Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
Note: Thanks; happy to be here.
Note: Much of what follows builds on the arguments in my recent book, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. The 'saving the university' part of the book's subtitle has to do with my growing conviction that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and especially public institutions of higher education -- 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.
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 has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing 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 public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability but an increasing threat to its very public orientation, as rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good -- a broadly educated public -- to the production of market-oriented individual benefit.
Note: And all the while, we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." And this falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though of course, without doubt, that too -- but rather must be understood as evidence that, as I argue in the last chapter of Generous Thinking, higher education has for the last several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms -- on the one hand, an older paradigm, largely operative within the academic community, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge; and on the other hand, a more recent one, in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. We find ourselves in a situation today, however, in which both of those paradigms are failing, if in different ways, 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.
Note: My overall argument is 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. It's going to require concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is and must be understood as social rather than individual.
Note: So I ask us to think about how we work with one another on campus, and how we connect our campuses to the publics around us. This 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.
Note: I also explore ways that our critical reading practices could 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.
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.
Note: But if we are going to make the kinds changes I argue for in the ways that scholars work, both on campus and off, the university as an institution must undergo a fairly radical transformation, becoming the kind of institution that supports rather than dismisses (or in fact actively punishes) collaboration and public engagement. And this needs to begin with our engagement with one another on campus, and perhaps especially our engagement with our students.
Note: Our students, after all, are our first and most important point of contact with the publics we serve. Our students come to us from a very wide range of backgrounds and with a very wide range of interests. Ensuring that we connect with them, that we work with them in creating the university's future, is job one. But I want to suggest that some of our students are learning habits of mind from us that ultimately work to undermine the future that we want to build.
Note: My thinking in this project had several points of inception over the years, one of which was a moment in a graduate seminar I taught years ago, a moment that has come to feel emblematic of the situation of the contemporary university. I want to preface the story by saying that I offer it not as an indictment of the kids today, but rather of the m.o. of higher education since the last decades of the 20th century. So here's the scene: the seminar is in cultural studies, and is meant to provide an overview of some current questions in critical theory. I do not now remember what article it was we'd read for that class session, but I opened our discussion by asking for first responses. And three students in a row issued withering takedowns of the article, pointing to the author's methodological flaws and ideological weaknesses. After the third, I said okay, that's all important and I definitely want to dig into it, but let's back up a bit: what is the author's argument here? What is she trying to accomplish?
Note: Nothing. "It's not a trick question," I said. "What is this article about?" Now, I was a fair bit younger and less sure of myself at that point, and I immediately began wondering whether I'd asked a stupid question, whether the sudden failure to meet my gaze was a sign that I, like the author, was now being dismissed as having pedestrian interest in neoliberal forms of meaning-making that demonstrated my complicity with the systems of oppression within which I worked. But it gradually dawned on me that the problem with the question wasn't its stupidity but its unfamiliarity. The students were prepared to dismantle the argument, but not to examine how it was built.
Note: The students in this seminar, like so many of us, had learned all too well the lessons of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say, I Say: that the key move in academic argumentation is from what others have previously said to one's own -- almost always contrasting, and inevitably more interesting or correct -- contribution. That is to say, that the goal of critical thinking is to expose the flawed arguments of others in order to demonstrate the inherent rightness of our own.
Note: The larger point that Graff and Birkenstein make in They Say, I Say is a good and important one: that scholarship proceeds through conversation, and thus that scholarly argument begins with engaging with what others have said and then develops through one's own individual contribution to the discussion. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first part is that we are -- and when I say we, I mean human beings at this hour of the world -- we are by and large TERRIBLE at conversation. Witness any set of talking heads on television, or any Thanksgiving dinner table, or any department meeting: more often than not, we spend the time when other people are talking waiting for our own turn to speak, and we take what's being said to us mostly as a means of formulating our own response. We do not genuinely listen, but instead react. And the same is too often true of scholarly conversation: the primary purpose of engaging with what "they" have said is to get to the important bit -- what I am saying.
Note: That's the first problem. The second is the assumption that what I am saying, my own individual contribution to the discussion, is genuinely individual, that it is my own. In no small part this stems from the hyperindividualistic orientation of the contemporary university -- an orientation inseparable from the individualism of the surrounding culture -- in which the entire institutional reward structure, including grades, credits, honors, degrees, rank, status, and every other form of merit is determined by what I individually have done. Every tub sits on its own bottom, in other words, and if I am to succeed it must be based on my own individual accomplishments.
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. We all find ourselves in an environment in which we have to compete with one another: for attention, for acclaim, for resources, for time.
Note: As a result, the mode of conversation promoted by They Say, I Say has become less about the most important forms of critical thinking on which our work focuses -- engaging with what has been said before us and adding to the discussion -- than about competitive thinking. Competitive thinking is a hyperindividualistic mode of debate that suggests that we are in an endless struggle with one another, in which there is only room for so much success, for so much attention. In competitive thinking, the quest for academic and professional success requires us to defend our own positions, and attack others. 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.
Note: This analysis of course applies as much to institutions as to the individuals who work within them. Insofar as the institutional reward structures within which we operate privilege achievement through competition, it's because our institutions are similarly under a mandate, as Chris Newfield has said, to "compete all the time." And it's only when our institutions separate themselves from quantified metrics for excellence that pit them against one another that we'll likewise be able to move fully away from competitive thinking and into a mode that's more productive.
Note: But in the meantime, one of the places where we can begin to create a new ethos and transform the values that structure our institutions is in teaching. This is not to say that such transformation will be easy. We are working within a system that instills these notions of competition and individual achievement earlier and earlier, of course, as students come to us from elementary and secondary institutions increasingly structured around testing. Perhaps students aren't competing directly against one another in the moment of testing, but they are nonetheless being inculcated into at least two of competitive thinking's underpinnings: the responsibility of the individual for demonstrating mastery, and the significant consequences of being wrong.
Note: And perhaps it's here that we see the origins of at least some of our students' -- and our -- terror of being wrong. Wrong means failure. Wrong brings shame. But wrong is inevitable, a horrible thought. And so if we can't avoid being wrong, we can certainly refuse to acknowledge when we're wrong; as Kathryn Schulz has explored, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid recognizing their wrongness. But of course there is no real thinking without the possibility of being wrong. Without being willing to be wrong, we can't hypothesize, we can't experiment, we can't create. We can't imagine new possibilities. We can't dream. But we are hard-wired not to admit the possibility that we might be wrong.
Note: And one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong -- and again, by "we" here, I mean both to point to academics in particular and to humans living at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century in general -- again, one key method by which we attempt to avoid the possibility of being wrong is by demonstrating the inherent wrongness in everyone else's ideas. In the academy, and perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences, this takes the form of critique: if I can demonstrate what's wrong with your ideas, it must mean that my ideas are better.
Note: This is the upshot of They Say, I Say, and it's what leads to the situation I faced in my graduate seminar: we have armed our students with all the most important tools of critique. They are ready to unpack and dismantle. They are well-trained, that is to say, in playing what Peter Elbow once referred to as the doubting game, in which they focus on the parts of an idea that could be wrong and what it might mean if they were. But they have -- and if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we all have -- a tendency to skip the half of the game that's supposed to come first: the believing game, in which we focus on what it might mean if the idea were right. The m.o. of They Say, I Say, in other words, encourages us to dismiss what "they say" as quickly as possible, in order to get on to the more crucial "I say," the part for which we will actually get credit.
Note: I want to be clear here: there is a LOT of what "they say" that in fact should be pushed back against. There's a lot out there worth doubting. I'm not asking us not to disagree, not to push new ideas forward, not to think critically. I am, however, hoping that we might find ways to remember that critical thinking requires deep understanding and even generosity as a prerequisite.
Note: So what I want to ask today is what we and our students might gain from slowing the process down a bit, from emphasizing the believing game before leaping to the doubting game, from lingering a bit longer in the "they say." We might, just as a start, find that we all become better listeners. We might open up new ground for mutual understanding, even with those with whom we most disagree.
Note: And we might find ourselves moving less from "they say" to "I say" than instead to "we say," thinking additively and collaboratively about what we might build together rather than understanding our own ideas to require vanquishing everyone else's. We might, as Lakoff and Johnson have suggested, move away from understanding argument through the metaphor of war and instead think of it as a dance, in which two creative individuals come together to produce something that neither could do alone.
Note: We might learn from theories of community engaged scholarship which, as my colleague Burt Bargerstock has told me, have recognized the damage that a deficit model of engagement has produced -- saying to the community, in effect, you have a problem and we're here to fix it -- and instead focus on an asset model: your community has these strengths, and we as scholars have these others, and together we might do something remarkable.
Note: Or we might think of ways that the work that we do together in the classroom could learn from improvisational comedy, which operates within an ethos of "yes, and." Saying "no" to an improv partner can derail a scene in progress; contradicting what's already happened in order to go a different direction fragments the scenario and shuts down possibility. "Yes, and" instead builds on what's been established, even if in order to go somewhere entirely new.
Note: All of these models begin to suggest what a more generous university might look like, one based on building something collective rather than tearing down our predecessors in order to promote our own ideas. Generosity might help us frame ways of thinking that focus on higher education as a means of fostering community rather than providing individual benefit. And this is key to the future of the university: we have to find our way back to an understanding of the university's work as grounded in service to a broadly construed public, and that requires all of us -- faculty, students, staff, administrators, trustees -- reframing the good that higher education provides as a social good, a collective and communal good, rather than a personal, private, individual one.
Note: Of course, if we are really going to effect this transformation -- what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about the values that underwrite higher education -- we're going to have to think differently about how we measure our success as well. About what success means in the first place. If we're going to move away from the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom, hyper individualistic, competitive mode of achievement, in which all outcomes are understood to be individual and are therefore assessed at that level, and instead foster more collective goals, we're going to need to think carefully about what we're assessing and why. How might we instead focus our modes of assessment at all levels, and the rewards that follow, on collaboration, on process?
Note: And that's of course not just about assessing our students; it's about our own professional reviews and evaluations as well. We need to think seriously about, and to press our institutions on, ways that all of the processes that structure our professional lives -- not least our processes of hiring, of retention, of tenure and promotion -- might help to instantiate the values we want to bring to the work we do, rather than fostering the culture of competition, of invidious distinction, that colors all of the ways that we work today.
Note: One cautionary note, however: I do not mean this emphasis on generosity, on a supportive engagement with the work that has gone before us, to be used as a means of defusing the important work that critique actually does in helping make ideas better. In the early days of working on Generous Thinking, I gave an invited talk in which I tested out some of its core ideas. In the Q-and-A that followed, one commenter pointed out what he saw as a canny move on my part in talking about generosity: no one wanted to be seen as an ungenerous jerk in disagreeing with me. It was a funny moment, but it gave me real pause; I did not at all intend to use generosity as a shield with which to fend off the possibility of critique. Generosity, in fact, requires remaining open to criticism -- in fact, it requires recognizing the generous purposes that critique can serve. So in pressing for more generous modes of working, I do not mean to impose a regime that is all rainbows and unicorns on us. Instead, what I'm hoping to ask is how we might all benefit from thinking with rather than against one another in developing the knowledge that might make all of us better contributors to the social good.
Note: I've asked a lot of questions about what we might do and how it might work, and I'm not sure how many answers I have for them. In part, that's by design: the problems facing the university today are larger and more complicated than can be solved by any one mind working alone. They're going to require all of us, thinking together, building one one another's ideas, in order to create something new. And so I'm going to stop here, both to hand things over to my colleague to talk about ways we might begin that process, but also in the hopes that we might use our discussion period to move from what I say to what we say. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we might encourage more generous ways of being across the university.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
Note: Many thanks.