Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
#OpenEd21
19 October 2021
Note: I want to start today by thanking Regina for inviting me to talk with you and Nicole Allen and the rest of the OpenEd team for making it possible. I'm delighted to have this opportunity to get to share this session with Leslie and to talk a bit with you about a few issues that have been worrying me with respect to the present course of higher education, as well as what my colleagues and I have been trying to do about it.
mlive.com
Note: All of this starts, alas, with economics, and the lock it has on contemporary ideas about the public good. In June 2021, an independent economic group released a report indicating that the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University together boosted the state economy by $19.3 billion in 2019 -- a figure that they went on to note is more than 20 times the funding provided to them by the state. This is an extraordinary report, which confirms what we all know: public research universities are crucial contributors to the economic well-being of their communities. Our universities not only conduct the research and development that leads to new business opportunities in the state, but they also build an educated workforce ready to take on the challenges our communities face now and into the future.
This is great news, and it's particularly great to have numbers that can be used in arguments about the value of public investment in institutions of higher education, especially at a moment when relationships between legislatures and boards of trustees and universities are strained. But I want to spend a bit of time today talking about why reports like this make me nervous. It may sound odd, but frankly it's because they do too good a job of tying the public vision of the value of the university to its economic impact, and in the process they inadvertently run the risk of undermining the purpose of the university as a broad service to the public rather than an engine of economic growth, and thus the ways that investments in the non-money-making parts of the university pay off in the public good.
unsplash.com/@m_b_m
Note: In other words, the danger of a report like this one, as positive as its results are, is that it speaks to a particular mindset in American culture that is primed to hear it, with the result that it completely overshadows all of the good that the university does in areas other than the economic. That focus on economic impact may be fine in good times, when taxpayers and legislators feel like they can afford to invest in a broad range of kinds of exploration and education on campus. But in bad times, when budgets are tight and jobs are scarce, many begin to look at those kinds of exploration that don't have obvious or direct economic benefits as "luxuries," as frivolous, as extraneous to the institution's mission -- precisely because the institution's mission, and the public good that it serves, have come to be wholly tied to ideas about economic growth.
There is, in other words, a deeply ingrained mindset in American culture that lends itself to the assumption that economic development -- both at the social level and at the individual level -- is the primary good that the university can and should serve. This is a mindset that I would love to see us work on changing. It has its underpinnings in our faith in the extraordinary creative potential unleashed by capitalism, but it leads to the assumption that all of the problems in the contemporary world can and should be approached through market-based solutions.
Note: This tight focus on the market as the telos of contemporary life is often discussed under the umbrella of "neoliberalism" on campus. "Neoliberalism" is admittedly one of those terms that has been so relentlessly misunderstood and misused that it's become a kind of caricature, an empty critique with all the force that "bourgeois" had in the early 1970s. It's the kind of term that causes a lot of people just to stop listening, because we know that what's coming is (a) profoundly ideological, and (b) likely not to mean exactly what its speaker thinks it means.
But neoliberalism is nonetheless an important concept, and one that can tell us a lot about what's happened within western culture since the early 1980s -- the forces that have encouraged the public to question the value of institutions of higher education, as well as the other forms of public investment in the public good. In fact, it's part of what's surfaced the question of whether there even is such a thing as the public good. Just as Margaret Thatcher argued in the 1980s that there was no such thing as "society," but instead only individuals and families that needed to look out for themselves, so we find today a predominant political perspective in this country that holds that all goods are and should be private rather than public, individual rather than social.
unsplash.com/@stri_khedonia
Note: The effects of this conviction on our culture today have been corrosive. We have experienced over the last four decades a dramatic increase in inequality, both economic and social, as those who already have benefit from an environment in which rewards accrue to the individuals who are already most equipped to pursue them. We have also seen a radical decline in our cultural sense of shared obligations to or even basic care and respect for others. Broadly speaking, we've lost our collective grip on the notions that our individual actions affect others, that we should act with those others in mind, that we share common concerns, and that we are collectively responsible for ensuring that we provide a viable future for all of us. Without those understandings, without a recognition that the global crises we face today require responsible social engagement and collective action, poverty will continue to increase, structural racism will continue to grow, and the very prospect of a livable planet is thrown into serious question.
unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry
Note: So. I want to pause here and acknowledge that I've managed to get in a very few minutes from a highly encouraging report on the economic impact of public research universities to the question of whether the future will be a livable one, and that there are several links along the way that I haven't yet fully explored -- not to mention all kinds of alternative paths that we have available to consider. So let's backtrack a bit. If, as I am arguing here, our overdetermined focus on the economic good that universities provide has the potential to undermine the other kinds of goods that our institutions serve, what are those goods, how are they undermined, what do we lose if we lose them, and how might we begin to ensure that they remain a crucial part of the public vision of what the university is for?
Note: In order to explore the university's purpose in serving the public good, and the ways that the neoliberal understanding of the university's function have weakened it almost beyond recognition, we might begin by thinking through the distinctions drawn in economics among the four primary types of goods, and the ways they are defined, first, through their "excludability" -- or whether non-paying customers can be prevented from using them -- and second, through their "rivalrousness" -- or whether their use uses them up. Public goods are nonexcludable and nonrivalrous, meaning that no one can be excluded from their use and no one's use uses them up for others. Private goods are typically both excludable and rivalrous, and are typically market-based as a result. Goods that are non-excludable but rivalrous are thought of as common-pool resources, which were assumed for a long time to be subject to the "tragedy of the commons" until the work of Elinor Ostrom demonstrated the potential for shared governance in ensuring their sustainability, about which more in a bit. Finally, club goods are those that are excludable but non-rivalrous -- goods that are not diminished through use, but that people can be prevented from using unless they pay for them.
Note: The question, then, is what kind of goods higher education and the knowledge that it provides and creates are and should be. Knowledge is certainly nonrivalrous; if I have it, and I share it with you, I do not wind up with less of it as a result. The question lies in excludability: where once knowledge and the higher education that fosters it might have been seen as striving to be nonexcludable, making itself available to anyone desiring it, it has since the 1960s become increasingly excludable, restricted to those who can pay. Access to knowledge is today a club good, in other words, rather than the public good that was once imagined to best serve our society: supported by all for the benefit of all.
Those ideals regarding public education were always flawed, even at their most promising moments: our system of land-grant universities was founded on the appropriation of land from indigenous nations, and the GI Bill supported rather than undermined racial inequities. But the underlying principle remains important: the understanding that the university's purpose is the broad education of the public. And that broad education has always been understood to have benefits beyond the directly economic, creating a world that is not just more prosperous but better in a much deeper sense.
unsplash.com/@thirdserving
Note: In order to focus on that better, however, we need collectively to rethink the systems through which we produce and share knowledge both with one another, with our students, and with the world, ensuring that we keep our focus on the larger project of collective understanding that is at the heart of the academic mission. This mission requires us to find ways to treat knowledge not as a club good, restricted to those on the inside, but as a public good, created for all, available to all.
This is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics.
--Tressie McMillan Cottom
Note: And this, as Tressie McMillan Cottom reminds us in Lower Ed, "is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics." The university's present situation, after all, has its roots not just in economics, but in politics: the institutions that not too long ago aspired to serve as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal-arts based education broadly available, today face not just a drastic reduction in their affordability but an increasing threat to their 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.
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Note: And many of our students are just as embedded in this privileging of individual benefit as is the rest of our culture. They have been told repeatedly that the purpose of a college degree is developing the skill set that will lead directly to a lucrative career -- and given how much they and their families are paying, and indeed going into debt, for that degree, it's understandable that they feel that way. Preparing students to enter the workforce is not a bad thing, and I'm not arguing at all that we should wave that aside. But if the goal of the university should be producing graduates who are not just successful economic actors, but who are well-rounded humans, who are able to think creatively about the complex conditions in which we live today, and who are willing to contribute not just materially but socially, ethically, even morally to the improvement of the world around them, not just for themselves but for others -- if that's the goal, we need to transform our engagements with our students in order to show them another path.
jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous-thinking
Note: This is generous thinking: finding ways to use our collective knowledge for the public good, demonstrating our deep connections to -- indeed, our responsibility for -- the world around us. The university's educational mission is and should be cultivating that generous thinking, preparing our students not just for the professions that might lead to wealth production but for the "several pursuits" in life. We are educating the "leaders of tomorrow" not just in the conventionally understood political and business realms, but in the kinds of engagement that will help their communities grow from the grassroots up. And that mission demands that we focus on what is required to make a better world, both on campus and off. It requires that we think about our institutions' often unspoken structural biases, including that toward "economic impact"; it requires us to focus not just on making it possible for more kinds of people to achieve conventionally coded success, but on examining what constitutes success, how it is measured, and why. And that requires a values-first approach to higher education, and an ongoing examination of the ways that those values are instantiated in institutional structures and processes.
unsplash.com/@john_cameron
Note: So: if we understood the well-being of communities to lie not just in the individual economic prosperity that can result but in terms of individuals' ability to work together -- to engage in collective action -- toward a wide range of common goals, we might begin thinking about how the university might itself begin to rely on systems that support connection and collaboration. We might think about the infrastructure of teaching itself, and how it might be used to help shape a more richly understood public good. As Leslie's talk indicates, we have become dependent on a wide range of platforms that deliver our core services -- learning management systems, student information systems, publishing and communication systems, research information management systems -- but by and large these are platforms over which we have little control. They are vendor-owned, corporation-controlled, and as such far more responsible to their shareholders than they are to us, or to our students. They appear to serve needs we cannot fill ourselves, and yet there is no sense of "service" in their relationship to our institutions. Only extraction. They take in our content, they take in our metrics, they take in our vast and growing annual fees, and they leave us dependent, privatized, beholden to economic forces that do not serve the public good.
hcommons.org
Note: This is just one of the reasons that my colleagues and I have been working to develop an open-source, open-access, non-profit, academy-owned and governed alternative to such extractive corporate platforms. Humanities Commons instantiates several key principles: first, that higher education will benefit from all of us doing more of our work together, 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.
And part of resisting privatization 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 educational technology. We -- librarians, instructional technologists, and instructors -- 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.
Note: But developing the collaborative, community-supported infrastructure that can create the paradigm shift we need will require some careful thinking about the work that will be necessary to make it sustainable. And that includes not just financial and technical sustainability -- the forms of sustainability that we most often consider in this context. Most importantly, it includes social sustainability, a deep focus on the relationships required to build and maintain our shared infrastructure. Thinking about those relationships under the rubric of social sustainability directs our attention not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project, not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together, but their commitment to the concept of "together" in the first place. Collective action requires a kind of solidarity, in other words, a readiness to put the needs of the whole ahead of local demands, a determination to stand together in support of projects that may not necessarily seem to be our own top priority. 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.
ubs.com/microsites/nobel-perspectives/
Note: The connection between sustainability and solidarity brings us back to the work of Elinor Ostrom, which focused on common-pool resource management. She argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was an inevitability given what's been called 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 their upkeep, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without supporting them. As the number of free riders grows, the resources become prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. Or so the conventional wisdom had it. The only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons, before Ostrom, was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization of the resources involved. Ostrom, however, studied a wide range of community-held fisheries and demonstrated through them 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. Relationships, in other words.
Note: There are lots of potential examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects that are seeking to provide community-based solutions that avoid the pitfalls of privatization, but all of them 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 often accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence. 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 use them. But this privatization is often the very problem that community-developed projects were developed in order to solve. 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: Building open platforms and keeping them functioning is not something that any of our institutions can do alone. But it is something that we can do together: we can build and share and maintain the infrastructure that will allow all of us to genuinely open education, to make the knowledge we develop for and with our students a public good. I've got a lot more to say about what will be required for us to commit to this work -- especially about the challenges involved in shifting the relationships between our institutions from the competitive to the collective -- but making those changes will enable the university, and the public good that it serves, to become the infrastructure allowing us to build a better world.
Note: So at Humanities Commons we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in a shared network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the collective, but that the collective belongs to them, and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a flexible technology or a workable revenue model but, far more importantly, a compelling governance model, one that gives all of us a voice in the network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Elinor Ostrom's work demonstrates, building the community that supports a platform like Humanities Commons, and enabling that community to become self-governing, are the crucial preconditions for its success. This is true for a wide range of open-source, academy-owned infrastructure projects, which require collective action for real sustainability. And it's at the heart of Open Education: your institutions 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, one that can help us escape the bottom-line orientation of the neoliberal university to embrace instead the wide range of public goods that the university should serve. But if we are to reclaim our public mission, and 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 one another, toward our students, 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 the kinds of community-supported infrastructure that can enable open education, we have to genuinely become, and act as, a community.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
Note: I'm honored to have had this chance to talk with you this afternoon as you continue the work of building that community. Thanks so much.