136 lines
20 KiB
Markdown
136 lines
20 KiB
Markdown
# Toward a More Generous University
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---
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### (Even in Hard Times)
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---
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<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
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<small>http://presentations.kfitz.info/ucsd.html</small>
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Note: Thank you, etc.
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Note: Much of what follows derives from the arguments in my recent book, _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially _public_ institutions of higher education 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.
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# "radical approach"
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Note: The 'radical approach' part grows out of 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, no 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,
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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 undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the purpose of the institution 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.
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Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed has described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence in our universities shouldn't simply be dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life. Rather, we need to examine the degree to which higher education has for the last several decades operated 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 paradigm, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. Even worse than the conflict between these paradigms, however, is that both of them are failing, if in different ways. If our institutions are to thrive in the decades ahead we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world.
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# generous thinking
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Note: So the book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the public university and the public that it ostensibly serves requires re-grounding 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 requires 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: So *Generous Thinking* asks us to consider how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. It begins by understanding generosity as a mode of engagement grounded in listening to one another, and to the publics with whom we work, attempting to understand their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
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# reading together
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Note: The book goes on to explore ways that the critical reading practices we enact on campus might be opened up to foster greater engagement between scholars and other readers, creating means for those readers to see more of the ways that scholars work and the reasons for those methods, as well as for scholars to learn more about why general interest readers read the ways they do, building key bridges between two communities that too often seem to speak past one another.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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# individualism
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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 this one 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, 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.
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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. 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.
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# institutions
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Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the structures within our institutions privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions are able to distance themselves from the rankings and the other quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that those of us who work for them will likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more generous.
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# culture change
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Note: And this is no easy task. Over the course of the last several years, both while *Generous Thinking* was in press and after it 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 in *Generous Thinking* 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.
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# better
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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, 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 making that change goes against some of the ingrained ways of working that have come to seem natural to us within the university setting, and it's super unclear how we might even begin to make such a change.
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# generosity in<br />hard times
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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.
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# sacrifice
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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 will not, cannot, love us back. However much we sacrifice for them, they will never sacrifice for us. This understanding was clarified for me, again, 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. One point in that thread stuck with me:
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> "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, can not do that. And you cannot do it, ever, by killing yourself." <br /><br /> --Tressie McMillan Cottom
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Note: (Read tweet.) 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.
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# big structural change
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Note: The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. And this is the deepest goal of _Generous Thinking_, and by extension of the followup project I'm now 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 -- large enough to require a revolution -- local changes can begin to make a difference, and that we are capable of making those local changes.
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# leadership
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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.
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# agency
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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.
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# you
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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.
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# us
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Note: But it recognizes as well that none of us can get far alone. To transform a complex organization, we need to build coalitions, and we need to act with the collective firmly in view. 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.
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# transformation
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Note: The key to 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. Along the way, we need to consider what we can gain from becoming better listeners, from learning to sit with difficult conversations and even criticism, from assessing our work and the work of those around us based on our deepest values, from cultivating an atmosphere of mutual and renewable trust, and so on. Each of the key concepts I explore in *Leading Generously* -- 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.
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# people
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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 the amazing program you have in front of you today 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.
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## thank you
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---
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<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller>
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Note: Many thanks.
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