kfitz/presentations.kfitz.info
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull Requests Actions Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity

add UWM

Browse Source
This commit is contained in:
kfitz
2023-10-29 10:51:53 -04:00
parent af951f7d5d
commit f6386031de
3 changed files with 282 additions and 37 deletions
Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

68
oai13.md
View File

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
---
### Platforms and Workflows for Actually Equitable Open Scholarly Communication
---
<small>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu<br />
<small>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu<br />
OAI13<br />
6 September 2023</small>
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ Note: So what do I mean by that?
Note: "culture eats strategy for breakfast" in the corporate universe -- which is to say that the normalized, unspoken ways things are done will take precedence over all but the best-laid plans, and thus real strategic change often demands deep cultural transformation as a prerequisite.
## "Fair use"
### Fair use
Note: Take the case of "fair use," which as we all know (at least in the US context) is not a legally defined status with respect to the use of copyrighted materials but rather a fuzzy defensive posture built of several highly subjective arguments.
@@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ Note: Take the case of "fair use," which as we all know (at least in the US cont
Note: Fair use is a small and eternally at risk carve-out within a culture that is built on ownership, in other words. And as Susan Bielstein argues in *Permissions: A Survival Guide,* every time we ask permission to use an image or a quotation in a way that ought to fall under fair use, we weaken that carve-out, and we normalize the dominance of ownership, giving credence to corporate claims that we ought to be asking for permission at all times because that's the way things are done
## "Fee waivers"
### Fee waivers
Note: Fee waivers, I want to argue, are similarly a precarious carve-out within a larger culture of
@@ -70,69 +70,63 @@ Note: corporate control: every time we accept a corporate publisher's discount o
# Alternatives
Note: So what are our alternatives?
- We've heard about several of them over the course of the week so far: projects and platforms and publishing workflows that are not corporate-owned, but that rely on public and institutional investment in order to make both publishing and reading freely available to all, and that are accountable to the publics that they serve.
- We've heard about several of them today and over the past few days: projects and platforms and publishing workflows that are not corporate-owned, but that rely on public and institutional investment in order to make both publishing and reading freely available to all, and that are accountable to the publics that they serve.
- And this is the point at which I want to turn from pontificating to instead talk about my own project...
![Humanities Commons logo](images/hclogo-new.png)
Note: Humanities Commons originated from a desire to build new avenues for more open, more public, more universally accessible scholarly communication for everyone. In 2013, with support from the Mellon Foundation, the Modern Language Association launched an internally-focused social network, MLA Commons, designed to foster direct communication and collaboration amongst its members. In 2016, we extended that model, again with support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, to embrace other fields across the humanities, establishing Humanities Commons as a platform for interdisciplinary communication among scholars and practitioners around the world. Account creation is open to any interested user regardless of institutional affiliation, professional status, or organizational membership, and accounts are and will remain free of charge.
# The Goal
Note: Our goal is to provide a non-extractive, scholar-led, and academy-owned and transparently governed alternative to commercial platforms. Beyond that, however, we also want to encourage our users to rethink the dynamics of publishing altogether, in ways that might allow for the development of new, open, collective, equitable processes of creating and sharing knowledge that give all scholars agency over the ways their work develops and circulates.
![Screenshot of Humanities Commons front page](images/humcomm091822.png)
<small>hcommons.org</small>
Note: A bit of background as I begin: Humanities Commons was launched in late 2016 by the Modern Language Association, with support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a platform for interdisciplinary communication among scholars and practitioners across humanities fields. It extended the model established in 2013 by MLA Commons by adding proprietary instances for a small group of scholarly societies who served as pilot partners, and it connected those instances to a central hub that anyone could join, free of charge, all linked by a shared identity management system that allows users access to the parts of the network where they have active memberships.
Note: Humanities Commons is a multi-functional network supporting collaboration and communication among more than 52,000 researchers and practitioners across the humanities and around the world. The Commons brings together a large-scale WordPress-based publishing network with the social-networking capabilities made available by the BuddyPress plugin, allowing users to create rich profiles detailing their work, to participate in a wide range of group discussions, and to build individual or group websites that can serve as portfolios, journals, networked projects, and more.
# NSF <span class="fragment highlight-red">FAIR</span><span class="fragment highlight-red">OS</span> <span class="fragment highlight-red">RCN</span>
![Screenshot of CORE item](images/coreitem.png)
Note: A couple of months ago, the Commons team was awarded a significant grant from the National Science Foundation in order to further extend that model. We're part of the inaugural cohort of the NSF's FAIROS RCN grantees -- which is how I discovered that the NSF loooooooves acronyms even more than my institution does. This one is composed of three key parts: (CLICK) first, FAIR, which stands for "findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable," a set of principles guiding data sharing; (CLICK) second, OS, or open science; (CLICK) and third, RCN, or research coordination networks. So the goal for this grant program is to foster networks that coordinate open research according to FAIR principles, all of which aligns quite well with the structures and goals of the Commons. What is especially unusual about this grant is that our team, which has "Humanities" right there in the name, was approached by a group of STEM education researchers who wanted to use our platform in order to build their RCN.
Note: Additionally, the Commons includes a Fedora/SOLR-based repository with a WP frontend, allowing members to upload their work, to receive DOIs for it, and to share that work with the broader Commons network.
![Stereotypical humanities professor](images/tweed.jpg)
![Screenshot of MSU Commons](images/msucommons.png)
<small>commons.msu.edu</small>
Note: There are at least a couple of things that make this surprising: first, that the usual narrative about innovation in scholarly communication is that it begins in the sciences and only gradually makes its way into the stodgy print-oriented humanities, where our elbow-patched blazers and dusty archives encourage us to resist everything technical. And second, that this particular group of STEM folks defied their own usual narrative about the sciences' technological superiority and empirical rationality in recognizing that we've figured out something that they can learn from -- that the values-based approach to building participatory communities we've taken with the Commons is what they need to make their work successful.
Note: Humanities Commons moved to a new fiscal host, Michigan State University, in 2020, and began work developing the first institutional node on the network, MSU Commons. Over the next two years, we 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.
![Open access logo](images/open-access-logo.png)
![Screenshot of sustaining.hcommons.org](images/sustaining.png)
Note: The usual narratives have played themselves out time and again in scholarly communication. You might see the history of the open access movement, for instance, which began with the recognition among scientists of the damage that major corporate publishers and their exorbitant journal subscription rates were doing to the dissemination of knowledge. In an effort to create greater equity in access to scientific developments -- and, not at all incidentally, to increase the global impact of work being done in the sciences -- researchers began pressing for alternatives to traditional journal publishing models, such that folks without access to well-funded research libraries would still be able to learn from new publications.
Note: Humanities Commons is built by and for scholars. It's a **values-enacted** project, meaning that, among other things, (1) we have put in place a participatory governance structure that enables users to have a voice in the project's future, (2) we have developed network policies that emphasize inclusion and openness, and (3) we are committed to transparency in our finances, and most importantly to remaining not-for-profit in perpetuity.
The open-access movement has been driven since the beginning by an astonishingly utopian goal. As the signatories to the Budapest Open Access Initiative claimed in 2002, "Removing access barriers to (scientific and scholarly) literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge." The idealism that drove this initiative is deeply moving, and it's had a significant effect in changing the ways that scholarly communication operates. Especially in the sciences.
That it's had less impact, and far slower impact, in humanities fields is often read as a sign of our recalcitrance, our backwardness, our refusal to engage with new systems, our desire to keep our conversations exclusive, our grasping after prestige, our general irrelevance to public discourse.
Becoming sustainable -- rather than remaining dependent on the endless churn of grant support -- requires us to generate revenue that will allow us to continue investing in the network's upkeep. And that requires support from institutions of higher education, which in turn requires us to help those institutions think about the significance of open-source, academy-owned alternatives to the corporate data capture platforms on which they currently rely.
![Clipart image of a tiny tree mulched in with coins](images/money-tree.jpg)
Note: While there may well be some elements of truth in some of those assessments, what they leave out is a rather stark economic reality: that by and large humanities scholars and humanities publications simply could not afford to take up the call to open access, at least not as it began to manifest itself in actual publications that sought to make work openly available. A huge percentage of those publications managed the transition to open access by shifting the costs from the consumer side, where they had long relied on library subscription fees, to the producer side, where they instead asked authors for article processing charges. This was arguably all well and good in the sciences, where researchers had long written publishing costs into their grants, and where nearly all research is not only grant-funded but funded by grants sizable enough to accommodate such costs. As we know all too well, the vast majority of research done in the humanities is done without grant-based support, and where grants do exist they're usually too tiny to accommodate publishing charges. And while some institutions are able to provide some support for APCs, that funding is neither universally available nor sufficient to accommodate all the researchers that might benefit from it.
![Photograph of a blue sky with the top of a wire fence on the right](images/barriers.jpg)
Note: So the situation in the humanities, looked at just a little harder, reveals itself not to be exclusive to our fields at all. In fact, the rise of APC-driven business models in scholarly publishing has created new kinds of barriers, preventing many researchers at underfunded institutions, in underfunded areas of research, and in underfunded areas of the world, from contributing to the conversations that open access can foster. In other words, in shifting the costs of publishing from the consumer side to the producer side, the dominant model for open-access publishing didn't eliminate inequities but instead just shifted them, too, turning barriers to access to the products of scholarly research into barriers to participation. (Even more dismayingly, the corporate behemoths that the open access movement rose up against have only seen their profit margins increase during this time, as they've figured out that they can create hybrid journals for which they can *both* charge libraries subscription fees for the journal as a whole *and* charge authors with the ability to pay APCs to make their work openly available.)
![Yellow background with a drawing of a lightbulb whose filament is shaped like a brain](images/generosity.jpg)
Note: Now, I don't want to suggest that we in the humanities, thanks to our highly developed powers of critical foresight, knew that this situation was coming, and thus that any resistance to open access publishing we might have put up was born out of a principled demand for equity and inclusion. But I will venture that the minimal availability of funding to support this shift to APCs, and thus the less-than-lucrative prospects for publishers who might have hoped to enact the same business model flip in our fields, encouraged those of us who want to promote open access scholarly communication in the humanities to begin thinking about workarounds -- and at least some of those workarounds are potentially more subversive to the business of scholarly communication altogether.
![Humanities Commons logo](images/hclogo-new.png)
Note: This is where Humanities Commons came from: a desire to promote more open, more public, more universally accessible scholarly communication for everyone.
For instance
- 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 the OA Books Network group](images/humcomm-group.png)
Note: The Commons is designed, in other words, to facilitate **community-building**. Its emphasis on member-to-member connections and communication is a significant component of why our STEM education colleagues came to us, rather than selecting another platform on which they could build their research coordination network -- because while there are a ton of well-funded platforms that can host and preserve the data and publications that scientists produce, many of them are operated without academic values in mind, and none of them focus on the *people* doing the work, or on the ways that discussion and collaboration amongst those people might lead to transformative change.
- I want to talk a bit today about my own project, Humanities Commons
- for the last ten years, I've been working with colleagues, first within the Modern Language Association, and now at Michigan State University, to develop a non-extractive, scholar-led, and academy-owned and governed alternative to commercial platforms, thus allowing for open, collective, equitable communication processes that give all scholars agency over the ways that work in their fields circulates
- HC is a bit different: we're not a publisher, or a journal system, but rather a platform that brings together a social/blogging network and a repository in ways designed to facilitate direct scholar-to-scholar communication
- overview of HC functionality
- HC community governance and support
## thank you
---
<small> Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu </small>
<small> Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu </small>
Note: Thanks so much.

58
uwm.html Normal file
View File

@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Building a More Generous University</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="dist/reset.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="dist/reveal.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="dist/theme/kfitz.css" id="theme">
<!-- If the query includes 'print-pdf', include the PDF print sheet -->
<script>
if( window.location.search.match( /print-pdf/gi ) ) {
var link = document.createElement( 'link' );
link.rel = 'stylesheet';
link.type = 'text/css';
link.href = 'css/print/pdf.css';
document.getElementsByTagName( 'head' )[0].appendChild( link );
}
</script>
<!-- Theme used for syntax highlighted code -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="plugin/highlight/monokai.css" id="highlight-theme">
</head>
<body>
<div class="reveal">
<div class="slides">
<!-- Use external markdown resource, separate slides by three newlines; vertical slides by two newlines -->
<section data-markdown="uwm.md" data-separator="^\n\n\n" data-separator-vertical="^\n\n"></section>
</div>
</div>
<script src="dist/reveal.js"></script>
<script src="plugin/notes/notes.js"></script>
<script src="plugin/markdown/markdown.js"></script>
<script src="plugin/highlight/highlight.js"></script>
<script>
// More info about initialization & config:
// - https://revealjs.com/initialization/
// - https://revealjs.com/config/
Reveal.initialize({
hash: true,
// Learn about plugins: https://revealjs.com/plugins/
plugins: [ RevealMarkdown, RevealHighlight, RevealNotes ]
});
</script>
</body>
</html>

193
uwm.md Normal file
View File

@@ -0,0 +1,193 @@
## Building a More Generous University
---
### Collaboration, Community, Solidarity
---
<small>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu<br />
C21, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee<br />
2 November 2023</small>
Note: Thank you for that introduction, and for inviting me to talk with you here today! It's so nice to get to be here with you in person. Zoom is great in a lot of ways -- most importantly it made it possible for us to continue to work together despite whatever distance might be involved. This is one of the things we've learned from the pandemic: that we can do a lot of things remotely that we thought we had to travel for, and that we can include many more when we do. But we've also learned that there are things that genuinely benefit from being and thinking and working together.
There have been a lot of such lessons in all of our lives over the last year-plus, some of them positive and some much less so, but all of which I hope we can carry with us as we begin to return to campus. I want us to carry these things not least because returning to "normal," or seeking to create a "new normal," would be a costly mistake. We have an opportunity right now to avoid normal and build something better, something more fluid and capable of growth. But coming back better is going to require us to think pretty differently about the structures within which we work, and about how to change them to support the kind of institution we genuinely want to be part of. (So that's my focus for this afternoon. Before I move on, a quick warning that there's a little bit of language coming up on the next slide.)
So back in 2020, just before everything began shutting down, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread on Twitter in which she talked about the things she tells early career Black scholars who seek her advice on surviving in the academy. These two tweets in particular caught my attention:
![TressieMcPhd tweet](images/tressiemc.png)
Note: "This place was fucked up when you got here, it will be fucked up when you leave here. All you can control is how much you let it fuck you up in the process. That is a pretty impolitic stance but I stand by it. I don't think these institutions can support us or love us. And I honor the many many people who work to make them more humane. But you, alone, cannot do that. And you cannot do it, ever, by killing yourself."
![Protester in mask](images/protest.jpg)
<smaller>https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry</smaller>
Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the several years of the horrifying accuracy of this perspective -- that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. These institutions have long been dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category the choice to prioritize the flow of tuition dollars over the safety of students and staff by returning too hastily to in-person instruction; the choice to prioritize institutional reputation over individual safety and dignity by suppressing, ignoring, and dismissing complaints of sexual harassment and assault; the choice to respond to calls for racial justice with superficial statements and underfunded add-on measures; and the choice to deploy an increasingly militarized police presence in response to civil protest. All of these choices share the conviction that the institution and its ways of being are far more important than the people for whom it exists. And all of them have led me to ask what would be required for us to remake the university as an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all its members, rather than seeking in a moment of crisis to minimize its obligations and ensure that all of its relationships remain forever contingent?
# collective action
Note: One key thing that it would require is collective action. Because McMillan Cottom is right: you, alone, cannot change things. Together we might: but first we have to build that together, build the spaces and places of supporting that together, and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals.
![Generous Thinking cover](images/gtcover.png)
Note: Much of what follows grows out of the arguments I made in _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education in the United States is going to require those of us who work on campus to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the many publics that it serves.
# "radical approach"
Note: The 'radical approach' part came from my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, and that it can't be made incrementally but instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no easy path or simple tool that can readily take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis in higher education today,
> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." <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 university system that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the purpose of our institutions from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated population ready to participate in building a better world -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
![Headline: Falling Confidence in Higher Ed](images/confidence.png)
Note: Moreover, as early as 2018, Inside Higher Ed was reporting "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence, which has turned in the ensuing years into outright antagonism, cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that exists. But we need to consider the possibility that, as I argue in the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, the paradigm under which higher education has operated in the United States is failing, and failing fast, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world. And this is true not least because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
![Headline: Education Dept Opens New Investigation Into Michigan State's Handling of Nassar Scandal](images/nassar.png)<br>
<small>http://chronicle.com</small>
Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the decline in confidence in the university is not just caused by the public failing to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. What I'm asking for is a tall order -- in many ways swimming against the current of the neoliberal institution. But a large part of what I'm after is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions *as* communities, as well as *in interaction with* communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own: we need our publics' help as much or more as they need ours.
# crisis
Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education has always been of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there _can be_ such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while the concept of generosity may seem too touchy-feely to represent the key to the future of the university, I hope, in the book, that I've put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
# "we"
Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I wrote in *Generous Thinking* focused on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty was my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is the thing we call 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.
# "community"
Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the institution itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests and excludes a "them."
# solidarity
Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
# generous thinking
Note: So the book overall made the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves requires re-grounding the institution in a mode of what I referred to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It requires concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
# listening
Note: *Generous Thinking* asked us to consider how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It began 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 went 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 spent 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 argued for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and community engagement. The university must become the kind of institution that can focus less on individual achievement, on educating for individual leadership, and that instead focuses on building community, and indeed on educating for community-building. And this requires a radical rethinking of the reward structures of higher education: what we value and how we demonstrate that we value it.
# individualism
Note: Our universities are in many ways structured as collectives, in which each member of the institution is charged with some part of the well-being of the whole. This is how we derive our principles of shared governance, that we each have a contribution to make to the operation of the institution. And yet: when we examine both the kinds of work for which we are actively rewarded, as well as the nature of the rewards themselves, we repeatedly find an emphasis on the individual rather than the whole. For instance, for faculty at an institution like mine the work for which we are most rewarded is our research -- which we pointedly refer to as our "own" work -- and the rewards we receive often pull us away from the collective. If I publish a well-received book or a an article published in a prestigious journal, I might be eligible for a course release or relief from service responsibilities. And all of the other possible rewards I can seek -- promotions, raises, sabbaticals, and so forth -- encourage me to retreat from membership in the university community and instead focus on my own work. This is part and parcel of the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university, in which every form of merit -- including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and more -- is determined by what I individually have done, even where I've done it collaboratively.
# zero-sum
Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. The result is that we find ourselves in zero-sum game in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
# institutions
Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Budget models such as responsibility center management promote competition among academic units for majors and enrollments, and actively discourage any attempts to think across units, whether to develop new interdisciplinary collaborations or to support connections and resource-sharing across larger university structure. And insofar as these sorts of budgetary structures within our institutions drive us all toward competition, our institutions as a whole are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time," seeking to distinguish themselves from other institutions by promoting their own interests. We need our institutions to distance themselves from the rankings and the other quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another, in order for those institutions to promote more generous, more collaborative internal structures, as well as a work environment in which each of us who work for them can move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more collective.
# culture change
Note: And this is no easy task. During the years just before and after *Generous Thinking* was published, I had the opportunity to speak on a number of college and university campuses where faculty, staff, students, and administrators were thinking about how to create and support a greater sense of connection between their campus communities and their public-facing mission. The folks who invited me -- ranging from the officers of campus AAUP chapters to university presidents and their advisors -- felt a connection with the arguments I was making not least because they recognized that their institutions require not just better strategic plans but deep culture change. That culture change demands, among other things, a serious rethinking of how we work, why we work the ways we do, how we assess and reward that work, and how we recognize as work things that tend to get dismissed as service but that play a crucial role in building and sustaining collaborative communities. *Generous Thinking*, however, focused pretty tightly on the why and the what of the changes that our university cultures need to make, and spent a whole lot less time on how.
# better
Note: For instance: it's clear that making a better, more sustainable institution, in other words, requires us to move away from individualistic ideas of meritorious production -- in fact to step off the Fordist production line that forever asks us to do *more* -- and instead to think in a humane fashion about ways that we can do *better* . Better often in fact requires slowing down, talking with our colleagues and our communities, and most importantly, listening to what others have to say. Better requires engagement, connection, sharing, time, in ways that more nearly always encourages us to rush past. Turning from more to better can help us access the pleasures -- indeed, the joys -- of our work that life on the production line has required us to push aside. But given the ways that we've all been steeped in *more*, it's not at all clear how we might begin to slow down, to make a set of changes that go against the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us.
# generosity in<br />hard times
Note: So I was already thinking that I needed to follow up *Generous Thinking* with something that would dig a bit further into the how of transformation. And then after one of the talks I gave, an attendee asked me a question that made the stakes of thinking about how painfully clear. Her question has been stuck in my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that it's relatively easy to embrace when resources are plentiful, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to think generously when we're facing significant budget cuts, for instance, or is it inevitable that we fall back into analytics-driven competition with every unit -- much less every worker -- out to protect their own resources and their own privileges? I don't remember exactly how I answered then. I suspect that it was some combination of saying "you're completely right; that's the real question" and pointing out that the difficulties involved in being generous in hard times are precisely why we need to practice generosity in a determined way in good times. And I may have said some things about the importance of transparency in priority-setting and decision-making, and of involving the collective in that process. But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us -- we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them -- invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I do want the institution to survive, and I want to sustain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
# sacrifice
Note: And I also know that however much I may want to keep the institution running, the institution is not thinking the same about me. Our institutions cannot love us back. However much we sacrifice for them, they will never sacrifice for us. This returns me to Tressie McMillan Cottom's point: you, alone, cannot make the institution more humane, and especially not by killing yourself in the process. This is especially true for members of minoritized groups working within the academy; it's especially true for faculty without tenure; it's especially true for staff; it's especially true for scholars working in contingent positions; it's especially true for everyone whose positions in the hierarchies of prestige and comfort leave them vulnerable, especially at moments when "we're all in it together" is invoked not in the context of resource-sharing but of sacrifice. Sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and to accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time as we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
# big structural change
Note: The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it differently. And this is the deepest goal of _Generous Thinking_, and by extension of the followup project I've been working on, entitled _Leading Generously_. In this project I'm focusing on how we can work collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. What kinds of leadership are required for us remake the university into an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all of its members, in good times and bad? _Leading Generously_ is in some ways intended to be a practical handbook for putting the ideas of _Generous Thinking_ into action. But in doing so it asks its readers to reconsider some basic concepts that underwrite big structural change. It proposes that, despite the enormity of the transformation that higher education needs today, local changes can begin to make a difference, and that we are capable of making those local changes, which can network out into something larger.
# leadership
Note: Among the concepts that demand reconsideration, however, is the very notion of leadership itself. We conventionally associate leadership with the folks at the top of an institutional hierarchy, those with the authority to steer the ship. While I hope that *Leading Generously* might speak to them, the project addresses everyone on campus, beginning with the argument that everyone in an institution has the potential to be a leader, to create local transformative change that can model ways of being that others might learn from and join in with. This conviction places a lot of emphasis on individual actors, however, in ways that may seem a bit at odds with some of today's most important ideas about how power operates. Those critical ideas -- including arguments about race and racism; about sex, gender, and misogyny; about class and power -- understand the issues they explore to be *systemic* rather than *individual*. That is to say, they argue that real change requires social transformation. It requires building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, transforming economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. I am convinced by those arguments, and I have that same end goal: building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world. But the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
# agency
Note: The key to this problem is where we locate agency: who has the power to start the process of making significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, there is little agency left to the individual. And it's unquestionably true that the structural problems we face are enormous, and that one individual can't do much to reshape the world. But groups of individuals can. And building those groups starts with individuals who decide to do more, to put what individual agency they do have to work in solidarity with others.
# you
Note: And so *Leading Generously* begins with you, where you are. It starts from the position that each of us is equipped to make change in the aspects of our institutions over which we have influence, and that these changes can model new modes of being within our communities. But there's a second part to the question of agency: how to multiply it. One of the deepest flaws in contemporary models of leadership is the assumption that our reach becomes bigger as we climb the org chart. And of course power does grow in that direction, but what also happens is that you narrow your connections, until you find yourself at the pinnacle of the institution: you're at the center of power, but you're teetering there alone.
> "retreating from the center of things -- both in reality and in one's self-conception -- is inseparable from forging connections that expand the boundaries of one's self."<br /><br /> -- Sarah Buss
Note: And as Sarah Buss notes in the introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled *Radical Humility*, it's through connections that we become larger, not through ego, and building those connections requires a willingness to step out of the singular position of power and to work on coalition-building instead. We need those coalitions to transform a complex organization, and we need to act in solidarity in order for those coalitions to succeed.
# us
Note: Because of this requirement, it's important to recognize that the object of leadership is not institutions, but people, bringing them together and organizing for change. Building a more generous, deeper sense of "us" asks us to focus our attention on our relationships with our colleagues and with our broader communities, ensuring that we maintain the humanity not just of those we work with and for, but of the structures through which all of us connect.
# how
Note: How we begin transforming our institutions, then, is shoring up the means of moving from "you" to "us," the means of building the coalitions and collectives required to transform our institutions and make them capable of the kinds of community-oriented thinking we most need today. There are aspects of this transformation that require high-level administrative intervention: developing the post-RCM budget model that rewards collaboration and contributions to the collective success of the institution rather than competition among units. (And honestly, any institution that can successfully develop and implement such a model could become a shining example for other to learn from.) But beyond these high-level administrative aspects of transformation, there are more local aspects as well, aspects that each of your units can take on. Many of our units are governed by bylaws or other policy documents, and the thing about those documents is that they can be revised. It's often a messy process, but bringing together the members of a department to articulate their values and then rewrite their bylaws to align with those values can foster deep cultural change, by looking hard at the discrepancy between, for instance, our desire for transparency and equity and our policies limiting who gets to participate in and vote on departmental processes. Or, by looking hard at the conflict between our desire for innovation and impact in scholarly work and our policies defining what counts as "research" in highly limited ways.
# change
Note: None of this is easy, not least because it requires us to do some deep self-examination, questioning both the ways our policies have become established and our attachments to them. As an expert in organizational change has put it, "People don't resist change. They resist *being changed*." We need to think hard about what the kinds of cultural change we'd like to see in our institutions will ask of us. We need to consider how we might become better listeners, how we might learn to sit with difficult conversations and even criticism, how we might commit to assessing our work and the work of those around us based on our deepest values, how we might cultivate an atmosphere of mutual and renewable trust, and so on. Each of these ideas -- listening, vulnerability, values, trust, support and more -- is deceptively simple, but with careful consideration can become the foundation for a practice of community building, for thinking through institutional policies and processes and ensuring that they serve the people for whom the institution operates.
# people
Note: The necessity of that practice is clear: our institutions cannot survive the crises they currently face unless the people and the relationships that make up the institution thrive. Budgets and bottom lines matter, but without its people -- the students, the staff, the faculty, the community -- the university is nothing. And that's the thing that we need to understand now more than ever, and the thing that your institute is working toward: the recognition that the primary work of the university is connection, and that in hard times the most generous thing we can do is to connect with ourselves and everyone we work with, so that we all might develop the collective strength necessary to return and rebuild.
## thank you
---
<small>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</small>
Note: Many thanks.