182 lines
27 KiB
Markdown
182 lines
27 KiB
Markdown
## Generous Thinking
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### Argumentation and Collaboration
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##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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Note: Thanks so much; I'm delighted to have the chance to talk with you a bit today. Much of what follows builds on the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. My focus in the book is particularly on the future of the American university, but I think most of it holds for those other nations that seem to be following our relentless course toward austerity and privatization.
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##### http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
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Note: Evidence of the need for rebuilding trusting relationships between universities and the public might be found in an increasing number of reports and studies such as this one, released in 2017 by the Pew Research Center, showing a precipitous decline in the esteem colleges and universities are held in in the United States, primarily on the political right. One frequent on-campus reaction to this kind of report, understandably, is to decry the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture, to turn inward, and to spend more time talking with those who understand us — meaning us. But in that reaction we run the risk of deepening the divide, allowing those who want to argue that today’s colleges and universities are not only irrelevant but actively detrimental to the well-being of the general public to say, “see? They’re out of touch. Who needs them anyway?” Because this shift in public opinion didn’t just happen; it was made to happen, part of a decades-long program of defunding a wide range of public-serving institutions in the US.
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Note: So the 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves, building relationships of trust that encourage those publics to understand that our institutions belong to them.
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## radical approach
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Note: The 'radical approach' part of the subtitle, thought, grows out of my increasing sense that the necessary change is a HUGE one, that it can't be made incrementally, that instead it requires -- as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of _The Great Mistake_ -- a paradigm shift, because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can take us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today,
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> "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." <br /><br /> --Tressie McMillan Cottom, _Lower Ed_
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Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization has not only shifted the burden of paying for higher education in the US from the state to individual students and families, but it has also turned the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit. Rather than thinking of higher education as a preparation for a lifetime of learning, students in the US today are overwhelmingly encouraged to understand a university degree as a necessary credential leading to a specific career outcome.
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Note: And so we see what Inside Higher Ed reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be examined as evidence that something in the paradigm under which higher education has for the last several decades been operating is failing. In fact, part of the problem is precisely that our institutions operate simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. Even worse than the conflict between these paradigms, however, is that both of them are failing, if in different ways. If our American higher education is to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
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## generous thinking
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Note: The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding the university in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing its research and pedagogical practices around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. It's going to require concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
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## listening
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Note: In that process, I ask us to think about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand what we're hearing as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
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## reading together
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Note: The book goes on to explore ways that our critical reading practices might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
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## working in public
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Note: I also spend time thinking about ways (and reasons) that scholars might do more of their work in public, publishing in openly accessible venues and in more publicly accessible registers, and developing more community-engaged projects, in order to bring the university's resources to bear in helping work through community concerns.
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## the university
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Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and public engagement. The university must become the kind of institution that can focus less on individual achievement, on educating for individual leadership, and that instead focuses on building community, and indeed on educating for community-building. And this, perhaps needless to say, will require rethinking a lot about the ways we engage with our students.
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## students
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Note: Our students, after all, are our first and most important point of contact with the publics that institutions of higher education serve. Students in the US come to our colleges and universities from a very wide range of backgrounds and with a very wide range of interests. Ensuring that we connect with them, that we work with them in creating the university's future, is job one. But I also want to suggest that some of our students are learning habits of mind from us that ultimately work to undermine the future that we want to build.
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## seminar
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Note: So, _Generous Thinking_ had several points of inception over the years, one of which was a moment in a graduate seminar I taught years ago, a moment that has come to feel emblematic of the situation of the contemporary university. I want to preface the story by saying that I offer it not as an indictment of the kids today, but rather of the m.o. of higher education since the last decades of the 20th century. So here's the scene: the seminar is in cultural studies, and is meant to provide an overview of some current questions in critical theory. I do not now remember what article it was we'd read for that class session, but I opened our discussion by asking for first responses. And three students in a row issued withering takedowns of the article, pointing to the author's methodological flaws and ideological weaknesses. After the third, I said okay, that's all important and I definitely want to dig into it, but let's back up a bit: what is the author's argument here? What is she trying to accomplish?
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## silence
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Note: Nothing. "It's not a trick question," I said. "What is this article about?" Now, I was a fair bit younger and less sure of myself at that point, and I immediately began wondering whether I'd asked a stupid question, whether the sudden failure to meet my gaze was a sign that I, like the author, was now being dismissed as having pedestrian interest in neoliberal forms of meaning-making that demonstrated my complicity with the systems of oppression within which I worked. But it gradually dawned on me that the problem with the question wasn't its stupidity but its unfamiliarity. The students were prepared to dismantle the argument, but not to examine how it was built.
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## they say / i say
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Note: The students in this seminar, like so many of us, had learned all too well the lessons of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's _They Say, I Say_: that the key move in academic argumentation is from what others have previously said to one's own -- almost always contrasting, and inevitably more interesting or correct -- contribution. That is to say, that the goal of critical thinking is to expose the flawed arguments of others in order to demonstrate the inherent rightness of our own.
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## conversation
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Note: The larger point that Graff and Birkenstein make in _They Say, I Say_ is a good and important one: that scholarship proceeds through conversation, and thus that scholarly argument begins with engaging with what others have said and then develops through one's own individual contribution to the discussion. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first part is that we are -- and when I say we, I mean human beings at this hour of the world -- we are by and large TERRIBLE at conversation. Witness any set of talking heads on television, or any large holiday dinner table, or any department meeting: more often than not, we spend the time when other people are talking waiting for our own turn to speak, and we take what's being said to us mostly as a means of formulating our own response. We do not genuinely *listen*, but instead *react*. And the same is too often true of scholarly conversation: the primary purpose of engaging with what "they" have said is to get to the important bit -- what I am saying.
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## individualism
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Note: That's the first problem. The second is the assumption that what I am saying, my own individual contribution to the discussion, is genuinely individual, that it is my own. In no small part this stems from the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university -- an orientation inseparable from the individualism of the surrounding culture -- in which the entire institutional reward structure, including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and every other form of merit is determined by what I individually have done. However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives -- on campus and off -- are overdetermined by highly individualistic processes of selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which applicants are measured, and the best -- whatever that might mean in a given context -- are rewarded. In actual practice, however, those metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. Always, in the unconscious of the academy, there is competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can't ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we're working together. The competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed individually. Every tub sits on its own bottom, in other words, and if I am to succeed it must be based on my own individual accomplishments.
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## zero-sum
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Note: Add to that the situation of most institutions of higher education today, in which austerity-based thinking leads us to understand that merit is always limited, and thus your success, your distinction, your accomplishments can only come at my expense. We all find ourselves in an environment in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time.
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## competitive thinking
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Note: As a result, the mode of conversation promoted by _They Say, I Say_ has become less about the most important forms of critical thinking on which our work focuses -- engaging with what has been said before us and adding to the discussion -- than about competitive thinking. Competitive thinking is a hyperindividualistic mode of debate that suggests that we are in an endless struggle with one another, in which there is only room for so much success, for so much attention. In competitive thinking, the quest for academic and professional success requires us to defend our own positions, and attack others. We're trapped on a quest for what Thorstein Veblen described as "invidious distinction," in which we separate ourselves from others by climbing over one another.
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## institutions
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Note: It's important for me to note that in _Generous Thinking_ I apply this analysis as much to institutions as I do to the individuals who work within them. The competitive individualism under which we all operate contradicts -- and in fact undermines -- all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning. In actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly the province of administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. And that last is crucial: insofar as the institutional reward structures within which we operate privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." This is no way to run a collective. It's also no way to structure a fulfilling life: this disengagement from community and race for individual distinction is a key factor in the extremely high risk of burnout among college faculty and other intellectual workers. It is all but impossible for us to structure our lives around the things that are most in line with our deepest personal values when we are driven to focus on those things that will allow us to compare ourselves -- or our institutions -- favorably with one another. This individualistic, competitive requirement is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social. And no amount of trying to persuade ourselves, or our administrations, or our governing bodies of the public good that we, our fields, and our institutions serve will take root unless we figure out how to step off the competitive track, to insist upon living our academic lives another way.
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## teaching
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Note: But in the meantime, one of the places where we can begin to create a new ethos and transform the values that structure our institutions is in teaching. This is not to say that such transformation will be easy. Those of us teaching in the US are working within a system that instills these notions of competition and individual achievement earlier and earlier, of course, as students come to us from elementary and secondary institutions that are increasingly structured around testing. Those students aren't competing directly against one another in the moment of testing, but they are nonetheless being inculcated into at least two of competitive thinking's underpinnings: the responsibility of the individual for demonstrating mastery, and the significant consequences of being wrong.
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## wrong
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Note: And perhaps it's here that we see the origins of at least some of our students' -- and our -- terror at the idea of being wrong. Wrong means failure. Wrong brings shame. But wrong is inevitable, a horrible thought. And so if we can't avoid being wrong, we can certainly refuse to acknowledge when we're wrong; as Kathryn Schulz has explored, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid recognizing their wrongness. But of course there is no real thinking without the possibility of being wrong. Without being willing to be wrong, we can't hypothesize, we can't experiment, we can't create. We can't imagine new possibilities. We can't dream. But we are hard-wired not to admit the possibility that we might be wrong.
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## <u>you're</u> wrong
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Note: And one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong -- and again, by "we" here, I mean both to point to academics in particular and to humans living at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century in general -- again, one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong is by demonstrating the inherent wrongness in everyone else's ideas. In the academy, and perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, this takes the form of critique: if I can demonstrate what's wrong with your ideas, it must mean that my ideas are better.
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## critique
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Note: This is the upshot of _They Say, I Say_, and it's what leads to the situation I faced in my graduate seminar: we have armed contemporary American students with all the most important tools of critique. They are ready to unpack and dismantle. They are well-trained, that is to say, in playing what Peter Elbow once referred to as the doubting game, in which they focus on the parts of an idea that could be wrong and what it might mean if they were. But they have -- and if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we all have -- a tendency to skip the half of the game that's supposed to come first: the believing game, in which we focus on what it might mean if the idea were right. The m.o. of _They Say, I Say_, in other words, encourages us to dismiss what "they say" as quickly as possible, in order to get on to the more crucial "I say," the part for which we will actually get credit.
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## critical thinking
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Note: I want to be clear here: there is a LOT of what "they say" that in fact should be pushed back against. There's a lot out there worth doubting. I'm not asking us not to disagree, not to press new ideas forward, not to think critically. Critical thinking is in fact at the heart of what scholars do. Not only would we be justified in rejecting any suggestion that we abandon it, or abandon the commitments that underwrite it, in favor of an approach that might be more friendly, but we'd also be well within reason if we were to point out that the critique of critique _is still critique_, that it makes use of criticism's negative mode in the very act of negating it. Moreover, the critique of critique is too often driven either by a disdain for difficulty or by a rejection of the political in scholarly work, neither of which do I want to support. I am, however, hoping that we might find ways to remember that critical thinking requires deep understanding and even generosity as a prerequisite.
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## generosity
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Note: So what I want to ask this evening is what we and our students might gain from slowing the process down a bit, from emphasizing the believing game before leaping to the doubting game, from lingering a bit longer in the "they say." We might, just as a start, find that we all become better listeners. We might open up new ground for mutual understanding, even with those with whom we most disagree.
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## we say
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Note: And we might find ourselves moving less from "they say" to "I say" than instead to "we say," thinking additively and collaboratively about what we might build together rather than understanding our own ideas to require vanquishing everyone else's. We might, as Lakoff and Johnson have suggested, move away from understanding argument through the metaphor of war and instead think of it as a dance, in which two creative individuals come together to produce something that neither could do alone.
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## asset
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Note: We might learn from contemporary theories of community engaged scholarship, which have recognized the damage that a deficit model of engagement has produced -- saying to the community, in effect, you have a problem and we're here to fix it -- and instead focus on an asset model: your community has these strengths, and we as scholars have these others, and together we might do something remarkable.
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## improv
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Note: Or we might think of ways that the work that we do together in the classroom could learn from improvisational comedy, which operates within an ethos of "yes, and." Saying "no" to an improv partner can derail a scene in progress; contradicting what's already happened in order to go a different direction fragments the scenario and shuts down possibility. "Yes, and" instead builds on what's been established, even if in order to go somewhere entirely new.
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## generous argument
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Note: All of these models begin to suggest what a more generous model of argument might provide, one based on building something collective rather than tearing down our predecessors in order to promote our own ideas. Generous argument might help us frame ways of thinking that focus on higher education as a means of fostering community rather than providing individual benefit. And this, as I argue at length in _Generous Thinking_, is key to the future of the university: we have to find our way back to an understanding of the university's work as grounded in service to a broadly construed public, and that requires all of us -- faculty, students, staff, administrators, trustees -- reframing the good that higher education provides as a social good, a collective and communal good, rather than a personal, private, individual one.
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## generous assessment
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Note: Of course, if we are really going to effect this transformation -- what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about the values that underwrite higher education -- we're going to have to think differently about how we measure our success as well. About what success means in the first place. If we're going to move away from the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom, hyper individualistic, competitive mode of achievement, in which all outcomes are understood to be individual and are therefore assessed at that level, and instead foster more collective goals, we're going to need to think carefully about what we're assessing and why. How might we instead focus our modes of assessment at all levels, and the rewards that follow, on collaboration, on process?
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## us
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Note: If we're going to bring this mode of generous thinking, of generous argument, of generous assessment to bear on our classrooms, of course, we'd be well served by bringing it to bear on our work together first. We need to think seriously about how all of the processes that structure our professional lives -- not least our processes of hiring, of retention, of tenure and promotion -- might help to instantiate the values we want to bring to the work we do, rather than fostering the culture of competition, of invidious distinction, that colors all of the ways that we work today, and the environment within which our students learn.
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## critique
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Note: One cautionary note, however: I do not mean this emphasis on generosity, on a supportive engagement with the work that has gone before us, to be used as a means of defusing the important work that critique actually does in helping make ideas better. In the early days of working on _Generous Thinking_, I gave an invited talk in which I tested out some of its core ideas. In the question-and-answer period that followed, one commenter pointed out what he saw as a canny move on my part in talking about generosity: no one wanted to be seen as an ungenerous jerk in disagreeing with me. It was a funny moment, but it gave me real pause; I did not at all intend to use generosity as a shield with which to fend off the possibility of critique. Generosity, in fact, requires remaining open to criticism -- in fact, it requires recognizing the generous purposes that critique can serve. So in pressing for more generous modes of argument and more generous modes of assessment, I do not mean to impose a regime that is all rainbows and unicorns on us. Instead, what I'm hoping to ask is how we might all benefit from thinking *with* rather than *against* one another, *with* rather than *against* the arguments of our predecessors, and *with* rather than *against* our students in developing the knowledge that might make all of us better contributors to the social good.
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## questions
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Note: I've asked a lot of questions about what we might do and how it might work, and I'm not sure how many answers I have for them. In part, that's by design: the problems facing universities today are larger and more complicated than can be solved by any one mind working alone. They're going to require all of us, thinking together, building one one another's ideas, in order to create something new. And so I'm going to stop here, in the hopes that we might use the rest of this time to move from what *I say* to what *we say.* I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we might encourage more generous forms of argument in our classrooms, and how we might use that generosity to encourage new ways of being within the university.
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## thank you
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---
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##### Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
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Note: Many thanks.
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