In this episode of Rocking the Academy, co-hosts Roopika Risam and Mary Churchill talk with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University and author of Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University, about her ideas for the future of higher education. We talk with Kathleen about her career journey, responses to Generous Thinking, and ways that faculty and administrators can implement generous thinking in the academy. Kathleen sees hope for a different future of higher ed through rethinking internal reward structures for faculty, breaking out of traditional metrics, and questioning what we value in the academy. Find us on Twitter: @roopikarisam, @mary_churchill, and @kfitz.
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Music Credits: “Come Right Here” by Tendinite, licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY-NC-ND license.
Mary Churchill: [00:00:00] Rocking the Academy is a podcast that's changing the future of higher education. Your hosts, Mary Churchill and Roopika Risam, bring you conversations with the very best truth tellers who are formulating a different vision of the university. Do they rock the boat? Yes, but in doing so, they rock the academy.
[00:00:26] Rocking the Academy is sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press, publisher of excellent books on higher education.
Roopika Risam: [00:00:35] On this episode of Rocking the Academy, we chat with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. She has previously served as the Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication for the Modern Language Association. Fitzpatrick is the author of numerous books, including Planned Obsolescence, published by NYU Press in 2011, and the recently acclaimed Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
[00:01:10] Thank you so much, Kathleen, for joining us. And I'll go ahead and start with our first question which is really intriguing to me because you've had this really interesting and multifaceted, multi-directional career. You've been a faculty member, you worked at MLA, now you're a faculty member again, and you're leading this amazing digital humanities initiative at Michigan State. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey? How did you get here?
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:01:35] It's one of those stories that, every time I tell it, it feels like I'm turning it into a narrative when it's all been a lot of accident and happenstance. But looking back, the choices actually seem to make some sense only in reverse, right? I did my doctorate at NYU, and, as I was finishing up, I had been working in digital publishing in the mid-‘90s and had this moment of recognizing that I could continue working in digital publishing if I wanted to do that, or I could go on the market and see if I got lucky. And I got lucky. Right out of grad school, I got the best job I could conceivably have imagined at Pomona College and thought, “Okay, well here we go.”
[00:02:19] “I'm going to go be an English professor, which is what you do.” And everything was lined up for me to follow a relatively traditional sort of English and media studies faculty member path. I had tenure. There were things happening around me, though, as all of this was going on. I had, at some point as I was finishing up my first book, gotten really sort of frustrated with how slow publishing processes were and started a blog. And so it's 2002 and I'm mouthing off on the internet about things. And one of the things that I wound up mouthing off about was the slow publishing process. They really just weren't keeping up with how technology might allow us to communicate -- maybe we should start thinking about doing something different. And, at some point, I realized that might be book number two, that I might want to pursue some of these questions and think about them. And it was as that book was going into press with NYU -- I had been through the open review process, I had done most of the revisions, the book's going into press -- basically, Rosemary Feal at the MLA came to me and said, "These are some really interesting ideas. What if we tried to put them into practice? What does that look like?" And it was a really interesting moment; I had just gotten promoted to full and I sort of had this vision of my life back on campus. You know: very wealthy institution, really brilliant students, all of the resources available to me. I knew exactly what I would be doing for the next 25 years. Or there was this new path, right? Go work for the MLA and see if you can make some change and do something different. And I wound up going down that path, which was gratifying and exciting and different. So I spent six years at the MLA and I loved every minute of it.
[00:04:15] I worked with an amazing team and we got to do some really fun stuff, but I will tell you that association life is hard and administrative life, as administrators know, is hard. And I found myself, at the end of that time, just ready to take what I had learned at that national level, field wide view, back onto a specific campus. And let me just worry about the local for a little while and not worry about the entire profession.
[00:04:44] You know, one thing led to another. I came back to MSU and have just been delighted to be here. I went to a large state land grant institution as an undergrad. I went to Louisiana State, and so it's felt like coming home, to come to a campus like this where I feel like I know these students and where they come from. And I know how they fit differently into the landscape of higher education today than Pomona College students. So it's been great and I have been extraordinarily privileged and really lucky to get to have taken that journey.
Mary Churchill: [00:05:22] Oh, fantastic. So we want to talk about your book because we've both read it, loved it. We found it fascinating. So what kinds of responses have you seen and how has the book resonated with people in higher ed?
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:05:36] The book has struck a nerve in a lot of places. I've been invited to a lot of campuses over the course of this last year, particularly the campuses that are finishing up a strategic planning process or that are about to embark on one and that are really thinking about these questions of the relationship between how they envision the structure of the university changing in the coming years and those core values and missions that they want to return to in some sense.
[00:06:07] I've gotten to have really extraordinary conversations with a bunch of different kinds of institutions and have found myself being pressed in some interesting directions. I've had campuses that are, like all state institutions, under various kinds of budgetary pressure, say, “Well, this is all well and good if you're Pomona College.” You can afford to be generous. How do you continue being generous when the budgetary screws tighten? How do you think generously at a moment when you're having to cut programs? And these are huge questions.
Mary Churchill: [00:06:43] And are those coming from faculty or administrators or both?
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:06:47] Both. Both, I think. I've had really positive conversations with faculty who feel like they have a sense, from the book, of the possibilities for the work that they want to do and how it might contribute something to a richer, more open public sphere for the kinds of work that they are ordinarily engaged in amongst themselves. So that's been really great. Where they see obstacles in the kinds of things that I've written has been in the "Yes, but my dean/provost/president will never allow us to do that." “It will never count because...” And then, similarly, many of the administrators that I've talked to see the goals that they have for the institutions and the ways that, in fact, they really do want to see faculty doing the kinds of things that the faculty members have been talking about but are running into things like entrenched departmental cultures and challenges getting those cultures to open up and shift around and so forth. Everybody feels like there are obstacles. The locus of those obstacles is in different places for different stakeholders.
Mary Churchill: [00:08:04] It sounds like they feel like it's something you would add on rather than rethink as a whole.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:08:10] Yeah. I think that's a fair characterization. Like now there is the generous thinking box that we check on our RPT form.
Mary Churchill: [00:08:19] Exactly.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:08:19] I thought generously this year.
Mary Churchill: [00:08:22] Here's that column.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:08:25] Right. Rather than, as I think a number of institutions are starting to do, really recognizing that if what you want from your faculty's engagement with ideas and scholarship is a public impact for that work, you have to assess that work differently, right? You really have to think about public engagement first and not as a separate sort of outreach category.
Mary Churchill: [00:08:50] Exactly.
Roopika Risam: [00:08:52] So, I've thought it's been exciting to see the Generous Thinking hashtag (#GenerousThinking) that people have been using to share their thoughts on what they did and how they've been implementing generous thinking into their own lives, into their own work lives, and even their personal lives. And that leads into my next question, which is how can faculty and administrators implement generous thinking in their working lives? In particular, this is something I talked to Nicky Agate about with HuMetricsHSS, the initiative, which actually Chris Long at MSU is really involved with, right?
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:09:28] Yeah, my dean.
Roopika Risam: [00:09:30] And so it's all about how do we rethink the prestige economies of academia and how do we rethink what we actually value.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:09:38] Yes.
Roopika Risam: [00:09:38] And the ways that those values, like openness, for example, could be incorporated into assessment. And what I was saying to Nicky was that these are -- who's not going to say these are great things, right? Who's going to disagree? But at the same time, I'm curious about this tension of implementing generous thinking while also dealing with the structural barriers of the academy, particularly around race. Particularly around gender. So what are your thoughts on that?
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:10:13] Yeah, I mean, I think these are exactly the crucial questions, right? One of the things that I've been most heartened by in the ways that the hashtag has gotten picked up on Twitter, and the ways that Hannah Alpert-Abrams and her colleagues that she's been using it very actively with have been focused, is that their approach to what they think of as generous thinking is very focused on creating equity and expanding opportunity for others within the academy, right? How can I create more conditions of possibility for more people to participate in the kinds of conversations that we're wanting to have? And there are elements of self-care in it, and there are elements of thinking about the impact of one's own work. But it's really that mode of expanding opportunity that I think is crucial because I do believe that there are already enormous calls to generosity within the academy, everywhere we turn. But those calls to generosity fall disproportionately on some shoulders more than others. And really figuring out how those of us who are in incredibly protected, privileged positions within the academy -- I am a full professor, I have tenure, I have an administrative increment to my salary because I'm directing digital humanities, I've got a budget at my disposal -- I've got all of these possibilities, and if I'm not using them to help support folks who do not have those possibilities available to them, what am I doing here? Why am I doing this? I am the subject of my own call to generosity. I'm the one, more than anything, that I'm really imploring to say, “Are you doing this for the right people, for the right reasons?”
[00:12:06] One of the things that I most admire, I think, about the HuMetrics project is that it's not a matter of saying to faculty members, to departments, to deans, to RPT committees, that you should be thinking about other kinds of values first in assessing the careers of these faculty. It's instead saying these are the values that we are all attempting to implement all the time, and remembering that those values, like equity, like openness, like collegiality, community -- all of the different things that Humetrics is exploring -- that these values underwrite everything we do. That as much as we talk up openness, for instance, but then end up publishing in ways that privilege quality -- and the recognition of HuMetrics that there is no quality without equality is, I think, a crucial part of their project. And it's, I hope, a crucial part of generous thinking, recognizing that those of us who have the ability to be generous should feel it as a call.
Mary Churchill: [00:13:14] Well, that actually leads very nicely into our final question which is what gives you hope for the future of higher ed?
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: [00:13:21] I mean, honestly, one of the things that most gives me hope right now is the number of campuses that have asked me to come talk about the book, that, having heard the talk about the book, say, “Okay, this is great. How do we do it?” That they really want to know how they can better align, for instance, their internal reward structures with the values and goals that they have for the institution more broadly, how they can break out of the “We've always done it this way” of traditional metrics and find a better path, thinking about kinds of things that we should actually value in the academy. And that gives me hope. That is not to equate hope with a smoother, easy path, but I think that the desire of people to do something better is going to push us in the right direction.
Roopika Risam: [00:14:13] Rocking the Academy is sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press, publisher of Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education by Bryan Alexander, available where books are sold.