Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
Goethe University Frankfurt
16 November 2021
Note: I want to start today by thanking Tim for inviting me to talk with you. I'm delighted to have this opportunity.
Note: Much of what I have to say today grows out of the work I did in Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require regrounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as "generous thinking," focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. And a key component of that work lies in recovering the public nature of that work by rejecting the privatization that has overtaken our campuses -- not least through the information systems that we invest in and deploy.
Note: The 'radical approach' part of my book's subtitle grows out of my sense that the necessary changes in front of us are HUGE, that they can't be made incrementally, that they instead require -- 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
Note: "This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The problem for the university, after all, begins with politics: the institutions that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, have been utterly undone. We face 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 the impact of individualism across our culture has similarly undermined the possibilities for collective action in a wide range of fields. In Generous Thinking, I ask the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, by returning its attention to the publics, and the public good, that it is intended to serve. And though I'm certain I'm preaching to the choir in much of this talk, I'm focused on that same message here today. Because however committed you as individuals are to the collective project that Apereo represents, most of you still work in institutions whose priorities and reward structures may not align with your own. And those reward structures must be changed.
http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W950N35
Note: This is the conclusion reached by a study by Juan Alperin and his colleagues entitled "How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?" The answer? Not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, "institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work toward systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized." If the university is going to work toward the public good, that work has got to be rewarded -- and yet the current structure of higher education, the paradigm within which it operates, leaves such collaborative, community-oriented work un- or under-rewarded.
Note: This problem first became painfully clear to me at a meeting of university libraries and the university presses that reported up through them. The meeting was keynoted by the highly distinguished provost of a large state research university, and it was an extraordinary talk. He described his campus's efforts to embrace a renewed mission of public service, and he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty's work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university's singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self-interested. Can opening our research up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk, both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or, I should say, it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised.
Note: And then it was as though someone had dimmed the lights: we heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest-ranked venues. Frustrated by that shift, I asked the provost during the question-and-answer period what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus, from the provost through the deans, chairs, and faculty, in a collective project of revising -- really, reimagining -- all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good? What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university's core service mission? The provost's response was, more or less, that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness within its institutional cohort.
Note: To say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was if nothing else honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road, and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service, and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched if unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually arranged today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated mission and values may mean that the institutions have not in fact fully embraced that mission or those values. Or perhaps it's that there is a shadow mission -- competition -- that excludes the possibility of that full alignment.
Note: The worst of it, and the single fact that Generous Thinking was most driven by, is that the provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered -- from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press -- to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. Any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. What Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to "compete all the time" forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it impossible for them to take any other approach.
Note: But while we have been trapped for the last several decades in this mode of inter-institutional competition, higher education as a sector has been facing what Inside Higher Ed described as "a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period." This falling confidence cannot be simply dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life -- though that is undoubtedly there. Rather, this decline in confidence in higher education should ask us to contemplate what we believe higher education is for, and why the paradigm under which our institutions largely operate -- in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge -- has been in such a protracted conflict with the paradigm under which our function is understood in the broader culture, as a producer and disseminator of market-oriented credentials. Even more -- especially at a moment such as we are experiencing today -- it should make us consider whether in fact both of those paradigms are failing, and why.
Note: As Thomas Kuhn noted in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the failure of a scientific paradigm, as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account, throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely, one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the "period of pronounced professional insecurity" that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift, the cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. There is in 2020 zero question that cataclysm is all around us. My argument is that we must rethink our purpose and functioning altogether if we are to discover that new paradigm that allows higher education as we want it to be to survive.
Note: Generous Thinking explores this problem from a number of different angles, asking all of us who care about the future of higher education -- faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more -- to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit, grounded in all of the competition that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education, to instead open the gates and focus on the university's role in building community.
Note: But my colleagues and I have also been trying to think through this problem in a more pragmatic, applied for through Humanities Commons, a non-profit, community-developed and governed network serving humanities scholars and organizations. Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of Generous Thinking: first, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what we do; and second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them, restoring service to the public good not just to their mission statements but to the heart of their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation -- even among those universities that we call "private" -- can allow us to build the kind of community that can sustain them.
Note: And part of resisting privatization, for both scholars and their institutions, involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent, and instead reserving our investments, and our labor, for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. This is true of a wide range of systems and platforms on which higher education relies, but perhaps nowhere has it become more pressing than in thinking about scholarly communication, both because these are the mechanisms through which the work of the academy is made public and because these are the systems that have been most deeply privatized at the direct expense of the academy. We -- libraries, publishers, and scholars -- need collectively to turn our attention to developing the shared, publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing, modes that might help higher education re-engage with the public good. But developing this form of collaborative, community-supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it, and the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable.
Note: And we need to think about these platforms precisely because of the extent to which the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery, data gathering and analysis, through writing, submission, and publishing, to dissemination, evaluation, and reporting, is increasingly concentrated in a very limited number of corporate hands.
Note: Though the issues that I'm discussing long predate this particular moment, the risk they posed came into stark visibility in August 2017, when bepress announced that it had been purchased by the RELX Group, the multi-national parent company of publishing behemoth Elsevier. Bepress had of course been founded in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open-access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. Bepress thus grew out of the academy, and was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at its heart.
Note: As the bepress website notes, over 500 institutions have purchased bepress services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly-accessible ways. And in one fell swoop, these 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing behemoths such as Elsevier.
Note: What had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure -- built and run by academics, for the academic community -- appeared to have been turned on that community. It's not as though anyone had been unaware that bepress was a commercial service all along, but they were one of the good guys, and the costs of outsourcing infrastructural needs to them had been balanced against the often impossible task of maintaining locally hosted repository and publishing systems. Bepress provided what many saw as best-of-breed functionality at a reasonable price, and it supported libraries' desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world.
Note: But the acquisition of bepress by RELX not only put libraries in the position of unintentionally supporting a growing corporate control not just of scholarly publishing but of the entirety of the research workflow, from discovery through production to communication; it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely in promoting greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. As a result, serious conversations have since focused on means of supporting open-source, academy-owned and -controlled infrastructure.
Note: This is not an impossible move, by any stretch, but it's harder than it might sound. Long-standing open-access, open-infrastructure projects like arXiv might suggest some possible areas of concern.
Note: By every reasonable measure, arXiv has been exemplary -- in its uptake, in its independence, and in the ways that it has helped to transform the fields that it serves. But in some crucial ways, arXiv has experienced what can only be called "catastrophic success" -- a crucial, paradigm-shifting project whose growing annual operating costs and mounting infrastructural requirements have demanded increasingly creative mechanisms for the platform's support.
Note: So in 2010, the arXiv team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource. But our institutions, as we unfortunately know, are largely unaccustomed to this work of cross-institutional collaboration. For one thing, they're far more prone to understand such resources as terrain for competition, and for another, the community-building required becomes yet another form of labor added on top of maintaining the resources themselves.
Note: I do not know the extent to which such difficulties may have played a role in arXiv's 2019 move from the Library to Cornell Computing and Information Science. It's entirely likely that the move is a matter of infrastructural pragmatics. But even so, the challenges of maintaining the kind of cross-institutional coalition necessary to sustain such a crucial resource remain.
Note: Another example, with a different narrative, might be found in the Samvera project. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories rely, developers at a number of institutions have come together to create a collective solution. As the proverb and their website have it, if you want to go far, go together.
Note: But this distributed developer community, like all such communities, has faced some challenges in coordination, challenges that have caused it, as the proverb also reminds us, to go more slowly than it might. It has also run the risk of fragmenting project priorities. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers involved in the project but of the institutions for which the developers actually work is not a simple matter.
Note: The foundation of the challenges that arXiv and Samvera have faced is the same challenge faced by any number of other projects and programs and initiatives: sustainability. This is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late, as my colleagues and I have been working to ensure that Humanities Commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And those attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point; they too would like to see the network thrive, but they cannot support it indefinitely. We need, they reasonably suggest, a plan for demonstrating that the network will, at some point in the future, be able to support itself.
Note: Sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models, in business plans, in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a non-profit entity forever tied to kinds of economic concerns that are very often divergent from, if not at odds with, the non-profit's primary mission. As a result, these non-profits remain forever precarious; one small miscalculation can make the difference between survival and collapse.
Note: But sustainability broadly understood extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed -- or more waste produced -- than can be developed or managed in the near term.
Note: There's technological sustainability, in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects' future stability and growth.
Note: All of these forms of sustainability are important, to varying degrees, to providing for the future of non-profit and open-source projects. But there's another form that gets a good bit less attention, and that I increasingly think precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability: social sustainability. The social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, but to the determination of those people to support their groupness; not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but to their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Ensuring that these commitments are sustained is, I increasingly think, a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward.
Note: This notion -- of the role of "community" in community-supported software, and of the best ways of building and sustaining it -- raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. In an early chapter in Generous Thinking, I explore Miranda Joseph's argument that "community" is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life. In this sense, "community" becomes a relief valve of sorts for those structures, a way of mitigating the damage that they do. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network–based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises, rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education. "Community" becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.
Note: However, if we recognize that the communities that we form both on campus and off can be crucial organizing tools, ways of ensuring that our institutions meet their public obligations, we might start to think of the call to community as a form of coalition-building, of a developing solidarity. Solidarity itself is a concept that's been challenged, of course; there are important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom, and for whom. Women of color, for instance, have pointed out the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests. But I remain convinced that institutions of higher education must embrace forms of solidarity that do not demand that individuals seeking redress for institutionalized injustices drop their own issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those individuals are all of our issues too. This form of solidarity asks us to stand together in support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this form of solidarity, I am increasingly convinced, is a necessary prerequisite for successful, sustainable development of non-profit, open-source, community-owned networks and platforms.
Note: What's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom was the first female Nobel laureate in economics and remained until 2019 the only female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common-pool resource management; she argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place.
Note: It's important first to focus in a bit on what is meant by the notion of common-pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable -- whether individuals can be prevented from using them -- and whether they are rivalrous -- whether one individual's use precludes another's. Public goods are those resources that are both nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be prevented from using them and that no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous; they can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability to another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but nonrivalrous, those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are nonexcludable but rivalrous are often described as common-pool resources: it is these goods to which the "tragedy of the commons" -- the overuse of shared natural resources -- can apply.
Note: At the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the "free-rider problem," which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly-held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization.
Note: But as Ostrom argued in her 1990 book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, this model -- like other such models as the prisoner's dilemma -- was based on a particular, and particularly pessimistic, view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor.
What makes these models so dangerous -- when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy -- is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.... I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies. -- Elinor Ostrom
Note: READ SLIDE; Ostrom's work thus explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly-held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources, such as fisheries, the problems she described, and the potential solutions she explored, have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the non-profit, community-developed, academy-owned software projects -- like arXiv, like Samvera, like Humanities Commons -- on which they should be able to rely.
Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem: there is often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence.
Note: Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic: eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is, in many cases, the problem that community-developed projects were developed to evade. So as with Ostrom's fishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving.
Note: So in summer 2018, Brett Bobley tweeted a question about ways of sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Cayless --
Note: -- noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining such projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in Generous Thinking, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor but -- most challengingly -- that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements.
Note: Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions, and they need accordingly to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.
Note: But getting institutions to stop competing with one another and start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. The privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market-oriented, competition-based approach to everything the institution does. Making the argument that this approach must be set aside, is a huge part of what I've tried to do in Generous Thinking, and it's a huge part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons.
Note: The project began its life at the Modern Language Association. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 to provide members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching the platform, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with colleagues in other areas in the humanities, so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields.
Note: With further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons sites developed for several other society partners. But beyond these proprietary sites, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work, and so we made the decision to open the network's hub to anyone who wants to join -- across the disciplines, around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership.
Note: All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites, and they can deposit and share their work in the network's open-access repository. This fusion of a social network with a library-quality repository (adhering to commonly accepted metadata standards, employing digital object identifiers, and so on) means that not only is stuff being put into the repository, and not only can that stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used, as there's a community there with which it can be shared.
Note: But while fully opening the Humanities Commons hub to free participation by any interested scholar or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use -- three and a half years later, we have over 21,000 registered users -- it has created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. It's understandable, as they need to provide such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms Humanities Commons from a common-pool resource into a club good, one whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the network if it were an exclusive service see the openness of the hub as diminishing the network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests.
Note: So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the network, but that the network belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common-pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success.
Note: So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure -- and for the academy itself -- lies. And it's of course where your work in the various Apereo communities lies: your institutions may of course have different structures, different requirements, different needs. And yet you share the same goals: the development, distribution, and preservation of new forms of knowledge. That you are all here together, looking for ways to meet your shared goals despite your different local needs gives me hope.
Note: It's a key form of generosity, and one that more units on our campuses, and more institutions in their engagements with one another need to embrace. Because the bottom line is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not other institutions of higher education, not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather, it is the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. If we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university, we're going to have to do together, acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward the other units within our institutions, toward the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected, and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community-supported infrastructure, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
Note: Thanks so much.