update indiana251110

indiana251110.md

@@ -11,12 +11,12 @@ Note: Thank you so much for that introduction!
 
 <img width="400" src="images/lgcover.jpg" alt="Cover of Leading Generously">
 
-Note: I'm delighted to be here today to talk with you a bit about *Leading Generously*. There are multiple origin stories for this book, but one of them is seeded in a protracted crisis at my own institution, Michigan State University. I'm not going to re-tell the whole story today, but instead just note that in the eight-plus years that I worked there, MSU has had six presidents and five provosts, and of the . The institution has also experienced massive conflict with and within our board of trustees and all of us are living through a resulting melange of anger and despair and exhaustion that seriously inhibits our ability to focus on the things that are most important to us.
+Note: I'm delighted to be here today to talk with you a bit about *Leading Generously*. There are multiple origin stories for this book, but one of them is seeded in a protracted leadership crisis at my own institution, Michigan State University. I'm not going to re-tell the whole story today, but instead just note that in the eight-plus years that I worked there, MSU has had six presidents and five provosts, and of the 19 deans across the campus, 12 have been in their roles for fewer than 3 years, and 16 for fewer than 4. The institution has also experienced massive conflict with and within our board of trustees, and all of us are living through a resulting melange of anger and despair and exhaustion that seriously inhibits our ability to focus on the things that are most important to us.
 
 
 ## crisis
 
-Note: But thinking about what our institution has experienced in recent years as a "crisis" feels so obvious as to say absolutely nothing about what's actually happening. We are surrounded by crisis in the academy (not to mention the world beyond) and while our circumstances at MSU have perhaps been more intense than at other institutions, to say that we have been facing an "institutional crisis" feels redundant.
+Note: But thinking about what our institution has experienced as a "crisis" feels so obvious as to say absolutely nothing about what's actually happening. We are surrounded by crisis in the academy (not to mention the world beyond) and while our circumstances at MSU have perhaps been more intense than at other institutions, to say that we have been facing an "institutional crisis" feels redundant.
 
 
 ## <span style="color:red">permanent</span> crisis
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Note: Institutions like ours are in many ways built on a foundation of crisis. A
 
 Note: noting that talk of a "crisis in the humanities" rest on claims that "modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities." And perhaps it is true that we in the humanities -- or is it the liberal arts more broadly? or even the university as a whole? -- we rely on our sense of crisis, our sense of swimming against the larger cultural tides, to give us purpose. Much of the work that we as scholars do, after all, is structured by critique, and without our distance from the cultural and institutional center we can neither obtain the perspective nor sustain the motivation necessary to studying the ways that our world structures and is structured by its representations.
 
-On the other hand. There are some particularities to the situation of our institutions today -- the threats that our colleges, our departments, our fields, and our researchers and instructors face -- that are not simply rhetorical, and it's worth paying some careful attention to the specifics of these crises, which include:
+On the other hand. There are some particularities to the situation of our institutions today -- the threats that our colleges, our departments, our fields, and our researchers and instructors face -- that are not merely rhetorical, and it's worth paying some careful attention to the specifics of these crises, which include:
 
 
 - the <span class="fragment highlight-red">labor</span> crisis<br />
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@ On the other hand. There are some particularities to the situation of our instit
 
 Note: (**CLICK**) **The labor crisis**. Over the last couple of decades, we've watched as more and more good positions -- with job security, adequate salaries, full benefits, and above all academic freedom -- have been sucked into the gig economy. The effects of this labor crisis are manifold: as fewer and fewer faculty members have access to the benefits of tenure, and thus the voice in shared governance required to have a real impact on the institution's directions, our fields and our departments appear decreasingly vibrant, drawing in diminishing numbers of students, thus making the case for our apparent obsolescence.
 - (**CLICK**) This of course works hand-in-hand with **the economic crisis** that our institutions are mired in. As public funding provides a smaller and smaller portion of university budgets, the costs of higher education have shifted radically from the state to individual students and their families. As those costs escalate, the pressure on students to think of higher education as a market exchange grows. If they're going to sink tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars into the purchase of a four-year degree, it's not the least bit surprising that students would also face increasing pressure to select a degree program that seems to promise an obvious career outcome. And thus majors that are named after jobs or industries grow, and those that aren't shrink, providing further evidence that new investments in those fields are a luxury that our institutions, like our students, cannot afford.
-- (**CLICK**) And in the midst of all that, there is of course **the political crisis**, which has been brewing for decades but has taken a particularly acute turn in the last few years. The attacks that we've seen on critical race theory, the moves to ban books from libraries, the attempts to eradicate tenure, the growing interference in the curriculum -- all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that the humanities bring to bear.
+- (**CLICK**) And in the midst of all that, there is of course **the political crisis**, which has been brewing for decades but has taken a particularly acute turn in the last few years. The attacks that we've seen on critical race theory, the moves to ban books from libraries, the attempts to eradicate tenure, the growing interference in the curriculum, the decimation of research funding, the restrictions on and danger to international students and faculty -- all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that the university brings to bear.
 I point to all of this in order to suggest that neither the threats we face nor the work we have ahead are rhetorical. They are instead very material, and they demand material responses.
 
 
@@ -63,7 +63,7 @@ But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow,
 ![Protester in mask](images/protest.jpg)
 <smaller>https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry</smaller>
 
-Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence in recent years of the painful inequities on our campuses, and have had proven to us that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. These institutions have long been dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category the choice to prioritize the flow of tuition dollars over the safety of students and staff by returning too hastily to in-person instruction; the choice to prioritize institutional reputation over individual safety and dignity by suppressing, ignoring, and dismissing complaints of sexual harassment and assault; the choice to respond to calls for racial justice with superficial statements and underfunded add-on measures; and the choice to respond to civil protest with an increasingly militarized police presence. All of these choices share the conviction that the institution is far more important than the people for whom it exists. And all of them have led me to ask what would be required for us to remake the university as an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all its members, rather than seeking in a moment of crisis to minimize its obligations and ensure that all of its relationships remain forever contingent?
+Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the last five years of the painful inequities on our campuses, and have had proven to us that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. These institutions have long been dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category the choice to prioritize the flow of tuition dollars over the safety of students and staff by returning too hastily to in-person instruction in the wake of the pandemic; the choice to prioritize institutional reputation over individual safety and dignity by suppressing, ignoring, and dismissing complaints of sexual harassment and assault; the choice to respond to calls for racial justice with superficial statements and underfunded add-on measures; and the choice to respond to civil protest with an increasingly militarized police presence; and now, in too many cases, the choice to pre-comply with federal demands. All of these choices share the conviction that the institution is 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
@@ -179,7 +179,7 @@ Note: As Young points out, "the values of bureaucratic organization" indicate th
 
 > <smaller>“The rules and policies of any institution serve particular ends, embody particular values and meanings, and have identifiable consequences for the actions and situation of the persons within or related to these institutions. All of these things are open to challenge, and politics is the process of struggle and deliberation about such rules and policies, the ends they serve, and the values they embody. The ideology of <span style="color:red">merit</span> seeks to <span style="color:red">depoliticize</span> the establishment of criteria and standards for allocating positions and awarding benefits.” (Young 211)</smaller>
 
-Note: **(READ SLIDE.)** That depoliticization sounds like a good thing — making the awarding of benefits as objective a process as possible — up until we remember that the individual people involved in defining and implementing these processes are not and can never be objective. We are all inescapably subjective, bringing our own experiences and perspectives to everything we judge. What depoliticization means in the bureaucratic, and particularly in the meritocratic, is a closing-off of the opportunities for debating the criteria, the processes, and the objectives through which we might keep notions like merit from becoming forms of oppression. As it becomes depoliticized, bureaucracy errs in treating the rules as the _ends_ that it seeks, rather than a _means_ to those ends.
+Note: **(READ SLIDE.)** That depoliticization sounds like a good thing — making the awarding of benefits as objective a process as possible — up until we remember that the individual people involved in defining and implementing these processes are not and can never be objective. We are all inescapably subjective, bringing our own experiences and perspectives to everything we judge. What depoliticization means in the bureaucratic, and particularly in the meritocratic, is a closing-off of the opportunities for debating the criteria, the processes, and the objectives through which we might keep notions like merit from becoming forms of oppression. As it seeks to become depoliticized, bureaucracy errs in treating the rules as the _ends_ that it seeks, rather than a _means_ to those ends.
 
 
 ## peer review
@@ -192,14 +192,14 @@ Note: Take, for example, peer review. I've written extensively about this, and I
 Note: Moreover, trying to change the rules and procedures to make them _more_ objective is laudable, but cannot help but introduce new areas in which objectivity is in question. Ultimately, as Young argues, the goal should be not to exclude subjectivity or "personal values" from decision-making, but rather to make that subjectivity and those personal values fully part of the decision-making process itself, as she notes that these values are "inevitably and properly part of what decisionmaking is about." So rather than trying to make peer review more bias-free, what if we were instead to embrace its deeply political nature, to make it more transparent and participatory, and to ask authors and reviewers alike to surface and contend with their values as a part of the process?
 
 
-## processes and policies
+> <smaller>“Decisions and actions will be evaluated less according to <span style="color:red">whether they are right or just</span> than according to their legal validity, that is, whether they are consistent with the rules and follow the appropriate procedures.” (Young 77)</smaller>
 
 Note: Similarly, we might think of the ways that tenure and promotion processes and policies are implemented. These structures have been designed to protect candidates from the personal whims or animus of administrators as cases move through the approval hierarchy. And yet that bureaucracy has the potential to interfere with justice in its requirement that all cases be treated identically. As Young notes of the gap between bureaucracy and truly democratic collective action, "Decisions and actions will be evaluated less according to whether they are right or just than according to their legal validity, that is, whether they are consistent with the rules and follow the appropriate procedures." This is encoded in the appeals process for promotion and tenure denials at many institutions, where the acceptable range of inquiry is restricted to whether the process was conducted in accordance with the rules, rather than whether the final determination was just, much less whether the process as constituted was capable of producing a just result. 
 
 Changing processes like peer review or tenure and promotion in order to surface rather than avoid subjective bias, one might reasonably argue, would make those processes political. And yet it's clear to just about everyone who has ever been through such a process that those decisions and processes _have always been political_, and will always remain political. That's not in and of itself a bad thing. We should not want to remove politics from the ways that we engage with one another on campus, but rather to create an environment in which we can embrace politics, rendering all of us able to participate wholly, fully, with the most open and honest intent in the processes through which our lives are inevitably structured.
 
 
-### politics : leadership :: bureaucracy : management
+#### politics : leadership :: bureaucracy : management
 
 Note: So what does all of this have to do with leadership? If management, as Kotter argued, is focused on "coping with complexity," on ensuring the optimal functioning of entangled structures and organizations, we might begin to intuit a relationship between management and bureaucracy. Establishing rules and processes, ensuring that they're followed, remediating them when they fail, all require careful management. And again, good management remains important, as anyone who has ever worked with a poor manager can attest. But if management is about ensuring that things get done with maximum efficiency, it's also about minimizing everything that can interfere with that efficiency, including — and perhaps especially — dissent. Management is in this sense necessarily depoliticizing; it requires foreclosing debate and smoothing the way for prescribed action. This is one reason why the good management needed for making the status quo function often cannot contend with change: when an organization tries to manage change, it too often ends up with a manufactured consent that squelches the political and moves decision-making outside the realm of debate.