Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
Note: I want to start by thanking Vice Chancellor Drummond for inviting me to talk with you today, and Julie Yoder for all of her help with making sure that this visit could happen. This talk is a highly compressed overview of sorts of my book, Generous Thinking, which came out in early February from Johns Hopkins. The overall argument of the project is that the future of higher education demands that those of us on campus pay more attention to building relationships of trust with the publics that the university serves. My focus is particularly on the future of the American university, but I think most of it holds for those other nations that seem to be following our relentless course toward austerity and privatization.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank
Note: Evidence of the need for rebuilding trusting relationships between universities and the public might be found in an increasing number of reports and studies such as this one, released in 2017 by the Pew Research Center, showing a precipitous decline in the esteem colleges and universities are held in in the United States, primarily on the political right. One frequent on-campus reaction to this kind of report, understandably, is to decry the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture, to turn inward, and to spend more time talking with those who understand us — meaning us. But in that reaction we run the risk of deepening the divide, allowing those who want to argue that today’s colleges and universities are not only irrelevant but actively detrimental to the well-being of the general public to say, “see? They’re out of touch. Who needs them anyway?” Because this shift in public opinion didn’t just happen; it was made to happen.
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 problem is not just that the public doesn’t 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. So a large part of what I’m after in Generous Thinking 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: asking us, in other words, to examine how our colleges and universities engage with the world. 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 solve on our own.
Note: These crises, I want to acknowledge, do not always give the impression of being life-threatening, world-historical, or approaching the kind or degree of the highly volatile political, economic, and environmental situation we face today. And yet the decline in public support for higher education is of a piece with these other crises, part of a series of national and international transformations in assumptions about the responsibility of governments 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 some might take my argument, about the importance of generosity for the future of the university, to be a self-indulgent, head-in-the-sand retreat into philosophizing and a refusal of real political action, I hope, in the larger project, to have 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. My argument is that 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 may lie less in its power to advance knowledge or solve problems in any of its many fields than in our more crucial ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.
Note: But first: who is this “we” I keep referring to, what is it precisely that we do, and why does it matter? Much of my argument 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 I want to be careful with the ways that I deploy 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.” 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, and that it might become possible for the “we” that I am addressing 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. But it’s important to acknowledge that the “we” that bears the greatest responsibility for caring for the university and for building relationships between the university and the broader publics that it serves, and thus the most immediate antecedent for my “we,” is those of us on campus, and especially the faculty.
Note: Every "we" implies a "them," of course, and the ways we define and conceive of that "them" points to one of the primary problems of the contemporary university, and especially public universities in the US. These institutions were founded explicitly to serve the people of their states or regions or communities, and thus those publics should be understood as part of "us." And yet, the borders of the campus have done more than define a space; they determine a sense of belonging as well, transforming everything off-campus into "them," a generalized other that at times gets imagined to be the audience for our performances, a passive group that takes in information we provide. What might it mean if we understood them as a complex collection of communities -- not just groups who interact with one another and with us, but groups of which we are in fact a part? How might this lead to a richer sense not just of "them" but of the "us" that we together form?
Note: We talk a lot, after all, about community on campus, both about community engagement and about the university itself as a community, but we don't talk a lot 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. "Community" in the singular—"the community"—also runs the risk of becoming a disciplinary force, a declaration of groupness that is designed to produce the "us" that inevitably suggests a "them."
Note: If we are able to understand community instead as multiple and multifarious, as shifting entities that serve strategic purposes, we might be able to think of community as an activity, a practice of solidarity, a process of coalition-building. And this sense of solidarity is a key part of the university's recent past, one of the important elements of its history that has been undone by recent political shifts. As Roderick Ferguson has detailed, the student-led calls for institutional change in the 1960s and 1970s in many ways focused on the potential that the university held -- and failed to meet -- for connecting with the communities around it. Instead, our institutions have 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 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 be built.
Note: However, in building those relationships, we have to contend with the fact that what faculty members actually do on our campuses is often a mystery, and indeed a site of profound misunderstanding, for people outside the academic profession, and even at times for one another. One of the key areas of misunderstanding, and one that most needs opening up, is the fundamental purpose of higher education. Public figures such as politicians increasingly discuss colleges and universities as sites of workforce preparation, making it seem as if the provision of career-enhancing credentials were the sole purpose for which our institutions exist, and as if everything else they do that does not lead directly to economic growth were a misappropriation of resources. Those of us who work on campus, however, understand our institutions not as credentialing agencies but as sites of broad-based education: a “liberal” education in the original sense of the term. Of course the very term "liberal education," so natural to those of us who are engaged in it, has itself become profoundly politicized, as if the liberal aspect of higher education were not its breadth but its ideological bent. So we see, for instance, Colorado stripping the term out of official university documents. But even where the concept of liberal education isn't imagined to be a cover for some revolution we're fomenting on campus, there’s a widespread misconception about it that’s almost worse: it is a mode of education in which we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students’ heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path.
Note: And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities. The portrait I’m about to sketch of the humanities today could be extended to many other areas within the curriculum—for example, the sciences’ focus on “basic science,” or science without direct industry applicability, is often imagined to be just as frivolous. But the humanities—the study of literature, history, art, philosophy, and other forms of culture—are in certain ways both the core and the limit case of the liberal arts. The humanities cultivate an inquisitive mindset, they teach key skills of reading and interpretation, and they focus on writing in ways that can prepare a student to learn absolutely anything else over the course of their lives—and yet they are the fields around which no end of hilarious jokes about what a student might actually do with that degree have been constructed. (The answer, of course: absolutely anything. As a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes clear, not only do humanities majors wind up gainfully employed, but they also wind up happy. But I digress.) The key thing to note is that the humanities serve as a bellwether of sorts: what has been happening to them is happening to higher education in general, if a little more slowly. So while I focus a bit on the kinds of arguments that are being made about the humanities in our culture today, it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to imagine them being made about sociology, or about physics, or about any other field on campus that isn’t named after a specific, well-paying career.
Note: The humanities, in any case, have long been lauded as providing students with a rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills with which they can engage the world around them. These skills are increasingly necessary in today’s hypermediated, globalized, conflict-filled world—and yet many humanities departments feel themselves increasingly marginalized within their own institutions. This marginalization is related, if not directly attributable, to the degree to which students, parents, administrators, trustees, politicians, the media, and the public at large have been led in a self-reinforcing cycle to believe that the skills these fields provide are useless in the current economic environment. Someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about all those English majors working at Starbucks; commentators reinforce the sense that humanities majors are worth less than pre-professional degrees; parents strongly encourage their students to turn toward pragmatic fields that seem somehow to describe a job; administrators note a decline in humanities majors and cut budgets and positions; the jobs crisis for humanities PhDs worsens; someone particularly visible makes a publicly disparaging remark about what all those adjuncts were planning on doing with that humanities PhD anyhow; and the whole thing intensifies. In many institutions, this draining away of majors and faculty and resources has reduced the humanities to a means of ensuring that students studying to become engineers and bankers are reminded of the human ends of their work. This is not a terrible thing in and of itself, but it is not a sufficient ground on which humanities fields can do their best work for the institution.
Note: And while this kind of cyclical crisis has not manifested to anything like the same extent in the sciences, there are early indications that it may be spreading in that direction. Where once the world at large seemed mostly to understand that scientific research, and the kinds of study that support it, are crucial to the general advancement of knowledge, recent shifts in funder policies and priorities suggest a growing scrutiny of that work’s economic rather than educational impact, as well as a growing restriction on research areas that have been heavily politicized. The humanities, again, may well be the canary in the higher education coal mine, and for that reason, it’s crucial that we pay close attention to what’s happened in those fields, and particularly to the things that haven’t worked as the humanities have attempted to remedy the situation.
Note: One of the key things that hasn’t worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defenses of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy have been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which have had the desired impact. Calls to save the humanities issued by public figures have frequently left scholars annoyed, as they often begin with a somewhat retrograde sense of what we do and why, and thus frequently give the sense of trying to save our fields from us. (One might see, for instance, a column published in 2016 by the former chairman of the NEH, Bruce Cole, entitled “What’s Wrong with the Humanities?”, which begins memorably:
“Let’s face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.” —Bruce Cole
Note: “Let’s face it: Too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.”) But perhaps even worse is the degree to which humanities professors themselves—those one would think best positioned to make the case—have failed to find traction with their arguments. As the unsuccessful defenses proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worse,
“Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them." —Simon During
Note: leading Simon During to grumble that “Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them.” And maybe we like it that way, as we are often those who take issue with our own defenses, bitterly disagreeing as we frequently do about the purposes and practices of our fields.
Note: Perhaps this is a good moment for us to stop and consider what it is that the humanities do do well, what the humanities are for. I will start with a basic definition of the humanities as a cluster of fields that focus on the careful study and analysis of cultures and their many modes of thought and forms of representation—writing, music, art, media, and so on—as they have developed and moved through time and across geographical boundaries, growing out of and adding to our senses of who we are as individuals, as groups, and as nations. The humanities are interested, then, in the ways that representations work, in the relationships between representations and social structures, in all the ways that human ideas and their expression shape and are shaped by human culture. In this definition we might begin to see the possibility that studying literature or history or art or film or philosophy might not be solely about the object itself, but instead about a way of engaging with the world: in the process we develop the ability to read and interpret what we see and hear, the insight to understand the multiple layers of what is being communicated and why, and the capacity to put together for ourselves an appropriate, thoughtful contribution.
Note: Now, the first thing to note about this definition is that I am certain that many humanities scholars who hear it will disagree with it—they will have nuances and correctives to offer—and it is important to understand that this disagreement does not necessarily mean that my definition is wrong. Nor, however, do I mean to suggest that the nuances and correctives presented would be wrong. Rather, that form of disagreement is at the heart of how we do what we do: we hear one another’s interpretations (of texts, of performances, of historical events) and we push back against them. We advance the work in our field through disagreement and revision. This agonistic approach, however, is both a strength of the humanities—and by extension of the university in general—and its Achilles’ heel, a thought to which I’ll return shortly.
Note: For the moment, though, back to Simon During and his sense that the humanities are terrible at self-promotion. During’s complaint, levied at the essays included in Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewitt’s volume, The Humanities and Public Life, is largely that, in the act of self-defense, humanities scholars leave behind doing what they do and instead turn to “sermonizing” (his word) about the value of what they do. He argues that part of the problem is the assumption that the humanities as we practice them ought to have a public life in the first place. He winds up suggesting that we should continue to ensure that there is sufficient state support for the humanities so that students who do not already occupy a position of financial comfort can study our fields, but that we should not stretch beyond that point, arguing for the public importance of studying the humanities, because that importance is primarily, overwhelmingly, private.
Note: This sense that education in the humanities is of primarily private value is everywhere in today’s popular discourse extended to higher education in general: the purpose, we are told, of a college degree is some form of personal enrichment, whether financial or otherwise, rather than a social good. This privatization of higher education’s benefits—part of the general privatization that Chris Newfield has referred to as the academy’s “great mistake”—has been accompanied by a similar shift in its costs from the state to individual families and students, resulting in the downward spiral in funding and other forms of public support in which our institutions and our fields are caught, as well as the astronomically increasing debt load faced by students and their families. As long as a university education is assumed to have a predominantly personal rather than social benefit, it will be argued that making such an education possible is a private rather than a public responsibility. And that mindset will of necessity lead to the devaluation of fields whose benefits are less immediately tangible, less material, less individual. If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.
Note: But what is that public good? We don’t do a terribly good job of articulating these things. In fact, despite the role so many of us have as professors, we often seem to have a hard time professing, describing what we do and arguing on behalf of the values that sustain our work. It’s hard to express our values without recourse to what feel to us like politically regressive, universalizing master narratives about the nature of the good that have long been used as means of solidifying and perpetuating the social order, with all its injustices and exclusions. And so instead of stating clearly and passionately the ethics and values and goals that we bring to our work, we critique. We protect ourselves with what Lisa Ruddick has described as “the game of academic cool”: in order to avoid appearing naïve—or worse, complicit—we complicate; we argue; we read against the grain.
Note: This mode of critique gets mistaken in public discourse for being primarily ideological in intent and effect; this is how our universities come to be accused of “brainwashing” their students, filling their heads with leftist rejections of the basic goodness of the dominant western culture. On campus, we know that’s not the case. The political and social commitments behind much of our work are real, and crucial, but even our most critical reading practices turn out to be perfectly compatible with the contemporary political landscape. In fact, I would argue that our critiques of contemporary culture do not simply surface out of our social commitments. Rather, they surface not just despite but because of the conservative-leaning systems and structures in which the university as a whole, and each of us as a result, is mired. Our tendency to read against the grain is part of our makeup precisely because of the ways that we are ourselves subject to politics rather than being able to stand outside and neutrally analyze the political. The politics we are subject to structures all institutions in the contemporary United States, and perhaps especially universities, a politics that makes inevitable the critical, the negative, the rejection of everything that has gone before. It is a politics structured around competition, and what historian Winfried Fluck has referred to as the race for individual distinction.
Note: However much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the neoliberal mainstream, our working lives—on campus and off—are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. Beginning with college applications, extending through graduate school admissions, fellowship applications, the job market, publication submissions, and, seemingly finally, the tenure and promotion review, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which applicants are measured, and the best—whatever that might mean in a given context—are rewarded. In actual practice, however, those metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another. Always, in the unconscious of the profession, there is competition: for positions, for resources, for acclaim. And the drive to compete that this mode of being instills in us can’t ever be fully contained by these specific processes; it bleeds out into all areas of the ways we work, even when we’re working together. The competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed individually, with the result that even those fields whose advancement depends most on team-based efforts are required to develop careful guidelines for establishing credit and priority.
Note: This competitive individualism contradicts—and in fact undermines—all of the most important communal aspects of life within our institutions of higher education. Our principles of shared governance, for instance, are built on the notion that universities best operate as collectives, in which all members contribute to their direction and functioning, but in actual practice, our all-too-clear understanding that service to the institution will not count when faculty are evaluated and ranked for salary increases and promotions encourages us to avoid that labor, to reserve our time and energy for those aspects of our work that will enable our individual achievement. The results are not good for any of us: faculty disengage from the functioning of the institution and the shared purposes that it serves, while university governance becomes increasingly managed by administrators, ostensibly freeing the faculty up to focus on the competitive work that will allow us as individuals and our universities as institutions to climb the rankings. This is no way to run a collective. It’s also no way to structure a fulfilling life: this disengagement from community and race for individual distinction is a key factor in the extremely high risk of burnout among college faculty and other intellectual workers. It is all but impossible for us to structure our lives around the things that are most in line with our deepest personal values when we are driven to focus on those things that will allow us to compare ourselves—or our institutions—favorably with one another. This individualistic, competitive requirement is inseparable from the privatization that Newfield describes as the political unconscious of the contemporary university. Competition and the race for individual distinction structure the growing conviction that not only the benefits of higher education but also all of our categories of success can only ever be personal, private, individual rather than social. And no amount of trying to persuade ourselves, or our administrations, or our legislatures of the public good that we, our fields, and our institutions serve will take root unless we figure out how to step off the competitive track, to insist upon living our academic lives another way.
Note: Worse, scholars’ internalization of the individualistic imperative to compete has provided an inroad into higher education for some forces that are hastening its disintegration. Bill Readings, in The University in Ruins, powerfully traces the transition of the purposes of higher education from the propagation of the culture of the nation-state and the training of its citizens therein, through an important period of resistance and protest that did the crucial work of opening up both access to higher education and the canon that it taught, to its current role, which seems to be the production of value (both intellectual and human) for global capital. This is to say that many of our critiques of our fields and our institutions are well-founded: they were developed in order to cultivate a particular model of citizenship based on exclusion and oppression and focused on the reproduction of state power. The problem is that in the absence of such a clear if problematic goal, the purpose of higher education has drifted. As in so many other areas of the contemporary public world, where the state has lost authority, corporate interests have interceded; the university may no longer promote exclusion and oppression in training state citizens, but it reinstantiates it in a new guise by turning to training corporate citizens. Even worse, rejecting or critiquing that purpose is simply not working: not only is capital extraordinarily able to absorb all critique and to marginalize those who make it, but our inability to stop competing with one another ensures that our critique is contained within the forces of the market that we serve. Perhaps we might have reached, as Rita Felski suggests, the limits of critique; perhaps we might need to adopt a new mode of approach in order to make a dent in the systems that hem us in.
Note: But that is not to say that I am rejecting critique, or critical thinking. Critical thinking is at the heart of what scholars do. Not only would we be justified in rejecting any suggestion that we abandon it, or abandon the commitments that underwrite it, in favor of an approach that might be more friendly, but we’d also be well within reason if we were to point out that the critique of critique is still critique, that it makes use of criticism’s negative mode in the very act of negating it. Moreover, the critique of critique is too often driven either by a disdain for difficulty or by a rejection of the political in scholarly work.
Note: I want to suggest, however, that though these rejections and dismissals undoubtedly lie behind the calls for comprehensibility and the return to tradition in our work—see again Bruce Cole—they aren’t the only things there. These calls may be at least in part a sign of the degree to which people care about our subject matter, about literature or history or art. They might indicate the degree to which people want on some level to engage with us, and the ways they feel rejected by us. There is grave political opposition to much of the work that is done on our college campuses today, and I do not at all wish to dismiss the threat that opposition can pose, but I also want to suggest that even that glimmer of care for our subject matter creates the opportunity, if we take it seriously, to create forms of connection and dialogue that might help further rather than stymie the work that we do.
Note: Some of my thinking about ways that attention to such care might encourage scholars to approach the work that we do from a slightly different perspective has developed out of a talk I heard a couple of years ago by David Scobey, then the dean of the New School for Public Engagement. His suggestion was that scholarly work in the humanities is in a kind of imbalance, that critical thinking has dominated at the expense of a more socially-directed mode of what he called “generous thinking,” and that a recalibration of the balance between the two might enable us to make possible a greater public commitment in our work, which in turn might inspire a greater public commitment to our work. My project, having drawn its title from Scobey, obviously builds on his argument, but with one key revision: generous thinking is not and should not be opposed to critical thinking. In fact, the two should be fully aligned, and my hope is to help guide us toward modes of working that allow us to more fruitfully connect the generous and the critical in scholarly work. Rather, the dark opposite of generous thinking, that which has in fact created an imbalance in scholarly work is competitive thinking, thinking that is compelled by what sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen called invidious comparison, or what Fluck refers to as the race for professional distinction. It is the competitive that has undermined the capacity for coalition-building, both within our campuses and between our campuses and the broader public. Entirely new discussions, new relationships, new projects might be possible if our critical thinking practices refused competition and were instead grounded in generosity.
Note: What is it I mean when I talk about generosity in this context? The book spends much more time exploring this question, but for the moment: what I’m hoping to develop, in myself most of all, is a generosity of mind, an openness to possibility. That openness begins for me by trying to develop a listening presence in the world, which is to say a conversational disposition that is not merely waiting for my next opportunity to speak but instead genuinely focusing on what is being said, beginning from the assumption that in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn. Generous thinking also means working to think with rather than against, whether the objects of those prepositions are texts or people. It means starting an encounter with a text or an idea with yes rather than no, with and rather than but. Yes, and creates the possibility for genuine dialogue, not only among academic colleagues but with our objects of study, our predecessors, and the many potential publics that surround us. Yes, and requires us to step away from competition, from the race for professional distinction; when we allow ourselves to linger in yes, and, we create the possibility of working together to build something entirely new.
Note: This mode of generous thinking is already instantiated in many projects that focus on fostering public engagement in and through the work done in colleges and universities. Public projects like these are well-established on many campuses around the country and in many fields across the curriculum. But one key aspect of understanding generosity as the ground from which the work of the university can and should grow is the requirement that all of us take such public projects just as seriously as the more traditional forms of scholarly work that circulate amongst ourselves. Scholars working in public history, just as one example, have some important stories to tell about the difficulties they have faced in getting work in that field appropriately evaluated and credited as scholarship. And a few years ago, after a talk in which a well-respected scholar discussed the expanding possibilities for careers in the public humanities, I overheard a senior scholar say with some bemusement, “I take the point, but I don’t think it works in all fields. There’s long been a ‘public history.’ But can you imagine a ‘public literary criticism’?” His interlocutor chortled bemusedly: the very idea. But the world has long been filled with public literary criticism, from public reading projects to book reviews to fan production, modes of literary work that reach out to non-specialist audiences and draw them into the kinds of interpretation and analysis that we profess.
Note: Resistance to taking such public projects as seriously as the work we do for one another—according them the same kinds of credit and prestige as traditional publications—speaks to one of two things: first, our anxieties (and they are very real) about deprofessionalization; and second, to our continued (and I would argue profoundly misguided) division and ordering of the various categories to which academic labor is committed, with a completely distinct category called “service” almost inevitably coming in a distant third behind research and teaching. Grounding our work in a spirit of generosity might lead us to erase some of the boundaries between the work that faculty do to support the engagements of readers and instructors both inside and outside the academy, and the work that we consider to be genuinely “scholarly.” A proper valuation of public engagement in scholarly life, however, will require a systemic rethinking of the role that prestige plays in the academic reward system—and this, as I discuss late in the book, is no small task. It is, however, crucial to a renewed understanding of the relationship between the university and the public good.
Note: Similarly, grounding our work in generous thinking might not only encourage us to adopt a position of greater openness to dialogue with our communities, and might not only foster projects that are more publicly engaged, but it might also lead us to place a greater emphasis on—and to attribute a greater value to—collaboration in academic life. It might encourage us to support and value various means of working in the open, of sharing our writing at more and earlier stages in the process of its development, and of making the results of our research more readily accessible to and usable by more readers. Scholarly work often presupposes a deep knowledge of a subject, not just on the part of the speaker but of the listener as well, and at its most competitive can forbid engagement by all but a select few. Generous, generative modes of critical thinking might invite others into our discussions as they develop, bringing them along in the process of discovery.
Note: But I want to acknowledge that adopting a mode of generous thinking is a task that is simultaneously extremely difficult and easily dismissible. We are accustomed to finding “smart” ways of thinking that rebut, that question, that complicate. The kinds of listening and openness for which I am here advocating may well be taken as acceding to a form of cultural naïveté at best, or worse, a politically regressive knuckling-under to the pressures of contemporary ideologies and institutions. I want to suggest, however, that in embracing competitive modes of "smartness" we are already well within the grip of the neoliberal order, and at great cost -- not only to individual scholars in setting a course toward stress-related burnout, but to scholars collectively in undermining our ability to understand ourselves as a community, one capable of disagreeing profoundly and yet still coming together in solidarity to argue for our collective interests. What might become possible for us if we were to retain the social commitment that motivates our critical work while stepping off the field of competition, opening ourselves and our work to its many potential connections and conversations?
Note: Such an opening would require us to place ourselves in a new relationship to our objects of study and their many audiences; we would need to be prepared to listen to what they have to tell us, to ask questions that are designed to elicit more about their interests than about ours. That is to say, we would need to open ourselves to the possibility that our ideas might turn out to be wrong. This, it may not surprise you to hear, is an alarming possibility not just for most scholars but for most human beings to countenance, but given what Kathryn Schulz has called the “Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything,” it is all but certain that at some future moment our own blind spots, biases, and points of general ignorance will have been uncovered. But there's good news in this: if everything we write today already bears within it a future anterior in which it will have been demonstrated to be wrong-headed, there opens up the chance to explore a new path, one along which we develop not just a form of critical audacity but also a kind of critical humility.
Note: Critical humility is one key to generous thinking. In the early days of working on this project, I gave an invited talk in which I tested out some of its core ideas. In the question-and-answer period 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. This tension was powerfully illustrated for me in a series of tweets from April Hathcock, a scholarly communications librarian who was recently engaged in establishing a new working group in her field. As the members of that working group laid out their expectations and norms for one another, one member offered “assume positive intent”: be generous, in other words, in interpreting the behavior and words of others. Hathcock insisted that this expectation be accompanied by another: “own negative effects.”
"Assume positive intent; own negative effects." —April Hathcock
Note: That is to say, we must not only refrain from assuming that everyone else is in the wrong, but we also must remain open to the very real possibility that we might be. This is generosity accompanied by critical humility, a mode that creates space for genuinely listening to the ideas and experiences of others, even when they contradict or critique our own. // It is probably unnecessary to point out that critical humility is neither selected for nor encouraged in the academy, and it is certainly not cultivated in graduate school. Quite the opposite, at least in my experience: everything in the environment of the seminar room makes flirting with being wrong unthinkable. A real critical humility—stepping outside competition and into generosity—can open up new space for discovery, but only if we are free to let go, just a tiny bit, of the necessity of being right.
Note: The possibility of being wrong is not the only area of discomfort that foregrounding generosity in our thinking might expose us to, however. In turning away from the competitive, we might be asked to shed the adopted position of the neutral, impartial, critical observer and instead become full participants in the work and world around us. This might mean being able to more readily and wholeheartedly profess our feelings for our subject matter without fear of sounding naïve or hokey, but it might also mean opening ourselves to more communal experiences of other emotions as well, some of them ours, and some of them directed at us: anxiety, fear, anger. Genuine generosity as I intend it is not a feel-good emotion, but an at times painful, failure-filled process of what Dominick LaCapra has referred to as “empathic unsettlement,” which asks us to open ourselves to difference as fully as possible without trying to tamp it down into bland “understanding.” This kind of ethical engagement can be a hallmark of the university, if we open ourselves and our institutions to the opportunities that genuinely being in community might create.
Note: So what if—and this flurry should be taken as a series of genuinely open rather than rhetorical questions—what if the university’s values and commitments made it possible for those of us who work on campus to develop a new understanding of how expertise is structured and how it functions, an understanding focused just a bit less on individual achievement, on invidious distinction? What if the expertise that the university cultivated were at its root connected to building forms of collectivity, solidarity, and community both on campus and off? What if the communities around the campus were invited to be part of these processes? How might we work together to break down the us-and-them divide between campus and public and instead create a richer, more complex sense of the connections among all of us? What kinds of public support for institutions of higher education might we be able to generate if we were able to argue persuasively on behalf of using scholarly work to cultivate community, of understanding ourselves in service to that community, while refusing to allow our administrations, our institutions, and our governments to lose sight of the fact that such service is a form of labor that is crucial to the future that we all share? What new purposes for the university might we imagine if we understand its role to be not inculcating state citizens, nor training corporate citizens, but instead facilitating the development of diverse, open communities—both on their campuses and across their borders—encouraged to think together, to be involved in the ongoing project of how we understand and shape our world?
Note: All of these possibilities that we open up—engaging perspectives other than our own, valuing the productions and manifestations of our multifarious culture, encountering the other in all its irreducible otherness—are the best of what the university can offer to the world. And all of these possibilities begin with cultivating the ability to think generously, to listen—to our subject matter, to our communities, to ourselves. There is much more to say, obviously—a whole book’s worth—but this listening presence, in which I am willing to countenance the possibility that I just might be wrong, is where I will now leave myself, ready to listen to you.