215 lines
39 KiB
Markdown
215 lines
39 KiB
Markdown
# Leading Generously
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---
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### Tools for Transformation
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---
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<br />
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<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
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<small>http://presentations.kfitz.info/oregon.html</small>
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Note: Thank you so much for that introduction. I'm delighted to talk to you a bit about *Leading Generously* here today. The origins of this book are seeded in a protracted crisis at Michigan State University. I'm not going to tell the whole story today, but instead just note that in the seven years that I've worked there, MSU has had six presidents and four provosts, and we're now searching for our fifth. The institution has also experienced massive conflict with and within our board of trustees and all of us are living through a resulting melange of anger and despair and exhaustion that seriously inhibits our ability to focus on the things that are most important to us.
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## crisis
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Note: But thinking about what our institution has experienced in recent years as a "crisis" feels so obvious as to say absolutely nothing about what's actually happening. We are surrounded by crisis in the academy (not to mention the world beyond) and while our circumstances at MSU have perhaps been more intense than at other institutions, to say that we have been facing an "institutional crisis" feels redundant.
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## <span style="color:red">permanent</span> crisis
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Note: Institutions like ours are in many ways built on a foundation of crisis. As Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon have explored in their book *Permanent Crisis*, the long history of the rhetoric of crisis, especially in the humanities, can be traced back to the establishment of the German university system, which of course gave shape to much of the structure of research universities in the contemporary United States. Reitter and Wellmon argue, in fact, that the existence of the humanities in the modern era is dependent upon that sense of crisis:
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> <smaller>“For nearly a century and a half, claims about a 'crisis of the humanities' have constituted a genre with remarkably consistent features: anxiety about modern agents of decay, the loss of authority and legitimacy, and invocations of 'the human' in the face of forces that dehumanize and alienate humans from themselves, one another, and the world. These claims typically lead to the same, rather paradoxical conclusion: <span style="color:red">modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities.</span> Without a sense of crisis, the humanities would have neither purpose nor direction.” (Reitter and Wellmon 132)</smaller>
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Note: noting that talk of a "crisis in the humanities" rest on claims that "modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities." And perhaps it is true that we in the humanities -- or is it the liberal arts more broadly? or even the university as a whole? -- we rely on our sense of crisis, our sense of swimming against the larger cultural tides, to give us purpose. Much of the work that we as scholars do, after all, is structured by critique, and without our distance from the cultural and institutional center we can neither obtain the perspective nor sustain the motivation necessary to studying the ways that our world structures and is structured by its representations.
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On the other hand. There are some particularities to the situation of our institutions today -- the threats that our colleges, our departments, our fields, and our researchers and instructors face -- that are not simply rhetorical, and it's worth paying some careful attention to the specifics of these crises, which include:
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- the <span class="fragment highlight-red">labor</span> crisis<br />
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- the <span class="fragment highlight-red">economic</span> crisis<br />
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- the <span class="fragment highlight-red">political</span> crisis
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Note: (**CLICK**) **The labor crisis**. Over the last couple of decades, we've watched as more and more good positions -- with job security, adequate salaries, full benefits, and above all academic freedom -- have been sucked into the gig economy. The effects of this labor crisis are manifold: as fewer and fewer faculty members have access to the benefits of tenure, and thus the voice in shared governance required to have a real impact on the institution's directions, our fields and our departments appear decreasingly vibrant, drawing in diminishing numbers of students, thus making the case for our apparent obsolescence.
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- (**CLICK**) This of course works hand-in-hand with **the economic crisis** that our institutions are mired in. As public funding provides a smaller and smaller portion of university budgets, the costs of higher education have shifted radically from the state to individual students and their families. As those costs escalate, the pressure on students to think of higher education as a market exchange grows. If they're going to sink tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars into the purchase of a four-year degree, it's not the least bit surprising that students would also face increasing pressure to select a degree program that seems to promise an obvious career outcome. And thus majors that are named after jobs or industries grow, and those that aren't shrink, providing further evidence that new investments in those fields are a luxury that our institutions, like our students, cannot afford.
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- (**CLICK**) And in the midst of all that, there is of course **the political crisis**, which has been brewing for decades but has taken a particularly acute turn in the last few years. The attacks that we've seen on critical race theory, the moves to ban books from libraries, the attempts to eradicate tenure, the growing interference in the curriculum -- all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that the humanities bring to bear.
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I point to all of this in order to suggest that neither the threats we face nor the work we have ahead are rhetorical. They are instead very material, and they demand material responses.
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Note: So part of my goal in *Leading Generously* is to demonstrate that we have at hand some of the means of responding to the crises faced by our fields and our institutions, and that we can demonstrate through the ways that we do our work a better path for the future of the university at large. I argued in *Generous Thinking* that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university, its internal communities, and the publics that we serve requires re-grounding the institution by building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. This kind of change requires concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is social rather than individual, and renewing that sense of higher education as a public good encourages us to think about the public modes for our work, including community-engaged research and open publishing processes, that might help us better demonstrate the good that we do, especially in hard times.
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## change
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Note: But embracing these ways of working requires deep institutional change, in order to ensure that work is valued and supported. And it requires not only transforming the ways that we value and reward public work, but also creating the policies that can help us account for and support public work, and adopting the processes and platforms that can bring public work to life. And this is just one piece of the overarching change that our institutions need.
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## how
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Note: By the time *Generous Thinking* came out, it had already become clear to me that I had some follow-up work to do, that I needed to dig far deeper into the process of and the conditions for transformation. And then after a talk I gave at Virginia Tech in October 2019, an attendee asked a question that's been stuck in the back of my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that's relatively easy to embrace when we're flush, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to be generous when we're facing significant budget cuts, for instance, or is it inevitable that we fall back into analytics-driven competition with every unit -- much less every worker -- out to protect their own resources and their own privileges?
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I don't remember exactly how I answered then. I suspect that it was some combination of "you're completely right; that's the real question" and "the difficulties involved in being generous in hard times are precisely why we need to practice generosity in a determined way in good times." And I may have said some things about the importance of transparency in priority-setting and decision-making, and of involving the collective in that process.
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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 want the institution to survive, and I want to maintain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
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<smaller>https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry</smaller>
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Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence in recent years of the painful inequities on our campuses, and have had proven to us that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. These institutions have long been dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category 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 respond to civil protest with an increasingly militarized police presence. All of these choices share the conviction that the institution is 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?
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## collective action
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Note: One key thing that transforming the university would require is collective action. Because no single leader can change things in a system this broken. We might make some headway together, but first we have to build that together and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals. Because right now, the primary way that the idea of "together" gets invoked -- as in "we're all in it together" -- is not in the context of resource or power-sharing but of sacrifice. And sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
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## structures
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Note: The only way to prevent anything, including something as metaphoric as sacrifice, from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. So my focus right now is on those structures, on what is required for us collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. I'm far less interested in radicalizing individual leaders who can rise through the administrative ranks than I am in building cohorts of leaders who can work together to transform those ranks.
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> “the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working.” (Interview with Dianne Harris)
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Note: This is true not least because, as Dianne Harris told me, "the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working." That heroic model of individual leadership is damaging not just to the institution, whose welfare lies at the mercy of such an executive's successful navigation of an increasingly complex economic, cultural, and political landscape, but also to the well-being of that executive, who must convincingly appear omniscient and invulnerable and who will inevitably fail at pulling that off. We need a new framework for academic leadership that is collective and collaborative rather than individual, enabling leadership to become a mode of connection that can be centered anywhere within the org chart where people have ideas about how to make things better. If we can come to appreciate and authorize the collective potential that exists within our institutions, we can begin to make them not only more generous but more resilient.
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## agency
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Note: In addition to the notion that leadership must of necessity be an individual quality, there's a second bit of conventional wisdom that *Leading Generously* is working against: the relative powerlessness of individuals in their encounters with the structures and systems of contemporary life. This sense of powerlessness derives both from some highly problematic sources — those who benefit from existing structures and systems and would prefer everyone else just let them do their thing — and from some misunderstandings of critical theories of power in contemporary culture. Those theories describe the issues they explore as _systemic_ rather than _individual_, arguing that real change must be structural, building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, reshaping economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. All of that demands something much larger and harder than personal transformation — but we misunderstand the import of those theories if we assume they mean that individual action doesn't matter. The individual matters, deeply: just perhaps not the way we think.
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When I argue that the complicated process of culture change can begin anywhere in the org chart, that any person (and not just the uniquely heroic leader) can be a change agent, I don't mean to suggest that the problems we face originate with individual behavior, or that any given person's change of heart can change the world. But if our goals include building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world, individuals have to find ways to become empowered, because the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
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It's a matter of where we locate agency, of who has the ability to make significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, or as the unique privilege of those with rank and status within those structures and systems, there is little agency left to the rest of us. And it's certainly true that the problems we face are enormous, and that one person without structural authority can't do much to change the world — but groups of people can. Groups of people working together can form coalitions and mobilize them to develop new organizational structures with collectivity at their center. Building those coalition begins with the energy of individuals who decide to put their agency to work in solidarity with others.
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## resistance
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Note: That decision is a big one, and it often requires overcoming a great deal of resistance, both internal and external. Many so-called "permanent faculty" on campus don't particularly consider themselves to be responsible for their institutions, in no small part because the institution isn't our primary point of identification. We're encouraged instead to think of ourselves as free agents of a sort, more accountable to our fields than to colleagues down the hall (much less the next building over). Worse, the growing percentage of contingent faculty rarely have the chance to feel any sort of connection to their institutions, precisely because those institutions are structured to offer them no toe-holds whatsoever. And staff members rarely have the kinds of job security and other privilege that faculty receive, and so work in a coerced silence, either fearing for their jobs if they speak out or all too aware that their voices will be ignored. All the while those of us who can speak out in relative safety don't, often feeling that fixing the institution isn't our job, that it should be left to the folks who are paid the big bucks to run things. But retreating into the work for which we are rewarded, and willingly handing off the running of our universities to an ever-thickening rank of upper administrators, has contributed mightily to getting us into this mess. The longer I stare at it, the more I believe that we collectively not only have the ability but also the responsibility to step forward, to take action, and to demonstrate that not only do we belong to the institution, but it also belongs to us.
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## leadership
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Note: We need a new *collective* model for academic leadership not least because the crises in which our institutions are mired indicate that the model under which we currently labor is irreparably broken. I want to be clear in what I'm saying here: there are some very good people doing the best work they can in many of our campus leadership roles. It's not the people that need replacing, or at least not *all* of the people, and in fact the exercise of replacing them with new leaders with new visions has become a form of institutional deck-chair-rearranging. The problem lies rather with the structures within and through which they work. That's the model of academic leadership we need to contend with, a model with its boards and its presidents and its innumerable vice-presidents that comes to us directly from the hierarchical structures of corporate governance. Those structures are ill-suited to the operation of non-profit entities in general, as can be seen in the extensive recent literature on reimagining non-profit leadership. And those structures are doing grave damage to the purposes of higher education.
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## “like a business”
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Note: This is why our campus values statements die a little every time that someone says that the university should be run more like a business: because all of our institutions already *are* being run like businesses, and long have been. Of course, what that someone means when they say that the university should be run more like a business is that we should be keeping a closer eye on the bottom line, we should be relentless in our pursuit of innovation, we should be eliminating the product lines that aren't producing sufficient revenue, we should be keeping our front-line labor in check, and so on. All of which we've been subjected to for decades now, and all of which has contributed to the sorry state we're in.
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## competitive
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Note: Even worse, however, the unspoken parts of "like a business," the individualist, competitive models for success that are foundational to corporate structures, are actively preventing our institutions from flourishing. This is true not just at the micro-level, where each individual student and employee is required to compete for resources, but also at the macro-level, where our institutions are required to square off in the marketplace rather than develop any kinds of cross-institutional collaborations that could lift the entire sector rather than creating the rankings-driven lists of winners and losers that surround us today.
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So here's the core of my argument: universities are not meant to be profit centers, and shouldn't be run that way. They are rather shared infrastructures dedicated to a form of mutual aid, in which those who have -- in this case, knowledge -- support those who need, with the goal of producing a more just and equitable society.
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## mutual aid
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Note: Dean Spade defines mutual aid as "collective coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse." And as Peter Kropotkin argued at the turn of the 20th century, mutual aid, mutual protection, and mutually beneficial cooperation have been as important to the development of both animal and human societies as the Darwinian mode of competition for survival. In fact, though history focuses on the role of conflict in societies -- it makes for a more thrilling narrative than does cooperation -- Kropotkin indicates the significance of mutual aid for our subjects of study:
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> <smaller>“the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his <span style="color:red">arts, knowledge, and intelligence</span>; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in <span style="color:red">arts, industry, and science.</span>” (Kropotkin 296)</smaller>
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Note: (**READ SLIDE**) The development, then, all of the forms of knowledge studied across our campuses, required mutual aid. And they still require mutual aid in order to continue their work. And that need should press us to consider that the ideal model for the university is not the corporation but the cooperative, in which every member has a stake in the successful outcome of the whole, and is as a result committed to full participation in its processes.
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## coalition / leadership
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Note: In collective models such as that of the co-op, leadership is of necessity coalition-based rather than hierarchical. It is both built *from* relationships and in order to *sustain* relationships. And this is a model that I would like to see us espouse for the future of academic leadership. I'll acknowledge, though, that "coalition" and "leadership" may not seem to go together terrifically well, at least in the conventional model. I tend to think, however, that our use of the term "leadership" is often a misleading euphemism.
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## management
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Note: In fact, most of what comes down to us from above is management rather than leadership. Don't get me wrong; good management is crucial to any organization. Management, as John Kotter has argued, is focused on "coping with complexity," on organizing and directing the people and resources necessary to conduct an organization's work. Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of "coping with change." This is a distinction with a difference for Kotter, who has argued that most organizations today are
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## “over-managed and under-led”
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Note: "over-managed and under-led," and universities are no exception. At every level of our institutions, we have been disciplined into an inability to cope with -- much less create -- change. Transforming our ideas about campus leadership could allow us to people together to create change, to model and to create the conditions for more thoughtful, more inclusive, more just ways of working. Leadership, in other words, ought to be about building the relationships necessary for collective action. It should be connective, and compassionate, and generative. And it could emerge anywhere in an institution, if cultivated.
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## cultivation
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Note: I choose the metaphor of cultivation pointedly, thanks to Beronda Montgomery, whose brilliant book _Learning from Plants_ explores the ways that an understanding of botanical life can help us develop more supportive, more collectively attuned ways of working in human communities. As Montgomery argues, learning from plants encourages us to focus on remediating the environments within which we work together rather than attributing the difficulties some individuals experience in taking root and growing in those environments to internal deficits. This approach also calls upon us to develop a new kind of leadership "vision," one that can
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> <smaller>“adapt to changing circumstances, and … enable leaders to see the potential collaborations and benefits in diverse communities. This approach contrasts with the traditional <span style="color:red">gatekeeping</span> approach, in which leaders determine who gains access via conceptualizations and assumptions about who can function and thrive in a particular context. Instead, this distinct form of leadership is sense driven and environmentally adaptive; it attends to individuals while at the same time tending the ecosystems in which these individuals exist. I call this form of leadership <span style="color:red"> groundskeeping</span>, in recognition of what we know about the conditions that plants need to successfully thrive.” (Montgomery 149)</smaller>
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Note: **(READ SLIDE.)** Organic metaphors such as groundskeeping and cultivation allow us to think about leadership as something that is grown rather than owned or inhabited, requiring an awareness that our institutions and organization are more akin to ecosystems than they are to the org charts we draw to represent them. Leaders must work in concert with their ecosystems, rather than operating from the top-down management perspective to which we have become accustomed.
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## re-organize
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Note: So how do we re-organize ourselves in ways that will enable us to create the change that our campuses so desperately need? In order to get a range of perspectives on that question, I conducted interviews with a number of mid-level managers within their institutions, folks I consider to be leading the process of transformative change. Nearly all of them pointed to the need for collaboration, for listening, for mutual support, and so on, in order to create the ground on which transformation can grow. As Chris Bourg said to me, “The leadership skills for the future of higher education are 100% coalition-building and relationships.” And this is true throughout our institutions: our success at the department level, the college level, the university level, all depends upon our becoming and acting as a collective, on developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear. And that process -- determining what our shared goals are and should be, and how we should go about striving toward them together -- requires a kind of interrelation that is not merely personal but also, and of necessity, political.
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## <span style="color:red">politics</span>
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Note: When I talk about politics in this context, I mean to point to Iris Marion Young's definition in _Justice and the Politics of Difference_:
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> “all aspects of <span style="color:red">institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings</span> insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decisionmaking” (Young 9)
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Note: (**READ SLIDE**) and in particular her argument that “the concept of justice coincides with the concept of the political,” arguing that every effort must be made to enhance collective evaluation and decision-making if we are to create the possibility for just institutions.
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## “shared governance”
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Note: In most colleges and universities in the US, the potential for "collective evaluation and decision-making" is contained within the structures of shared governance. Those bodies, including a wide range of working groups, committees, and senates, serve to gather faculty and (in some cases) staff opinions and perspectives on many questions concerning the operation of our institutions. On a few such questions — such as the curriculum — those bodies exercise a kind of ownership, and the decisions issuing from them have the mark of authority. On many campuses, however, and on many issues, faculty and staff governance is advisory at best: votes are taken, decisions are made and communicated to the administration, and that's it. The administration has the freedom to take those resolutions up and act upon them, or to ignore them at will.
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## bureaucratic
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Note: As a result, the collective deliberation and decision-making bodies on many campuses have become less political, in Young's sense, than bureaucratic, functioning in order to function rather than bearing the potential for change. "Bureaucracies," Young notes, "are distinguished from other forms of social organization in operating according to impersonal rules that apply in the same way to all cases." Young goes on to note, of course, that bureaucracy as we experience it at the level of the state developed in order to replace individual sovereignty and its less rational whims with the rule of law. Similarly, the principles and processes of shared governance on campus attempt to mitigate the unjust imposition of an administrator's opinions on faculty and staff functions. But an over-reliance on and even subjugation to those principles and processes runs the risk of making the bureaucracies through which we operate seem politically neutral and eternal and unchangeable.
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## merit
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Note: As Young points out, "the values of bureaucratic organization" indicate that decisions should be made "according to merit." And while the reliance on merit in bureaucracy is, she notes, among "the important positive developments in the history of social organization," what is missing is a deep engagement with and debate concerning the meaning and determination of _merit itself_. Our institutions have devised metrics and processes that allow us to believe that merit is a quantifiable thing we can assess outside the realm of the political. But merit as a category is always and inevitably ideological, in providing a common-sense explanation that transforms highly contingent relations of domination into something apparently natural. As Young argues:
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> <smaller>“The rules and policies of any institution serve particular ends, embody particular values and meanings, and have identifiable consequences for the actions and situation of the persons within or related to these institutions. All of these things are open to challenge, and politics is the process of struggle and deliberation about such rules and policies, the ends they serve, and the values they embody. The ideology of <span style="color:red">merit</span> seeks to <span style="color:red">depoliticize</span> the establishment of criteria and standards for allocating positions and awarding benefits.” (Young 211)</smaller>
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Note: **(READ SLIDE.)** That depoliticization sounds like a good thing — making the awarding of benefits as objective a process as possible — up until we remember that the individual people involved in defining and implementing these processes are not and can never be objective. We are all inescapably subjective, bringing our own experiences and perspectives to everything we judge. What depoliticization means in the bureaucratic, and particularly in the meritocratic, is a closing-off of the opportunities for debating the criteria, the processes, and the objectives through which we might keep notions like merit from becoming forms of oppression. As it becomes depoliticized, bureaucracy errs in treating the rules as the _ends_ that it seeks, rather than a _means_ to those ends.
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## peer review
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Note: Take, for example, peer review. I've written extensively about this, and I won't rehash all of that here. But one key point has to do with the role that anonymity plays in the process. Anonymizing the submissions that undergo peer review for publication began as a means of mitigating the influence of reviewer bias based on the identity of the author. The goal was admirable and its success has been appreciable, enabling the work of marginalized scholars to gain purchase in the highest levels of academic discourse. What anonymity did not do, however, and cannot do, is _eliminate_ bias, which will always find ways to creep back in around the edges as, for instance, critiques of subject matter, methodology, and cited sources become proxies for status based on identity and serve as ostensibly neutral means of reinforcing hierarchies within fields. Again, the intent of these rules and procedures is admirable, but they can never provide for the fullness of justice, precisely because they are treated as if they are sources of objectivity, when they are always designed and implemented by individuals with specific subjectivities.
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## values
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Note: Moreover, trying to change the rules and procedures to make them _more_ objective is laudable, but cannot help but introduce new areas in which objectivity is in question. Ultimately, as Young argues, the goal should be not to exclude subjectivity or "personal values" from decision-making, but rather to make that subjectivity and those personal values fully part of the decision-making process itself, as she notes that these values are "inevitably and properly part of what decisionmaking is about." So rather than trying to make peer review more bias-free, what if we were instead to embrace its deeply political nature, to make it more transparent and participatory, and to ask authors and reviewers alike to surface and contend with their values as a part of the process?
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## processes and policies
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Note: Similarly, we might think of the ways that tenure and promotion processes and policies are implemented. These structures have been designed to protect candidates from the personal whims or animus of administrators as cases move through the approval hierarchy. And yet that bureaucracy has the potential to interfere with justice in its requirement that all cases be treated identically. As Young notes of the gap between bureaucracy and truly democratic collective action, "Decisions and actions will be evaluated less according to whether they are right or just than according to their legal validity, that is, whether they are consistent with the rules and follow the appropriate procedures." This is encoded in the appeals process for promotion and tenure denials at many institutions, where the acceptable range of inquiry is restricted to whether the process was conducted in accordance with the rules, rather than whether the final determination was just, much less whether the process as constituted was capable of producing a just result.
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Changing processes like peer review or tenure and promotion in order to surface rather than avoid subjective bias, one might reasonably argue, would make those processes political. And yet it's clear to just about everyone who has ever been through such a process that those decisions and processes _have always been political_, and will always remain political. That's not in and of itself a bad thing. We should not want to remove politics from the ways that we engage with one another on campus, but rather to create an environment in which we can embrace politics, rendering all of us able to participate wholly, fully, with the most open and honest intent in the processes through which our lives are inevitably structured.
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### politics : leadership :: bureaucracy : management
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Note: So what does all of this have to do with leadership? If management, as Kotter argued, is focused on "coping with complexity," on ensuring the optimal functioning of entangled structures and organizations, we might begin to intuit a relationship between management and bureaucracy. Establishing rules and processes, ensuring that they're followed, remediating them when they fail, all require careful management. And again, good management remains important, as anyone who has ever worked with a poor manager can attest. But if management is about ensuring that things get done with maximum efficiency, it's also about minimizing everything that can interfere with that efficiency, including — and perhaps especially — dissent. Management is in this sense necessarily depoliticizing; it requires foreclosing debate and smoothing the way for prescribed action. This is one reason why the good management needed for making the status quo function often cannot contend with change: when an organization tries to manage change, it too often ends up with a manufactured consent that squelches the political and moves decision-making outside the realm of debate.
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## leading generously
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Note: If leadership, as Kotter contrasts it with management, focuses on "coping with change," good leadership must of necessity be political at heart. Leadership requires embracing and facilitating the kinds of open debate, dissent, and even struggle necessary for making the best possible decisions about what an organization should do and how it should do it. Leadership requires making room for the broadest possible participation in decision-making, and it requires developing the relationships and coalitions necessary to ensure that the resulting decisions are understood and embraced. Leadership is about creating the conditions necessary for the many people within an organization to contribute to and feel ownership of the organization's future.
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The path to developing more generous forms of academic leadership, then, leads directly through politics, through political organizing, through coalition-building, through solidarity. Our institutions, our fields, and our colleagues have suffered enormously under the competitive corporate regimes to which we've been subjected. If there's going to be change, it's not going to come from above; it has to be led by us. Not that we need more administrators to rise out of the faculty, but rather that the faculty might begin to model new cooperative structures that can serve as starting points for the radical rethinking of academic hierarchies. If we can work collectively, we have the potential to create alternatives to the failed model of individualist academic leadership and its basis in the principles of the corporate economy. We can work together to develop properly politicized cultures of mutual aid based on collective action within our departments. We can ensure that our departments similarly interact with one another based on principles of mutual support. And we can demonstrate what it would mean for an institution to live out the values espoused in its mission statement.
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I recognize that all of this requires a lot in the way of hope for the future, and I will admit that my usual commitment to understanding hope as a discipline, in Mariame Kaba's phrase, is struggling a bit today. I am trying to bear in mind Dean Spade's conviction that "crisis conditions require bold tactics" and that the boldest of these is mutual aid. True cooperation and collective action might provide a path out of the crises by which we're beset, and in fact toward a future in which higher education can genuinely serve the public good.
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## thank you
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---
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<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller>
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Note: Many thanks. |