Does Higher Ed Need to Rediscover Generosity?

by Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education:  https://www.chronicle.com/article/Does-Higher-Ed-Need-to/245769

Hi. I'm not Goldie Blumenstyk, who usually writes this newsletter. I'm Scott Carlson, also a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering the business of higher education. Here's what I'm thinking about this week:

Does higher ed need to rediscover generosity?

This week I caught up with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of English at Michigan State University, an influential digital-humanities scholar, and the author of Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. At the heart of her book is … well, heart. Academics are fond of intellectual combat, and one's ability to dissect, deconstruct, and even destroy ideas can make one's reputation. But what are the casualties of that competitive, combative orientation?

Fitzpatrick advocates a reorientation of academe toward something more positive, more collaborative. Higher education is fractured by competition — or, in worse cases, infighting — that limits the sector's impact on the communities universities were built to support, drives institutions' attention inward, and undermines public support.

"Community is and has been the university's weakness, when it should have been its strength," she writes. Community "does not simply exist but must be built."

I asked her a few questions about her book. Here's what she said, in this edited version of our interview.

What is "generous thinking"?

From my standpoint, generous thinking is really a way of regrounding the work that the university does in a mode of public engagement. It's not just outreach. It's really thinking about how to bring the concerns of the public into the university, and how to create a relationship with the public. That kind of public engagement is really about listening, thinking, reading, and working with people who may have very different perspectives on the kinds of issues we are engaged with.

How does the culture of higher education hinder that public-engagement role?

The relentless individualization, and the competition that it fosters within the university, hinders that goal most severely. We are in a higher-education system governed by competition from top to bottom. We see departments in competition with one another for resources or for positions. We see institutions in competition with one another for students, for faculty, for funding. And because we're constantly in this competition with one another, we find ourselves serving goals that aren't the actual value that we bring to higher education. We end up serving goals that are just about how to get ahead.

So junior faculty wind up putting aside the most important, often most exciting work that they might want to be doing in favor of doing the thing that will get them tenure. Departments wind up not serving the larger goals of the college, but instead doing what they can to help the department get ahead. Institutions wind up making all kinds of bad choices that have positive effects on the rankings and often quite negative effects on the feeling of community within the institution, support of the students, and support of the faculty.

Criticism and competition are at the heart of academic life. Academics stress-test ideas. So they can't do that anymore?

No, there are some positives to competition. But much of the competition that we've gotten ourselves embroiled in is not that healthy, friendly competition. There's a way in which our critical-thinking practices have fallen out of balance with a more generous spirit that might help us. Start out in encountering ideas of others by saying, "OK, tell me more about this idea. This is extremely interesting. I want to hear more about this." It's that "yes, and" mode that allows us to build something positive together, rather than jumping to the "no, but" — "your idea must be wrong because my idea has to be the one that wins out."

Let's say you're the president of a major university. How would you change the structure or culture of either academe or an individual institution to reflect the goals you're looking for?

I would love it if a really brave institution took this on, but honestly I don't think it will have impact until a cluster of five institutions does this: You need to start by gathering the entirety of the academic campus — the provost, deans, department chairs, and all of the faculty. Then take a look, top to bottom, at our tenure-and-promotion process to make sure the values we claim to espouse — the values of public service, the values of education for the public good — are written into those tenure-and-promotion processes at every level. If we are saying that our public mission is first and foremost, then what we consider excellence in publishing or other forms of research and scholarly production should have that public-service mission written into it. Similarly, if we're looking for excellence in teaching, whatever it is that we consider excellence should have that public mission inscribed in it as well.

You want to gather the entire campus in this process, and really get them invested in rethinking what excellence is, what we value, and where our reward structures are aimed. Then you might be able to start rebuilding the academic community into something that is much more generous — something that does begin to reconnect with that public-service mission.