Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @[email protected]
Note: Thank you!
Note: Though I invoke the notion of "crisis" in my title, it's only to point to its inevitability: conversations about the university that could be are in large part driven by the state of the university today,
Note: which, as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon suggest, is in a state of "permanent crisis," and has been more or less since its inception. In fact, they argue that we rely on that sense of crisis, and in particular of the ways in which we are swimming against the larger cultural tides, to give us purpose.
- the labor crisis
- the economic crisis
- the political crisis
Note: On the other hand, there are some particularities to our situation today that it's worth paying attention to, including (CLICK) The labor crisis, as more and more good positions -- with job security, adequate salaries, full benefits, and above all academic freedom -- are being sucked into the gig economy.
- (CLICK) This of course works hand-in-hand with the economic crisis that our institutions are mired in. As public funding provides a smaller and smaller portion of university budgets, the costs of higher education have shifted radically from the state to individual students and their families. As those costs escalate, the pressure on students to think of higher education as a market exchange grows.
- (CLICK) And in the midst of all that, there is of course the political crisis, which has been brewing for decades but has taken a particularly acute turn in the last few years. The attacks that we've seen on critical race theory, the moves to ban books from libraries, the attempts to eradicate tenure, the growing interference in the curriculum -- all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that the university serves.
Note: So what I'm hoping to bring to the table today is the idea that we have at hand some of the means of responding to the crises faced by our fields and our institutions, and that we can demonstrate through the ways that we do our work a better path for the future of the university at large. I've argued at length for the ways that stronger connections between our institutions and the many publics that we serve might help facilitate a renewed sense of higher education as a public good, and I discussed a range of forms of public scholarship, including community-engaged research and open publishing processes, that might help us build those connections. But all of this requires deep institutional change, and in particular a new model for academic leadership via collective action.
Note: We need that new model for academic leadership not least because the model under which we currently labor is irreparably broken. I want to be clear in what I'm saying here: there are some very good people doing the best work they possibly can in many of our campus leadership roles. It's not the people that need replacing, or at least not all of the people, and in fact the exercise of replacing them with new leaders with new visions has become a form of institutional deck-chair-rearranging. The problem lies with the structures within and through which they work. That's the model we need to contend with, a model with its boards and its presidents and its innumerable vice-presidents that comes to us directly from the hierarchical structures of corporate governance. Those structures are ill-suited to the operation of non-profit entities in general, as can be seen in the extensive recent literature on reimagining non-profit leadership. And those structures are doing grave damage to the purposes of higher education.
Note: This is why our mission statements die a little every time that someone says that the university should be run more like a business: because all of our institutions already are being run like businesses, and long have been. Of course, what that someone means when they say that the university should be run more like a business is that we should be keeping a closer eye on the bottom line, we should be relentless in our pursuit of innovation, we should be eliminating the product lines that aren't producing sufficient revenue, we should be keeping our front-line labor in check, and so on. All of which we've been subjected to for decades now, and all of which has contributed to the sorry state we're in.
Note: Even worse, however, the unspoken parts of "like a business," the individualist, competitive models for success that are foundational to corporate structures, are actively preventing our institutions from flourishing. This is true not just at the micro-level, where each individual student and employee is required to compete for resources, but also at the macro-level, where our institutions are required to square off in the marketplace rather than develop any kinds of cross-institutional collaborations that could lift the entire sector rather than creating the rankings-driven lists of winners and losers that surround us today.
So here's the core of my argument: universities are not meant to be profit centers, and shouldn't be run that way. They are rather shared infrastructures dedicated to a form of mutual aid, in which those who have -- in this case, knowledge -- support those who need, with the goal of producing a more just and equitable society.
Note: Dean Spade defines mutual aid as "collective coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse." And as Peter Kropotkin argued at the turn of the 20th century, mutual aid, mutual protection, and mutually beneficial cooperation have been as important to the development of both animal and human societies as the Darwinian mode of competition for survival. In fact, though history focuses on the role of conflict in societies -- it makes for a more thrilling narrative than does cooperation -- Kropotkin indicates the significance of mutual aid for our subjects of study:
the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in arts, industry, and science. (Kropotkin 296)
Note: (READ SLIDE) The development, then, not just of the softer, more aesthetic subjects that we in the humanities study, but of the broader forms of knowledge studied across our campuses required mutual aid. And they still require mutual aid in order to continue developing. And that need should press us to consider that the ideal model for the university is not the corporation but the cooperative, in which every member has a stake in the successful outcome of the whole, and is as a result committed to full participation in its processes.
Note: In collective models such as that of the co-op, leadership is of necessity coalition-based rather than hierarchical. It is both built from relationships and built in order to sustain relationships. And this is a model that I would like to see us espouse for the future of academic leadership.
"Coalition" and "leadership" may not seem to go together well, I'll acknowledge; our ideas about what it is to lead have largely come to us from the corporate universe, as filtered through our business schools. A leader in that model is a strong, visionary individual capable of seeing the future and pressing an institution toward it. But if you've been paying attention to the higher education press for the last several months, you might already have a sense of why, coming from my own institutional perspective, I am somewhat less than sanguine about the transformative potential embodied in the folks that our campuses designate as "leaders." In fact, referring to our upper administrations, our boards, and so on as "leadership" is a profound misnomer. They are, more properly, "management," charged with keeping the institution running in accordance with the status quo.
Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of creating change, and not only can that work be done anywhere within the org chart, it's in fact most effective when it emerges through a grass-roots process of coalition building rather than via top-down mandate.
Note: It's not for nothing that John Kotter has argued that most organizations today are "over-managed and under-led," and academia is no exception. In fact, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with -- and worse, an inability to create -- change.
Note: So how do we re-organize ourselves in ways that will enable us to create the change that our campuses so desperately need? As Chris Bourg told me in an interview, “The leadership skills for the future of higher education are 100% coalition-building and relationships.” At every level throughout our institutions, our collective success depends upon our becoming and acting as a collective, upon our developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear. And that process -- determining what our shared goals are and should be, and how we should go about striving toward them -- requires a kind of interrelation that is not merely personal but also, and of necessity, political.
“all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decisionmaking" (Young 9)
Note: When I point to the political, I mean to point to Iris Marion Young's definition of politics, which she uses to describe (READ SLIDE) and in particular the ways that she suggests “the concept of justice coincides with the concept of the political,” arguing that every effort must be made to enhance collective evaluation and decision-making if we are to create the possibility for just institutions (34). Just institutions require political action, but the ways that "collective evaluation and decisionmaking" have been trammeled on our campuses by the erosion of shared governance into bureaucratic busywork has left most of us feeling less than enthusiastic about the prospects. And, in fact, that kind of depoliticization is a core principle of management: getting things done by minimizing input and eliminating controversy.
Note: So to come back around to the focus of our panel: what could the university become? What I want to suggest here is that our institutions are wholly dependent on mutual aid in order to flourish, and that they have enormous amounts to gain from its full realization. We have all suffered enormously under the competitive corporate regimes to which we've been subjected. And if there's going to be change, we're going to need to make it happen, by modeling better paths.Our fields -- the critical, the creative, the humanistic -- might develop a new structures of cooperation that can serve as a starting point for the radical undoing of academic hierarchies.Our training, our ways of working, our understanding of the always-already political, and even our outsider status in the current regime can allow us to create alternatives to the failed model for academic leadership and its basis in the individualist principles of the corporate economy. We can work together to develop properly politicized cultures of mutual aid based on collective action within our departments. We can ensure that our departments similarly interact with one another based on principles of mutual support. And we can create a model that the rest of the institution might be persuaded by.
This all sounds super pie-in-the-sky, I recognize, but I hope that you'll consider Dean Spade's conviction that "crisis conditions require bold tactics" and that the boldest of these is mutual aid. True cooperation and collective action might provide a path out of the crises by which we're beset, and in fact toward a university that works toward transformation of society as a whole.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @[email protected]
Note: Many thanks.