34 KiB
Building a More Generous Institution
Collaboration, Community, Solidarity
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
Note: Thank you for that introduction, and for inviting me to join you here for this talk! This is once of the first in-person talks that I've given since the pandemic began, and it's just delightful to be here with you. This is one of the double-edged things we've learned from the pandemic: on the one hand, we can do a lot of things remotely that we thought we had to travel for, and we can include many more people when we do. But on the other hand, there's something special about our ability to be together, and that specialness makes it all the more important that we use the time and space well. There have been a lot of lessons like this in all of our lives over the last couple of years, some of them positive and some of them much less so, but all of which I hope we can carry with us in the years ahead. I want us to carry these things not least because returning to "normal," or seeking to create a "new normal," is almost always a costly mistake. We have the opportunity right now to avoid normal and build something better, something more fluid and capable of growth. But doing so is going to require us to think pretty differently about the structures within which we work, and about how we might reshape them to help create the kind of institution we genuinely want to be part of.
So that's my focus for today. But before I move on, a couple of warnings. The first is that there's a little language coming up -- I usually include this warning for the Zoom crowd, in case there are little ones in the background, but I do feel a bit self-conscious about the language I'm about to use on a Jesuit campus! But the second warning is, quite frankly, that I'm pretty pissed off right now. I have the joy and the privilege of working in a college that is genuinely trying to build a culture of care for everyone that works for or with it, but that college is embedded in a university that is filled with mistrust, that is replacing transparency with obfuscation, and that is actively undermining the care we all need in order to function. I'll hope that in what's ahead I can work through some of the anger and come back around to thinking generously with you about the possibilities ahead.
So, in 2020, just before everything began shutting down, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread on Twitter in which she talked about the things she tells early career Black scholars who seek her advice on surviving in the academy. These two tweets in particular caught my attention:
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."
https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry
Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence over the last two-plus 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. Institutions are dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category the choice to prioritize the flow of tuition dollars over the safety of students and staff by returning too hastily to in-person instruction; the choice to prioritize institutional reputation over individual safety and dignity by suppressing, ignoring, and dismissing complaints of sexual harassment and assault; the choice to respond to calls for racial justice with superficial statements and underfunded add-on measures; and the choice to 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 it 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 together, and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals.
Note: Much of what follows develops out of the arguments in Generous Thinking. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle, as I originally conceived it, had to do with my conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education in the United States required 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.
"radical approach"
Note: The 'radical approach' part, though, grew 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 or 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,
"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." The problem, after all, begins with politics: the American university system 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 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 our institutions 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.
Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed described FOUR YEARS AGO as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." That decline has only accelerated since, and we can no longer simply dismiss it as evidence of an entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that exists. Rather, we need to consider the possibility that the very paradigm under which higher education has operated in the United States is failing, and failing fast, and if our institutions are to survive we must find a new way of articulating and living out the value of the university in the contemporary world. And this is true not least because this shift in public opinion didn't just happen by itself; it was made to happen as part of a program of discrediting and privatizing public services across the nation.
Note: However: from time to time we are confronted with undeniable evidence that many of our institutions -- even those institutions that most profess their commitment to public service -- have utterly betrayed the trust that public has placed in them. Which is to say that the decline in confidence in the university is not just caused by the public failing to understand the importance of what we do; it's also that we have, in many ways, failed: failed to make that importance clear, failed to protect our communities both on-campus and off, failed to build institutions that are genuinely, structurally capable of living out the values they profess. What I'm asking for is a tall order -- in many ways swimming against the current of the neoliberal institution. But a large part of what I'm after is to press for new ways of understanding our institutions as communities, as well as in interaction with communities, asking us to take a closer look at the ways that we communicate both with one another and with a range of broader publics about and around our work. And some focused thinking about that mode of public engagement is in order, I would suggest, because our institutions are facing a panoply of crises that we cannot resolve on our own: we need our publics' help as much or more as they need ours.
crisis
Note: These crises don't always give the impression of approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we are currently living through. And yet the decline in public support for higher education has always been of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments and other institutions for the public good -- the very notion, in fact, that there can be such a thing as the public good -- and the consequences of those transformations are indeed life or death in many cases. So while the concept of generosity may seem too touchy-feely to represent the key to the future of the university, I hope, in the book, that I've put together a case for why this is not so -- why, in fact, the particular modes of generous thinking that I am asking us to undertake within and around our institutions of higher education have the potential to help us navigate the present crises. Many of our fields, after all, are already focused on pressing public issues, and many of us are already working in publicly engaged ways. We need to generalize that engagement, and to think about the ways that it might, if permitted, transform the institution and the ways that we all work within it. That is to say, the best of what the university has to offer -- what matters most -- may lie less in its power to advance knowledge in any of its particular fields than in our ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
"we"
Note: But first: who is this "we" I keep referring to, what is it that we do, and why does it matter? Much of what I have written focuses on the university's permanent faculty, partially because that faculty is my community of practice and partially because of the extent to which the work done by the faculty is higher education: research and teaching are the primary purposes and visible outputs of our institutions. Moreover, the principles of shared governance under which we operate -- at least in theory -- suggest that tenured and tenure-track faculty members have a significant responsibility for shaping the future of the university. But it's important to be careful in deploying this "we"; as Helen Small has pointed out,
"The first person plural is the regularly preferred point of view for much writing about the academic profession for the academic profession. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole."
-- Helen Small
Note: "The first person plural is... a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the concerns of the profession can be made to seem entirely congruent with those of the democratic polity as a whole." While I hope that my argument has something important to say to folks who work on university campuses but are not faculty, or who do not work on university campuses at all, that connection can't be assumed. It would be great if we could make it possible for the "we" I focus on here to refer to all of us, on campus and off, who want to strengthen both our systems of higher education and our ways of engaging with one another in order to help us all build stronger communities, to ensure that all of us count -- but that's part of the work ahead.
"community"
Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the institution itself as a community, but we don't often talk about what it is we mean when we invoke the concept. Miranda Joseph explores the ways in which "community" gets mythologized, romanticized, and so comes to serve what she calls a supplementary role with respect to capitalism, filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. Additionally, "community" in the singular -- "the community" -- runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests and excludes a "them."
solidarity
Note: If we understand community instead as multiple and diverse, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to embrace community not as a declaration but as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. It is a way of rethinking who counts, of adding others to our numbers, and adding ourselves to theirs. This call for solidarity between the university and the communities outside its walls is part of higher education's recent history, the subject of the student-led calls for institutional change that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, however, those calls were met with deep resistance, not only within the institution but in the governmental and corporate environment that oversaw it, leading to the political shifts whose apotheosis we are living today. In reaction, our institutions, rather than tearing down their walls, instead turned inward, become self-protective, looked away from the possibility of building solidarity with the publics that the university was meant to serve. Community in this strategic sense is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength. If we are to save our institutions from the relentless economic and political forces that today threaten to undo them, we must begin to understand our campus as a site where new kinds of communities, and new kinds of solidarities, can and must be built.
generous thinking
Note: So the book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves requires re-grounding the institution 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.
listening
Note: 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.
reading together
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.
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 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.
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, our institutions of higher education must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of structure that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and community engagement. Colleges and universities must become the kind of institutions 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.
individualism
Note: Our institutions are in many ways structured as collectives, in which each member 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 mine 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, sabbaticals, 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.
zero-sum
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 a 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.
institutions
Note: It's important to note that this situation applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Budget models such as responsibility center management promote competition among academic units for majors and enrollments, and actively discourage any attempts to think across units, whether to develop new interdisciplinary collaborations or to support connections and resource-sharing across larger university structure. And insofar as these sorts of budgetary structures within our institutions drive us all toward competition, our institutions as a whole are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time," seeking to distinguish themselves from other institutions by promoting their own interests. We need our institutions to distance themselves from the rankings and the other quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another, in order for those institutions to promote more generous, more collaborative internal structures, as well as a work environment in which each of us who work for them can move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more collective.
culture change
Note: And this is no easy task. Before the pandemic shut down our ability to travel, 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.
better
Note: For instance: it's clear that making a better, more sustainable institution 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, 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 more, 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.
generosity in
hard times
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.
sacrifice
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. However much we sacrifice for them, they cannot sacrifice for us. This returns me to Tressie McMillan Cottom's point: you, alone, cannot make the institution more humane, and especially not by killing yourself in the process. 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.
big structural change
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've been 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, local changes can begin to make a difference, and that we are capable of making those local changes, which can network out into something larger.
leadership
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 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.
agency
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.
you
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. But there's a second part to the question of agency: how to multiply it. One of the deepest flaws in contemporary models of leadership is the assumption that our reach becomes bigger as we climb the org chart. And of course power does grow in that direction, but what also happens is that you narrow your connections, until you find yourself at the pinnacle of the institution: you're at the center of power, but you're teetering there alone.
"retreating from the center of things -- both in reality and in one's self-conception -- is inseparable from forging connections that expand the boundaries of one's self."
-- Sarah Buss
Note: And as Sarah Buss notes in the introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled Radical Humility, it's through connections that we become larger, not through ego, and building those connections requires a willingness to step out of the singular position of power and to work on coalition-building instead. We need those coalitions to transform a complex organization, and we need to act in solidarity in order for those coalitions to succeed.
us
Note: 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.
how
Note: How we begin 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. There are aspects of this transformation that require high-level administrative intervention: developing the post-RCM budget model that rewards collaboration and contributions to the collective success of the institution rather than competition among units. (And honestly, any institution that can successfully develop and implement such a model could become a shining example for other to learn from.) But beyond these high-level administrative aspects of transformation, there are more local aspects as well, aspects that each of your units can take on. Many of our units are governed by bylaws or other policy documents, and the thing about those documents is that they can be revised. It's often a messy process, but bringing together the members of a department to articulate their values and then rewrite their bylaws to align with those values can foster deep cultural change, by looking hard at the discrepancy between, for instance, our desire for transparency and equity and our policies limiting who gets to participate in and vote on departmental processes. Or, by looking hard at the conflict between our desire for innovation and impact in scholarly work and our policies defining what counts as "research" in highly limited ways.
change
Note: None of this is easy, not least because it requires us to do some deep self-examination, questioning both the ways our policies have become established and our attachments to them. As an expert in organizational change has put it, "People don't resist change. They resist being changed." We need to think hard about what the kinds of cultural change we'd like to see in our institutions will ask of us. We need to consider how we might become better listeners, how we might learn to sit with difficult conversations and even criticism, how we might commit to assessing our work and the work of those around us based on our deepest values, how we might cultivate an atmosphere of mutual and renewable trust, and so on. Each of these ideas -- 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.
people
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: the recognition that the primary work of colleges and universities 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 build a better future.
thank you
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
Note: Many thanks.