<smaller>https://datascience.codata.org/articles/10.5334/dsj-2020-043/</smaller>
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
![Screenshot of MSU Commons STEM groups](images/msustem.png)
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
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller>
Note: Many thanks.

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## Higher Education as a Social Good
---
<br /><smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
<small>http://kfitz.info/presntations/cece.html</small>
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.
![screenshot from MLive story](images/mlive.png) <!-- .element height="45%" width="45%" --><br />
<smaller>mlive.com</smaller>
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.
![graph of gains and losses](images/economic.jpg)<!-- .element height="90%" width="90%" --><br />
<smaller>unsplash.com/@m_b_m</smaller>
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.
![wall painted with "until debt tear us apart"](images/inequality.jpg)<!-- .element height="90%" width="90%" --><br />
<smaller>unsplash.com/@stri_khedonia</smaller>
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.
![female protester in mask](images/protest.jpg)<!-- .element height="90%" width="90%" --><br />
<smaller>unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry</smaller>
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?
![chart of economic resources](images/resources.jpg)
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.
![Harvard gates](images/university.jpg)
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
> <smallish>"the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, <span style="color:red">without excluding other scientific and classical studies</span> 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 <span style="color:red">the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.</span>" (7 U.S. Code § 304)</smallish>
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.
![painted pebbles, one reading "make the world a better place"](images/better.jpg)<!-- .element height="80%" width="80%" --><br />
<smaller>unsplash.com/@thirdserving</smaller>
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.
![man reading and taking notes on a park bench](images/reading-writing.jpg)<!-- .element height="90%" width="90%" --><br />
<smaller>unsplash.com/@skyjlen</smaller>
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?
![students in a classroom](images/students.jpg)<!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" --><br />
<smaller>unsplash.com/@sbk202</smaller>
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.
![lightbulb from Generous Thinking cover](images/generosity.jpg)<!-- .element height="90%" width="90%" --><br />
<smaller>jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous-thinking</smaller>
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.
![billboard reading "community is strength"](images/community.jpg)<!-- .element height="80%" width="80%" --><br />
<smaller>unsplash.com/@john_cameron</smaller>
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?
![woman with umbrella in air against yellow wall](images/creativity.jpg)<!-- .element height="90%" width="90%" --><br />
<smaller>unsplash.com/@edulauton</smaller>
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.
![feet standing on sidewalk painted with "passion led us here"](images/passion.jpg)<!-- .element height="90%" width="90%" --><br />
<smaller>unsplash.com/@goian</smaller>
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
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br /><br />
<small>http://presentations.kfitz.info/cece.html</small>
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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## 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.
![TressieMcPhd tweet](images/tressiemc.png)
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)
![kfitz tweet](images/kfitz.png)
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?
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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." <br /><br /> --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.
![Headline: Falling Confidence in Higher Ed](images/confidence.png)
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.
![Headline: Education Dept Opens New Investigation Into Michigan State's Handling of Nassar Scandal](images/nassar.png)
##### 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."<br /><br />-- 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."<br /><br />-- 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."<br /><br />-- 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
---
### 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.
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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. <br />
> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; --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.
![Headline: Falling Confidence in Higher Ed](images/confidence.png)
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.
![This slide left blank](images/blank.png)
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.
![Humanities Commons](images/humcomm040719.png)
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.
![This slide left blank](images/blank.png)
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.
![Elsevier acquires bepress](images/bepress1.png)
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.
![bepress users](images/bepress3.png)
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.
![Tweet: Well, shit.](images/well_shit.png)
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.
![beprexit](images/beprexit.png)
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.
![arXiv.org](images/arxiv.png)
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.
![arXiv use graph](images/arxiv-use.png)
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.
![arXiv sustainability plan](images/arxiv-cornell.png)
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.
![arxiv move to CIS](images/arxiv-cis.png)
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.
![Samvera](images/samvera.png)
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.
![Samvera community](images/samvera-community.png)
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.
![Dollar sign icon](images/econ-sustainability.png)
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.
![Leaf icon](images/env-sustainability.png)
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.
![Chip icon](images/tech-sustainability.png)
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.
![People icon](images/soc-sustainability.png)
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.
![This slide left blank](images/blank.png)
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.
![Hashtag Solidarity is for white women](images/solidarity-hashtag.png)
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."
![Solidarity magazine](images/solidarity-mag.png)
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.
![Elinor Ostrom](images/ostrom.png)
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. &nbsp; -- 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.
![Software supply chain](images/softwaresupplychain.png)
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.
![Money tree](images/money-tree.jpg)
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.
![Tweet from Brett Bobley](images/bobley-tweet.png)
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 --
![Tweet from Hugh Cayless](images/cayless-tweet.png)
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.
![Institutions](images/institutions.png)
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.
![MLA Commons logo](images/mlacommons.png)
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.
![Humanities Commons partners](images/hchub.jpg)
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.
![Humanities Commons profile](images/hcprofile.png)
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.
![Humanities Commons partners](images/hchub.jpg)
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.
![This slide left blank](images/blank.png)
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.
![Alperin et al preprint](images/alperin.png)
<small>http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35</small>
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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# Comps!
---
### A Few Things to Consider
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social</smaller><br />
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
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social</smaller>
Note: Many thanks.

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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.
![Headline: Republicans skeptical of colleges' impact on US](images/skeptical.png)
##### 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.
![Headline: Education Dept Opens New Investigation Into Michigan State's Handling of Nassar Scandal](images/nassar.png)
##### 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
---
<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
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.

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## Toward a More Generous University
---
##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
Note: Thanks; happy to be here.
![TressieMcPhd tweet](images/tressiemc.png)
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)
![kfitz tweet](images/kfitz.png)
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?
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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." <br /><br /> --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.
![Headline: Falling Confidence in Higher Ed](images/confidence.png)
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.
![Headline: Education Dept Opens New Investigation Into Michigan State's Handling of Nassar Scandal](images/nassar.png)
##### 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."<br /><br />-- 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."<br /><br />-- 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."<br /><br />-- 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.
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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." <br /><br /> --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.
![Headline: Falling Confidence in Higher Ed](images/confidence.png)
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.
## <u>you're</u> 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
---
### A Radical Approach to Saving the University
---
<smallish>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smallish>
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.
![Headline: Republicans skeptical of colleges' impact on US](images/skeptical.png)
<smaller>http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank</smaller>
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.
![Headline: Education Dept Opens New Investigation Into Michigan State's Handling of Nassar Scandal](images/nassar.png)
<smaller>http://chronicle.com</smaller>
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.”<br />
> —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 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.
![Alperin et al preprint](images/alperin.png)
<small>http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35</small>
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.
![Education Dept Opens New Investigation Into Michigan State's Handling of Nassar Scandal](images/nassar.png)
<small>http://chronicle.com</small>
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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## Generous Thinking
---
#### and Sustainable Scholarly Communities
---
<br /><smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu<br />
Goethe University Frankfurt<br />
16 November 2021</smaller>
Note: I want to start today by thanking Tim for inviting me to talk with you. I'm delighted to have this opportunity.
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
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. <br />
> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; --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.
![Alperin et al preprint](images/alperin.png)
<small>http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35</small>
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.
![Headline: Falling Confidence in Higher Ed](images/confidence.png)
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.
![Harvard gates](images/university.jpg)
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.
![Humanities Commons](images/humcomm033020.png)
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.
![The Elsevier research workflow](images/elsevier.png)
<small>http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/</small>
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.
![Elsevier acquires bepress](images/bepress1.png)
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.
![bepress users](images/bepress3.png)
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.
![Tweet: Well, shit.](images/well_shit.png)
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.
![beprexit](images/beprexit.png)
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.
![arXiv.org](images/arxiv.png)
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.
![arXiv use graph](images/arxiv-use.png)
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.
![arXiv sustainability plan](images/arxiv-cornell.png)
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.
![arxiv move to CIS](images/arxiv-cis.png)
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.
![Samvera](images/samvera.png)
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.
![Samvera community](images/samvera-community.png)
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.
![Dollar sign icon](images/econ-sustainability.png)
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.
![Leaf icon](images/env-sustainability.png)
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.
![Chip icon](images/tech-sustainability.png)
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.
![People icon](images/soc-sustainability.png)
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.
![Elinor Ostrom](images/ostrom.png)
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. &nbsp; -- 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.
![Software supply chain](images/softwaresupplychain.png)
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.
![Money tree](images/money-tree.jpg)
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.
![Tweet from Brett Bobley](images/bobley-tweet.png)
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 --
![Tweet from Hugh Cayless](images/cayless-tweet.png)
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.
![Institutions](images/institutions.png)
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.
![MLA Commons logo](images/mlacommons.png)
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.
![Humanities Commons partners](images/hchub.jpg)
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.
![Humanities Commons profile](images/hcprofile.png)
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.
![Humanities Commons partners](images/hchub.jpg)
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.
![Clip art social network](images/network.png)
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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