## Failures of Leadership
---
### Rethinking the University in the United States
---
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
http://presentations.kfitz.info/jfki.html
Note: Thanks so much for that introduction, and thanks to Alexander for inviting me to participate in this workshop. When we first began talking about this, long before the pandemic, the idea of hopping on a plane to pop over to Berlin for a few days of scholarly conversation seemed not only plausible but normal. Two years later, finding myself actually here, I'm a bit stunned. Right up until I crawled inside the metal tube that brought me here I kept expecting the plan to fall through -- and it would have been fine, if less fun; as with so many things since the pandemic began, we'd have found ways to adjust, to make use of our networked tools, and to produce a conversation that might have been a little less satisfying but nonetheless sufficient.
This is one of the things we've learned from the pandemic: that we can do a lot of things at a distance that we thought we had to travel for, and that we can include many more people in the process. There have been a lot of such lessons in all of our lives, some positive and some less so, but all of which I hope we can carry with us as we continue to emerge from our homes and return to our campuses. I want us to carry these things not least because returning to "normal," or seeking to create a "new normal," would be a costly mistake. We have an opportunity right now NOT to return to normal, and there are good reasons not to do so. But coming back better is going to require us to think pretty differently about the structures within which we work, and about how to change them to support the kind of world we want.
# better
Note: The project that I'm currently working on has that change as its explicit goal. It's tentatively entitled "Leading Generously: Rethinking the Future of the University," and it's meant to serve as a follow-up of sorts to my 2019 book *Generous Thinking*. Such a followup is necessary, I increasingly believe, because many many many of us working within the university system in the United States, and for that matter around the world, know that things need to change, and even have a good sense of *what* needs to change, but have far less of a grasp on *how* to make that change. *How* is really hard.
For instance: it's clear to many of us, that creating better, more sustainable institutions requires us to move away from quantified metrics for meritorious production -- in fact to step off the Fordist production line that forever asks those of us working in higher education to do *more* -- and instead to think in a humane fashion about ways that we can do *better*. Better often in fact requires slowing down, talking with our colleagues and our communities, and most importantly, listening to what others have to say. Better requires engagement, connection, sharing, time, in ways that more nearly always encourages us to rush past. Turning from more to better can help us access the pleasures -- indeed, the joys -- of our work that life on the production line has required us to push aside. But given the ways that we've all been steeped in the *more* that is the heart of the neoliberal university, it's not at all clear how we might begin to slow down, to make a set of changes that go against the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us.
# how
Note: The gaps in thinking about *how* in *Generous Thinking* had already persuaded me that I had some follow-up work to do, that I needed to dig a bit deeper into the process of and the conditions for transformation. And then after a talk I gave in October 2019, an attendee asked me an utterly prescient question that's been stuck in the back of my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that it's relatively easy to embrace when we're flush, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to be generous when we're facing significant budget cuts, for instance, or is it inevitable that we fall back into analytics-driven competition with every unit -- much less every worker -- out to protect their own resources and their own privileges?
I don't remember exactly how I answered then. I suspect that it was some combination of "you're completely right; that's the real question" and "the difficulties involved in being generous in hard times are precisely why we need to practice generosity in a determined way in good times." And I may have said some things about the importance of transparency in priority-setting and decision-making, and of involving the collective in that process.
Note: But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us — we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them — invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I do want the institution to survive, and I want to maintain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
And I also know that however much I may want to keep the institution running, the institution is not thinking the same about me. Our institutions will not, cannot, love us back. However much we sacrifice for them, they will never sacrifice for us. As with so many of my thoughts, this understanding was clarified for me by Tressie McMillan Cottom, who posted a Twitter thread describing the advice she gives to Black scholars who ask her how to survive in the academy. (For those of you watching remotely, who may have little ones in the room with you, heads-up that there's a little language on the next slide.) Two tweets in particular stuck with me:
Note: This place was fucked up when you got here, it will be fucked up when you leave here. All you can control is how much you let it fuck you up in the process. That is a pretty impolitic stance but I stand by it. I don't think these institutions can support us or love us. And I honor the many many people who work to make them more humane. But you, alone, cannot do that. And you cannot do it, ever, by killing yourself. (@tressiemcphd)
# failure
Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the last two years of the horrifying accuracy of this perspective -- that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. These institutions have long been dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category, within the US context, the choice to prioritize the flow of tuition dollars over the safety of students and staff by returning too hastily to in-person instruction; the choice to prioritize institutional reputation over individual safety and dignity by suppressing, ignoring, and dismissing complaints of sexual harassment and assault; the choice to respond to calls for racial justice with superficial statements and underfunded add-on measures; and the choice to deploy an increasingly militarized police presence in response to civil protest. All of these choices share the conviction that the institution and its ways of being are far more important than the people for whom it exists. And all of them have led me to ask what would be required for us to remake the university as an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all its members, rather than seeking in a moment of crisis to minimize its obligations and ensure that all of its relationships remain forever contingent?
# collective action
Note: One key thing that transforming the neoliberal university would require is collective action. Because McMillan Cottom is right: you, alone, cannot change things. Together we might: but first we have to build that together, build the spaces and places of supporting that notion of together, and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals. Because right now, the primary way that the idea of "together" gets invoked -- as in "we're all in it together" -- is not in the context of resource or power-sharing but of sacrifice. And sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and to accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
# structures
Note: The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. So my focus right now is on those structures, on what is required for us collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. I'm far less interested in radicalizing individual leaders who can rise through the administrative ranks than I am in building cohorts of leaders who can work together to transform those ranks. This is true not least because, as an academic leader I recently interviewed told me, "the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working." That toxic model is damaging not just to the institution, which lies at the mercy of such an individual's successful navigation of an increasingly complex economic, cultural, and political landscape, but also to the person in that role, who must convincingly appear omniscient and invulnerable, and who can only inevitably fail. What I hope to build instead is a model of academic leadership as collective and collaborative rather than individual, and therefore potentially originating anywhere within the org chart where someone has ideas about how to make things better. If we can come to appreciate and authorize the collective potential that exists within our institutions, we can begin to create institutions that are not only more generous but also more resilient.
# agency
Note: Another bit of conventional wisdom that this project is working against, however, has to do with the relative powerlessness of individuals in their encounters with the structures and systems of contemporary life. This sense of our powerlessness derives both from some highly problematic sources — those who benefit from existing structures and systems and would prefer everyone else just let them do their thing — and from some misunderstandings of recent critical theories regarding the ways that power operates in contemporary culture. Those theories — including arguments about race and racism; about sex, gender, and misogyny; about class and wealth — describe the issues they explore as _systemic_ rather than _individual_. That is to say, they argue that real change requires social transformation. It requires building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, reshaping economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. And all of that demands something much larger, and much harder, than personal transformation — but we misunderstand the import of those theories if we assume they mean that individual action doesn't matter, that each of us is powerless. The individual matters, deeply: just perhaps not the way we think.
When I argue that the complicated process of culture change can begin anywhere in the org chart, that any person (and not just the heroic leader) can be a change agent, I don't mean to suggest that the problems we face originate with individual behavior, or that any given person's change of heart can change the world. But if our goals include building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world, individuals have to find ways to become empowered, because the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
It's a matter of where we locate agency, of who has the ability to make significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, or as the unique privilege of those with rank and status within those structures and systems, there is little agency left to the rest of us. And it's certainly true that the problems we face are enormous, and that one person without structural authority can't do much to change the world — but groups of people can. Building those groups starts with individuals who decide to do more, to put what agency they do have to work in solidarity with others. Those people are leaders, whatever their job title or position might suggest, and it's their leadership this project seeks to support.
# leadership
Note: And so this project has begun for me with an attempt to understand how we currently conceive, and misconceive, of leadership within the US academy, and has thus sent me in two odd methodological directions, for a scholar trained in literature: first, I'm reading recent writing in business and management that can show me something about how leadership is conceived of in the contemporary US, and how it got to be that way. And second, I'm doing interviews with a wide range of folks that I consider leaders in higher education, asking them to tell me about their experiences and challenges, and to help me understand how they think of leadership and why.
My dive into the business literature grew out of my sense that the way we most often use the term "leadership" today -- to refer to the individuals at the top of an org chart -- is at best a misleading euphemism. In fact, most of what comes to us from above in our institutions and organizations is management rather than leadership. This sense was confirmed by a lot of the most interesting recent literature produced by experts in business and management.
# change
Note: For instance, John P. Kotter has argued in the _Harvard Business Review_ that management and leadership are distinct if complementary modes of organizational action. In his framework, management is focused on "coping with complexity," on organizing and directing the people and resources necessary to conduct an organization's work. Leadership, by contrast is about "coping with change," the more ambiguous processes of setting new directions and aligning people toward them. The distinction is significant for Kotter, not least because of his conviction that most organizations today are "over-managed and underled." In fact, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with — or worse, an inability to create — change.
# learning
Note: Similarly, Peter Senge, in _The Fifth Discipline_, notes that "the very word ‘leader' has come to refer largely to positional authority, a synonym for top management." The danger in this, for Senge, runs deep, not least because, as he argues, "the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best." His goal, in guiding institutions to become what he calls "learning organizations" is the development of "an alternative system of management based on love rather than fear, curiosity rather than an insistence on ‘right' answers, and learning rather than controlling." This alternative system of management, and its emphasis on learning — so completely at odds with what most of us experience in our organizational lives — has a lot in common with the kinds of leadership that institutions of higher education need today.
A transformed conception of leadership might include a commitment to bringing people together to create change, and a willingness to model and to create the conditions for more thoughtful, more inclusive, more just ways of working. Leadership ought to demonstrate a desire to bring out the best in others, and to help them become leaders too. Leadership ought to be about building the relationships necessary for collective action. It should be connective, and compassionate, and generative. And it could emerge anywhere in an institution, if cultivated.
# cultivation
Note: I choose the metaphor of cultivation pointedly, with deep thanks to my colleague Beronda Montgomery, whose brilliant book _Learning from Plants_ explores the ways that an understanding of botanical life can help us develop more productive, more supportive, more collectively attuned ways of working in human communities. As Montgomery argues, such an understanding encourages us to focus on remediating the environments within which we work together rather than attributing the difficulties some individuals experience in taking root and growing in those environments to internal deficits. This approach also calls upon us to develop a new kind of leadership "vision," one that can
> adapt to changing circumstances, and … enable leaders to see the potential collaborations and benefits in diverse communities. This approach contrasts with the traditional gatekeeping approach, in which leaders determine who gains access via conceptualizations and assumptions about who can function and thrive in a particular context. Instead, this distinct form of leadership is sense driven and environmentally adaptive; it attends to individuals while at the same time tending the ecosystems in which these individuals exist. I call this form of leadership groundskeeping, in recognition of what we know about the conditions that plants need to successfully thrive.
——Beronda Montgomery
Note: (READ SLIDE.) Groundskeeping rather than gatekeeping. Cultivation rather than control. These organic metaphors allow us to think about leadership as something that is grown rather than something that is built or inhabited, something that requires an awareness that our institutions and organization are more akin to ecosystems than they are to the org charts we draw to represent them. Our leaders must work in concert with their ecosystems, rather than operating from the top-down management perspective to which we have become accustomed.
Note: So here's a thought experiment: does your institution really need a president? What if the vice presidents were collectively charged as a true leadership team, dependent upon and responsible to one another for the organization's success?
I can immediately hear the responses: "Have you met our vice presidents? Most of them despise each other, and at least a couple are only there because of their long-standing relationships with the president." This is exactly the problem that needs solving. If there were no president, those long-standing relationships would not be a factor — and if there were no presidency to ascend to, the stakes in battles among members of leadership teams would diminish. Deborah Ancona and her colleagues have described such a model in which a large Dutch consulting firm replaced its CEO with "a team of four managing directors who share leadership responsibilities"; as they note, in order for this model to work, "members must be skilled at engaging in dialogue together.... because each director can veto a decision, each must thoroughly explain [their] reasoning to convince the others that [their] perspective has merit."
In such a shared leadership model, in other words, the team's interdependence requires each member to develop not just their relationship with the boss, but their mutual relationships with one another. And this so far has been the most significant finding from my interviews as well: that the most effective leaders are those who focus on building the relationships that form the basis of their institution's success. And this is true of all of us, at every level throughout our institutions: our collective success at the department level, the college level, the university level, all depends upon our ability to become and act as a collective, upon our developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear. But that process — determining what our shared goals are and should be, and how we should go about striving toward them — requires a kind of interrelation that is not merely personal but also, and of necessity, political.
> This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
——Tressie McMillan Cottom
Note: That studying academic leadership looped back around to studying the nature of the political shouldn't have come as a surprise to me; after all, I adopted this quotation from Tressie McMillan Cottom's _Lower Ed_ as an epigraph opening the last chapter of _Generous Thinking_, which focused on the need for rethinking the university in order to make it a more just institution: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." We cannot simply innovate ourselves out of the problems we face in higher education today, but instead we must reckon with the systems that led us here, and that keep us here.
# politics
Note: This reckoning has led me back to Iris Marion Young, who, in her 1990 volume _Justice and the Politics of Difference_, defines politics as "all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decision-making." The word "potentially" is doing a lot of work here; in most of our lives, those structures, actions, practices, and meanings are not subject to a kind of decision-making in which we're encouraged to play a real role. However, Young later notes that "the concept of justice coincides with the concept of the political," arguing that every effort must be made to enhance collective evaluation and decision-making if we are to create the possibility for just institutions.
# "shared governance"
Note: In most colleges and universities in the US, the potential for "collective evaluation and decision-making" is contained within the structures of shared governance on campus. Those bodies, including a wide range of working groups, committees, and senates, serve to gather faculty and (in some cases) staff opinions and perspectives on many questions concerning the operation of our institutions. On a few such questions — for instance, the curriculum — those bodies exercise a kind of ownership, and the decisions issuing from them have the mark of authority. On many campuses, however, and on many issues, faculty and staff governance is advisory at best: votes are taken, decisions are made and communicated to the administration, and that's it. The administration has the freedom to take those resolutions up and act upon them, or to ignore them at will.
# bureaucratic
Note: As a result, the collective deliberation and decision-making bodies that form the core of shared governance on many campuses have become less political, in Young's sense, than bureaucratic, functioning in order to function rather than bearing the potential for change. "Bureaucracies," Young notes, "are distinguished from other forms of social organization in operating according to impersonal rules that apply in the same way to all cases." The importance of these rules and the processes and functions through which they are applied should of course not be dismissed; as Young goes on to note, bureaucracy as we experience it at the level of the state developed in order to replace individual sovereignty and its less rational whims with the rule of law. Similarly, the principles and processes of shared governance on campus serve to mitigate the unjust imposition of a top administrator's opinions on faculty and staff functions. But an over-reliance on and even subjugation to those principles and processes runs the risk of making the bureaucracies through which we operate seem politically neutral and eternal and unchangeable.
As Young points out, "the values of bureaucratic organization" indicate that decisions should be made "according to merit." And the reliance on merit in bureaucracy is, she notes, among "the important positive developments in the history of social organization." What is missing, however, is a deep engagement with and debate concerning the meaning and determination of _merit itself_. Our institutions have devised metrics and measures and processes that allow us to believe that merit is a quantifiable thing we can assess outside the realm of the political. But merit as a category is always and inevitably ideological, in the sense that it provides a common-sense explanation that transforms highly contingent relations of domination into something natural or neutral. Says Young:
> The rules and policies of any institution serve particular ends, embody particular values and meanings, and have identifiable consequences for the actions and situation of the persons within or related to these institutions. All of these things are open to challenge, and politics is the process of struggle and deliberation about such rules and policies, the ends they serve, and the values they embody. The ideology of merit seeks to depoliticize the establishment of criteria and standards for allocating positions and awarding benefits.
——Iris Marion Young
Note: (READ SLIDE.) That depoliticization sounds like a good thing — making the awarding of benefits as objective a process as possible — up until we remember that the individual people involved in defining and implementing these processes are not and can never be objective. We are all inescapably subjective, bringing our own experiences and perspectives to everything we judge. What depoliticization means in the bureaucratic, and particularly in the meritocratic, is a closing-off of the opportunities for debating the criteria, the processes, and the objectives through which we might keep notions like merit from becoming forms of oppression. As it becomes depoliticized, bureaucracy errs in treating the rules as the _ends_ that it seeks, rather than a _means_ to those ends.
# peer review
Note: Take, for example, peer review. I've written extensively elsewhere about the problems endemic to today's conventional processes of peer review, and I won't rehash all of that argumentation here. But one key point has to do with the role that anonymity plays in the process. As is frequently noted, the process of anonymizing the submissions that undergo peer review for publication in journals and by university presses was established in order to mitigate the influence of reviewer bias based on the gender, race, or institution of the author. Similarly, reviewer anonymity was designed to permit reviewers of lower career status to address the work of higher-status scholars without fear. These goals were admirable — placing the focus on the quality of the work and allowing that quality to be assessed without reserve — and its success was appreciable. Author anonymity arguably permitted the work of scholars of color and women to gain purchase in the highest levels of academic discourse, and reviewer anonymity allowed new perspectives to counter established orthodoxies. What anonymity did not do, however, and cannot do, is _eliminate_ bias, which will always find ways to creep back in around the edges as, for instance, critiques of subject matter, methodology, and cited sources become proxies for status based on identity and serve as arguably neutral means of reinforcing hierarchies within fields. Again, my intent here is not to discount the importance of establishing and following the rules and procedures that have developed around scholarly work and its communication. Rather, I want to note that those rules and procedures can never provide for the fullness of justice, precisely because the rules and procedures are treated as if they are sources of objectivity, when they have inevitably been designed and are always implemented by individuals with specific subjectivities.
# values
Note: Moreover, trying to change the rules and procedures to make them _more_ objective is laudable, but cannot help but introduce new areas in which objectivity is in question. Ultimately, as Young argues, the goal should be not to exclude subjectivity or "personal values" from decision-making, but rather to make that subjectivity and those personal values fully part of the decision-making process itself, as these values are "inevitably and properly part of what decisionmaking is about." So rather than trying to make peer review more bias-free — a worthy but ultimately fruitless process of depoliticization — what if we were instead to accept its deeply political nature, to make it more transparent and participatory, and to ask authors and reviewers alike to surface and contend with their values as a part of the process?
# processes and policies
Note: Similarly, we might think of the ways that tenure and promotion processes and policies are implemented. These bureaucratic formations have been designed to protect candidates from the personal whims or animus of administrators as cases move through the approval hierarchy. And yet that bureaucracy has the potential to interfere with justice in its requirement that all cases be treated identically. As Young notes of the gap between bureaucracy and truly democratic collective action, "Decisions and actions will be evaluated less according to whether they are right or just than according to their legal validity, that is, whether they are consistent with the rules and follow the appropriate procedures." This is encoded in the appeals process for promotion and tenure denials at many institutions, where the acceptable range of inquiry is restricted to whether the process was properly conducted, rather than whether the final determination was just, much less whether the process as constituted was capable of producing a just result.
Changing the ways that peer review is conducted in order to surface rather than avoid reviewer bias, one might reasonably argue, would make peer review political. And similarly changing the grounds for appeal of tenure decisions to include the justice of their outcomes — or even better, changing the criteria for promotion and tenure such that they surface and embrace their subjectivity, treating each case on its own terms rather than assuming an unearned neutrality — would likewise make those decisions political. And yet it's clear to just about everyone who has ever been through such a process, especially from a non-dominant position within the academy, that those decisions and processes _have always been political_, and will always remain political. And that's not in and of itself a bad thing. We should not want to remove politics from the ways that we engage with one another on campus, but rather to create an environment in which we can embrace politics, rendering all of us able to participate wholly, fully, with the most open and honest intent in the processes through which our lives are inevitably structured.
# management
Note: So what does all of this have to do with leadership? If management, as Kotter argued, is focused on "coping with complexity," on ensuring the optimal functioning of entangled structures and organizations, we might begin to intuit a relationship between management and bureaucracy. Establishing rules and processes, ensuring that they're followed, remediating them when they fail, all require careful management. In associating management with bureaucracy I do not at all mean to dismiss the importance of good management, as anyone who has ever worked with a poor manager can attest; as one leader I talked with reminded me, there's a real value in keeping the trains running on time. But if management is about ensuring that things get done with maximum efficiency, it's also about eliminating or at least minimizing everything that can interfere with that efficiency, including — and perhaps especially — dissent. Management is in this sense necessarily depoliticizing; it requires foreclosing debate and smoothing the way for prescribed action. This is one reason why the good management needed for making the status quo function often cannot contend with change: when an organization tries to manage change, it too often ends up with a manufactured consent that squelches the political and moves decision-making outside the realm of debate.
# leadership
Note: If leadership, as Kotter contrasts it with management, focuses on "coping with change," good leadership must of necessity be political at heart. Leadership does not just require accepting but in fact embracing and facilitating the kinds of open debate, dissent, and even struggle necessary for making the best possible decisions about what an organization should do and how it should do it. Leadership requires making room for the broadest possible participation in decision-making, and it requires developing the relationships and coalitions necessary to ensure that the resulting decisions are understood and embraced. Leadership is about creating the conditions necessary for the many people within an organization to contribute to and feel ownership of the organization's future.
The path to developing more generous forms of academic leadership, then, leads directly through politics, through political organizing, through coalition-building, through solidarity. And it's that work that we're starting to see emerge in labor movements across the US and elsewhere. I've got a ton of work ahead before this project will be ready to go, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to share a bit of it with you today, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
## thank you
---
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
http://presentations.kfitz.info/jfki.html
Note: Thanks again for having me.