13 KiB
The Public University
and the Public Good
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
Note: I want to start today by thanking Antoinette and Jennifer and everyone else who made it possible for me to join you here for this event; I'm very much looking forward to the conversations that unfold tonight and tomorrow. This is also the point at which I've got to confess the liberties I've taken with our panel topic this evening. I have a book that's on its way out, entitled Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University, and it is inevitably coloring everything I'm thinking about right now.
saving the university
Note: 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.
radical approach
Note: The 'radical approach' part 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 notes,
This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics. —Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed
Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics."
generous thinking
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.
big data
Note: So the book does not make an argument about big data, or even about the digital more broadly, in that process, except to suggest that trying to solve the problems created by the current paradigm in higher education by applying the tools created by and for that paradigm is unlikely to work. Instead, the book argues that we need to focus on ways of working that enable and support empowered publics that might in turn have an interest in supporting the universities that serve them.
listening
Note: So the book asks us to step back to some distinctly non-digital practices in thinking 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 their concerns as deeply as possible before leaping forward to our critiques and solutions.
reading together
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.
working in public
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. And this is where network-based technologies will undoubtedly have something to contribute to helping us connect and communicate with those communities.
the university
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) public engagement. And this is where the need for a paradigm shift -- for politics -- arises.
http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study, currently available online in preprint form, entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." We've no doubt all got stories to tell that would support this conclusion, stories that illustrate the ways that the kinds of public-facing, community-oriented work that might best support the university's need for a closer relationship with the public goes un- or under-rewarded by the university.
the anecdote
Note: Here's mine: Right around the time I began sketching the outline for this book, I attended a day-long workshop on new models for university press publishing, for which the provost of a large state research university had been invited to give a keynote address. The talk came during a day of intensive discussions amongst the workshop’s participants and university press and university library leaders, all of whom had a real stake in the future of the institution’s role in disseminating scholarly work as openly as possible. And the keynote was quite powerful: the provost described his campus’s efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty’s work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university’s singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our work up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
prestige
Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-quality venues, conventionally understood. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising—really, reimagining—all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university’s core service mission? The provost’s response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
honest
Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it’s that there is a shadow mission—competition—that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
the worst of it
Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that Generous Thinking is most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered—from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press—to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to “compete all the time” forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
paradigm
Note: That competition is the dominant paradigm under which universities operate today, a paradigm instituted and enforced by those universities' growing privatization. It is competition for faculty, for students, for funding, and above all for rankings, that replaces the public good with the quest for prestige, that turns our institutions from priding themselves on the communities they invite in to bragging about how many they turn away.
Note: And it is that same concern for reputation that leads so many institutions to protect themselves instead of protecting the publics, the communities, the individuals that they are meant to serve. It is little wonder that universities are held in such low regard by so much of the voting public today: it is not just the rampant anti-intellectualism of contemporary American culture, but also the degree to which our institutions have repeatedly betrayed the trust that the public has placed in them.
us
Note: In us. If we are going to turn this situation around, if we are going to convince the voting public that universities are deserving of public reinvestment, we have to effect a ground-up transformation in our institutions and the ways they work. That transformation cannot begin with new analytics, or new technologies, that derive from the neoliberal paradigm that is responsible for the damage in the first place. It cannot begin with new means of demonstrating the individual, competitive benefits that higher education can confer. It's got to start, instead, with new ways of thinking about who this "us" is, or can be.
community
Note: These new ways of thinking about "us" have to take root both on campus and off, enabling us to understand ourselves both as a community and in a community. We need -- as I urged that provost -- to radically rethink our means of assessment, the relentless spread of metrics through which we are required to demonstrate success, and instead consider what measures might actually begin to reflect the deep values we bring to our work. And we need to contemplate what a higher education whose benefits were genuinely social rather than individual, public rather than private, might look like, and how focusing our work around those social benefits might help us find new means of building solidarity with the publics that our universities are intended to serve.
humanities
Note: And all of that work is where we come in, the humanities and the arts, in demonstrating the generosity that underlies our critical thinking, and in using that generosity to foster and sustain more engaged, more articulated, more actualized publics. I've obviously got a lot more to say about this -- a whole book's worth -- but for the moment I'll leave things by saying that all of us -- faculty, staff, students, administrators, parents, trustees, and beyond -- have more to gain from abandoning competition, from working together, from understanding ourselves and our institutions as intimately connected, than we have to lose in the rankings.