Kathleen Fitzpatrick
And our institutions are constantly competing with one another to demonstrate their higher status, their, you know, bigger library, their better dorms, their whatever it may be, right, the more that our institutions can come together and recognize that they have they have more to lose from that competition than they do to gain, the better off I think the entire sector will be. And I think for better or for worse, this last six months have really begun to demonstrate that that unless higher education as a sector, is able to come together and become mutually supportive, bad things will happen. I’ll just leave it at that.

Keith Edwards
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW I’m your host, Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by Dr Kathleen Fitzpatrick to discuss two of her books on essentially the same topic from two different angles. The first book is generous thinking, which critiques for critique sake, and calls for more generous engaged scholarship institutions and communities as a way of renewing higher education’s democratic purpose. It urges leaders to create more just, caring and participatory institutions where everyone’s voice is heard and valued. The second book is leading generously, which outlines how higher ed leaders can do this through their leadership. I’m really excited to have Kathleen here to talk about both of these books today. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com This episode is sponsored by evolve. Evolve helps, helps higher ed leader senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual executive leadership development experience and Huron. Hurons education and research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture to foster innovation, financial health and student success. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his. I’m speaker, author and coach, helping higher leaders and organizations advance leadership, learning and equity. You can find out more about me at Keith edwards.com and I’m recording this from a beautiful day here in my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the ancestral and current homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Thank you so much for being here. I loved reading both of these as I mentioned, as we were just getting connected. We’re going to blame this whole episode on Chris Wren, who connected me to your work many years ago, as I was outside shoveling snow. It’s 80 degrees and beautiful here today, so it feels very far away, but I remember it distinctly, so I really appreciate you joining to talk both about think generously and about leading generously. But before we get too far into it, you want to just share a little bit about yourself, your career and your connection to this topic. Absolutely.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Thank you so much for having me here today, Keith. I’m really excited about it. I am Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and I use she her pronouns. I am. I was about to say Interim Associate Dean as of July 1, I am no longer interim I am now Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University, and I’m also here a University Distinguished Professor in the English Department. I came to MSU seven years ago from having previously worked at the Modern Language Association, where I was the organization’s founding director of scholarly communication, and in that role, established the thing that has grown into Knowledge Commons, which is a large scale Network for research, sharing, collaboration, communication and so forth. And I think that, you know, the two roles say something about the nature of my career. It’s been a little bit idiosyncratic in the ways that it’s developed. I’ve done my work on the edge of several fields, including literary studies and Media Studies and digital humanities and scholarly communication and higher education studies now, but the real goal through all of it has really been trying to help build sustainable scholarly communities that can be resilient and collaborative and supportive and so on. So I’m really delighted to get to talk with you a little bit about part of that work today.

Keith Edwards
Well, I think resilient scholarly communities that can be engaged and participatory and collaborative seems relevant in the times that we’re in. Seems like we could all use that, yes, in our institutions and across institutions, in our states or our regions or different types of institutions. We just need more of that coming together for collective action, for our students, for our faculty staff, for higher ed as an industry, one of the things that really connected me to this, in hearing Chris Wren first mentioned this, is this critique of critique, just for critique sake, just to just to prove our bona fides by tearing down. I’m oversimplifying it, but I was wound up at that moment in time about it, and generous thinking is really a critique of that and call to something more. So what was the impetus for this?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Yes, part of the emphasis I started working on the book in about 2015 2016 and it took a good few years to for it to coalesce into the project that it turned into. But what I was seeing was a lot of culture of, as you say, critique for critique sake, right, active disagreement that served only the purposes of disagreeing, of staking out my own position, and of like being, being the voice that was going to say something different. And I was seeing this all across the academy, but particularly within the fields that I work in and particularly online. It was, it was something that I was finding happening a lot in that early academic Twitter space, where folks would end up in these kerfuffles about things that seemed to me, not really, I don’t know, not helpful in some way. And I started thinking about this. You know, what? Where does this come from? Why are we arguing with one another all the time when, in fact, like the academy, is such a small and eternally under threat portion of our culture that, like we would really do better to band together and become mutually supportive in that world, as you know, we’re being what contested from the outside or attacked from the outside, right? So why are we so driven to argue with one another, and why, particularly in fields in the humanities like literary studies, does our work develop through disagreement, right? We can’t ever just kind of read something and say, Wow, that was really incredibly smart. And I would like to build on these ideas and, you know, accept them and do something more with them. Instead, I felt at that time, as I was starting to work on this book, that there was this vanishingly small gap between something being a radical, wacky, new idea that nobody really wanted to look too hard at, and something turning into its old hat and passe and, you know, reactionary, and we should get rid of that idea. And why? Why is there not a sort of protracted moment in which we get to sit with an idea and accept it and explore it and really embrace the possibilities that it opens up for more work, rather than having to kind of knock that idea down in order to create space for new work and what it came down to, the more that I thought about it, the more that I read, the more that I talked to people, the more it came to seem that the it seems obvious when I say it now, right, but our entire culture is so grounded in competitive individualism that We are, particularly within higher education, forced to outdo everyone else in order to compete for really small resources, right to just like the little slivers of time or funding or whatever are out there are all based in competition. And so we end up carrying that. I mean, rather than than understanding competitiveness as being part of a collective process in which an entire team gets better at the thing that we are doing collectively, we treat it as an individual sport, and we treat it also as a zero sum game, right? If I am seeking funding for something, and you get that funding that means that you have gotten something that’s taken something away from me, and because of that, we’re always seen as being eternally in this kind of competition that leads us not to be able to have conversations in which we build on one another’s ideas, not to have those yes and conversations, but instead always having the the but conversation, but I don’t agree with what you’re saying, because we have to see it my way. And I grew really as as I did the research for this project to to get really concerned about the degree to which I felt like we weren’t listening to one another within the academy, that we were always as we were talking, preparing for the next thing we were going to say, right, instead of really interacting with what was being said and really attempting to internalize and understand it. But that this was also having really detrimental effects on our ability to communicate beyond the borders of the campus, right? Because as we’re constantly arguing with one another, we’re having these increasingly niche arguments that close out the publics that the academy is meant to serve, and that keep us from being able to really engage in the conversations. We need to and especially at a moment. And you know, generous thinking was published in 2019 so the moment has only intensified, but at a moment when we need the public really to understand what higher education is for in a much deeper sense than culturally we really do right now. So this is, I mean, the impetus for this project was really trying to think about how we can communicate better, the importance of our work to the public, but starting with how we can communicate better amongst ourselves and to really become a supportive community in which disagreement doesn’t necessarily require me to tear your idea down, but instead to say, I see what you’re saying, and that’s really interesting. And how does it connect to this other idea that I’ve been pursuing, and can we have a conversation about that? So that’s where it grew from.

Keith Edwards
It really is a radically different way than I don’t know if it was how academe was designed or has emerged to become it’s a radical departure from that to seek collaboration, work together, serve the public. I mean, these things sound so obvious, but it’s so rare in reality, and this the zero sum game and the competitiveness you’re making me think of Audre lorde’s quotes, master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, which I find to be like this Rorschach test, like everybody loves that quote for completely different reasons, right? The people who want to be really radical or say, you know, I’m not going to be kind, I’m not going to be nice, we’re going to be really aggressive, we’re going to be really activist. And then other people are saying, well, that’s just the competitive zero sum logics. And so how do we build collaboration and coalitions and and bring people in where they’re at? So everybody loves that quote to justify wherever they want to go. Right? Absolutely. And you’re not talking about a naive positive like we never disagree.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
No, no, not at all. And in fact, I think you know, we do need productive disagreement. We need to be able to push one another’s ideas to get better and not just absolutely support everything that’s going on. But I think we also need to recognize that that what we are all at some level, engaged in the same mission, right in education, in the development of new knowledge, in really thinking together about what a learning community is and should be, and if we’re going to build that community together, we have to find more productive, collaborative ways to disagree and to push our disagreements forward, and to push all of our work collectively forward, so that it’s not simply you know, me telling you that your idea is wrong and my idea is right, so that My idea is the one that becomes the the accepted idea, but rather that we have these two ideas, and how do we put them into dialog with one another? How can we find a way to make sure that multiple ideas are in circulation and that we are pushing them to become better, stronger ideas,

Keith Edwards
right? So the critique is really welcome to move things forward, to advance knowledge, to bring things into more clarity, to to bring them into update, into the current context, exactly. But we don’t just critique for to critique sake. We critique to advance something. Bring it together, merge it here and bring with it what is valuable, even if 80% of it no longer is valuable. Let’s keep the 20% let’s keep

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
exactly and expand that 20% in a way that can make that, that part of the idea, shine. I mean, if we think about peer review as a methodology for scholarly communication, right? There are two different modes that peer review can operate in. One of them is the gatekeeping mode, which is like you have gotten to the end of working on this project. You have sent it to me to review. I am now going to tell you whether it is good enough to go forward and whether it should be published or not. The other mode of peer review is formative, and it takes that same text and is like, Well, okay, these parts of the idea are working really well, and I don’t get what’s going on here. Can you elaborate? Can you refine? Can maybe this part of the argument needs to be put aside. How do we take your text and make it as good as it possibly can be, so that it should be published and it should go forward. And when that’s the goal, when the goal is ensuring that all of our ideas are as good as they possibly can be, we have to move into that formative mode, rather than that gatekeeping mode. And so much of you know standard critique comes down in that much more gate. Keeping mode in which I’m trying to prevent other ideas from gaining purchase, and instead focus on my own ideas. And we

Keith Edwards
see this happen. I mean, that’s that’s such a good example, and it’s so pervasive in faculty realms. But, I mean, I just see this everywhere, right? It’s tenure track versus contingent faculty zero sum game, right? Yeah, it’s faculty versus staff in a zero sum it’s faculty and staff versus admin in the zero sum game. It’s Michigan State versus Michigan, when those two institutions have so much in common and working together and could uplift so many other institutions. And then we might think about the whole sector of higher education, which I think is seeing right now, just how, how risky individual action and competing with each other, for a lot of reasons, for some of these attacks that folks are experiencing. But also I think that when there were just a lot of students available, all right, you know, be be all things to all people, and we have the same things everybody else. But when students are going to be much less prospective students, there’s fewer and fewer in the enrollment cliff. I think what’s really going to separate people is, here’s how we’re really unique, right? Here’s how we’re really different from all of the other large public schools that you might be looking at, we focus on this and we offer this. And not everybody’s into that, right? And, but if that’s the right thing for you, you know, we focus. We really have a service focus, or we really have an international focus, or we really have an experiential learning focus, rather than saying, Well, we have all the student organizations that everybody

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
else has, right, right? I also think one of the ways that institutions are really going to be able to distinguish themselves is in I mean, you talked about the different ways in which competition, or the different levels at which competition within institutions and then across institutions, manifests itself, and the difficulties that That presents, both within an institution and across the sector, for really moving new ideas forward, for sustaining the good work that institutions are doing. I think the more that we can can really focus higher education on helping students develop positive collaboration skills. And I don’t just mean like supporting one another’s work and everybody’s in it to together, and we’re all going to do it. It’s all going to be good, right? But, but really thinking about how we build ideas collectively, how we refine them, how we shape them, how we work together to make things as strong as we can, institutions that can really focus on collaboration as a core practice are going to, I think, be producing graduates that are able to do remarkable work in the world and the kind of work that we desperately need right now. But teaching that kind of collaboration is hard, and it’s, I mean, in many ways, a skill set that our institutions don’t select for, right among faculty, among administrators, like we have all succeeded because we have competed to get these positions. And you know, as you say, we see all of this competition between faculty and staff. All of our hiring categories end up dividing the campus into competitive communities. And our institutions are constantly competing with one another to demonstrate their higher status, their, you know, bigger library, their better dorms, their whatever it may be, right, the more that our institutions can come together and recognize that they have they have more to lose from that competition than they do to gain, the better off I think the entire sector will be. And I think for better or for worse, this last six months have really begun to demonstrate that that unless higher education as a sector, is able to come together and become mutually supportive, bad things will happen. I’ll just leave it at that.

Keith Edwards
Yeah. Well, one of the things I’ve been wanting to scream into the ether, not related to higher ed business, about life in general, is I just this, it’s all a group project. All of this. I’m teaching my kid to drive, and I’m like, this is all a group project. Covid is all a group project. Everything navigating natural disasters. It’s just everything is a group project. And most of us didn’t like group projects.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
No, we didn’t like them, because there was always somebody who never did the work, and we had to pull them along. And you know, quite frankly, that’s life. There’s always somebody who doesn’t do the work that has to be brought along. So how are you going to negotiate that within a team? How are you going to make agreements within the team for who’s going to do what and hold one? Another accountable and keep the work going, right? That that kind of of skill building around collaboration is absolutely key. And I think, you know, there’s an extent to which our students come to us as undergrads ready to do certain kinds of collaborative work, right? They might hate it. They might not like the team projects, but they’ve done them all the way through K 12. It’s been a pretty collaborative exercise. We bring them in, and we start gradually beating the collaboration out of them by making them individually responsible for their own success, such that by the time we get to grad school. I mean, the joke that I have always made is that, you know, we talk a good game about the value of collaborative research and about building research teams and all of that within the academy, but unless we can figure out a way to support a co authored dissertation, we, in fact, have not embraced collaboration, or We don’t value it enough, right? We still want that level of work. Every tub’s got to sit on its own bottom. It’s got to do its own work. So I would really love for us to engage in some of those kinds of thought experiments, to think about like, Well, why not a co authored dissertation? What could we ask a team of graduate students to do together that might turn into something more, rather than assuming that if two graduate students write a dissertation together, each of them has only written half. Yeah.

Keith Edwards
I mean, it just seems like how, how the problems we’re tackling need to be solved work. So I love that you’re talking about this collaborative, mutually supportive, generative way of institutions functioning, of us leading, and then how we operate as staff and as faculty, and then also what we want to be. This is also an outcome. We want to be teaching the students through the process of their learning and their engagement. I know we want to move to the second book, and a little bit about the what and the how, but anything else on the why that you want to get to before we make that shift.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
You know, I think the key thing for me in all of this, and this is a big part of of the why, that sort of transitioned, for me, into the how is that in order for our institutions to genuinely support the kind of collaborative connection based research and teaching that we really like, we talk about all of our mission statements. Talk about, you know, doing community, engaged work. They talk about really valuing connections between the Academy and the public. They talk about collaborative research and so forth. But then we end up providing rewards in our hiring systems, in our annual review, our promotion and tenure review, in promotions within administrative space, all of those things are determined individualistically, and in order for our institutions to really provide for the full what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s like the full enact, enactment of the mission. The full achievable. I don’t know there’s a good word there, and it’s not occurring to me, but the full success of the mission, it’s going to require the institution to change and to become a place that can genuinely support different kinds of work conducted in different kinds of ways that may not look like The stuff that we’re used to in the competitive, individualistic model. And doing that, I think, is going to require some radical transformations in governance, within our institutions, to make them places that are more more naturally collaborative spaces, rather than hierarchical and individualistic, and that’s how of ultimately, you know, really wanting to create that more collaborative environment and then recognizing that institutions are going to have to change in order to make that possible, is how I moved from the first book into the second to really thinking about Like, okay, if we’re going to build a new institution, how do you structure it? How do you want to lead that institution in order to make it a better place to work?

Keith Edwards
Well, I find the timing of this really interesting. As you were saying, the generous thinking came out in 2019 as I refer to as the before times. And you spent years leading up to that writing that then leading generously, which is really a what and how book, whereas generous thinking is a why book, yeah, leading generously comes out in 2024 and I’m guessing you spent a lot of 2020 21 2220 Three thinking and writing and talking and having conversations, yeah, and somewhat of maybe even doing zoom calls around generous thinking, having conversations, maybe speaking at conferences, having talking about it. Having conversation then clarifies your thinking, Yes, advances your thinking a little bit and now, how do we make this really practical about that? So maybe just begin with the context of publishing generous thinking, and then how that moves into leading generously, yeah, and then into a little bit about the the what and the how,

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
absolutely so I mean, you’re exactly right. Generous thinking comes out early in 2019 and I launch on to the circuit, and I’m, you know, visiting places and giving talks. And in October 2019 I was asked to visit Virginia Tech, and got to visit three campuses and to talk with them, because Virginia Tech was in a strategic planning moment, and was thinking particularly about community engagement as part of that plan. And really wanted to hear more in different spaces and with different audiences about this idea of generosity and connection and communication and what this might bring to them. And I gave a big talk in Blacksburg, and at the end of the talk in the Q and A a faculty member who I believe may have been from an English department, your people, yeah, like, generosity is all well and good, she said, I mean, it’s ingrained in my head, right? Generosity is all well and good in good times, right when we’re flush, we can afford to be generous within our institution, within our college, with the public around us. But what happens in bad times right when we’re facing another round of budget cuts? How can this idea of generosity help us? Or are we just naturally going to retreat into like protecting what’s ours and become more enclosed again and so forth? And I stood there trying to answer this question, thinking, you know, okay, well, I can say some things about developing muscle memory around generosity and making sure that we return to our values again and again in the ways that we’re engaging around around all kinds of institutional processes, you know, both in good times and in bad times. But as I was whatever it was I was saying, I the back of my head is going, Wow. This is a hard question. This is a hard question. How do you do this? How do you stay generous at a moment when you’re feeling under attack, you’re feeling like your resources are being taken away, and you feel like in order to for your unit to continue doing the work, you have to protect it and fight back against any of these cuts. And so I decided, okay, well, clearly there’s something I need to pursue in here, in terms of thinking about how, how leaders become more naturally generous, or maybe not more naturally. But can can work to espouse an ongoing renewal of that sense of generosity in ways that can sustain an institution that needs to be thinking as generously as possible, especially in difficult times. This is all late 2019 and then in early 2020, we launch into the pandemic. And it was exactly that moment where all of a sudden, you know, we’re having to face all kinds of crisis decisions about when we send people back into the classroom and when we allow them not to and to take care of themselves in the ways that we need to. We’re also facing deep anxiety about what’s going to happen with student tuition. If students aren’t going to come back because they don’t want to go to zoom school, then how do we deal with budget cuts, and how do we deal with with, you know, all of the situation surrounding that and so in some ways, leading generously, is very much a covid book, right? It was written during and, you know, researched and written during those years of recovering or attempting to recover from the shock of everything that happened in in the academy in 2021 2022 but it’s also really, really heavily influenced by a bunch of crises that were going on on my own campus over the course of those years, and thinking about where the individual leaders on campus who wanted so much. Much to do the right thing for the community, to be supportive of the faculty, of the students, of the staff, to make sure that everybody was as well taken care of as they could. Ran into the brick wall of institutional structure and institutional bureaucracy. And it was the moment at which I began to recognize that that, you know, we talk about the neoliberal university a lot, and it’s, you know, how the degree to which the politics of the university, though they attempt to separate themselves from market based approaches to understanding how the world works, nevertheless, are so steeped in those market based approaches from our board of trustees to our CEO on down, that we can’t get away from them, that we are all, in fact, enacting these neoliberal processes of competitive individualism all the time. So I started thinking about questions around leadership. Did a bunch of research of the sort of standard English professor variety, which is to say I did a bunch of looking up of sources and read things and followed links and citations and so forth. But at the same time also decided that I needed to talk to leaders, and so reached out to a group of folks that I considered really transformational leaders within their spaces, in their institutions, and didn’t realize at the time, but only sort of in retrospect, that the folks that I was reaching out to were really mid level managers who were, you know, they were department chairs, They were deans, they were directors of units in libraries. They were, they were at that point where they had some institutional space in which they could be persuasive and could attempt to make change. But were not. They were not the president of the university. They were not attempting to carry the entirety of the institution on their own, and they were able to make change in part because of that position in the middle of the org chart, right, rather than at the top of the org chart. And the conversations that I had with those leaders really helped me begin to understand something of the of the the what the tools, as I described them in the book for transformation, the things, the practices that those leaders engaged in in order to keep themselves grounded, in order to ensure that the the community that they were working with was brought into decisions that they needed to make, rather than having things foisted upon them from the top. And that that through those processes of collaboration, they were really able to create what community buy in, is the easy way to put it, but that’s not what I’m really after they were able to create a space in which everyone who was participating in those processes felt like the processes belonged to them as much as they did to the administrative leaders who were were pushing those things forward. And so it was through that process that I really started thinking about about what it would be to structure an institution that was collaborative from top to bottom, and that was really attempting to think with everyone on campus about how to pursue the institution’s Mission, rather than being structured in the kinds of corporate top down org chart pyramid that most of our institutions are sort of mired in right now, yeah?

Keith Edwards
Well, you’re talking about this being a covid book. I think it’s a crisis book. The first chapter

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
happened to be the right yeah.

Keith Edwards
Now we got a different one, and I think in three years, we’ll probably have a different one that we don’t even know about. But the first chapter is really grounding it in the crisis covid. And as you mentioned, many of the things going on at MSU at the time, the second chapter is leadership. And as I’ve shared with you, I just think it’s a remarkable chapter about leadership and really talking about the the why and how to do this differently, and then the next 12 chapters, I think, are the tools. And I’ll just because I have them in front of me, the tools are people yourself, vulnerability, together, trust, values, listening, transparency, nimbleness, narrative, sustainability and solidarity. So as you were talking about the tools those, those are the tools, and each one of them has a short chapter, sort of. Outlining what that is and how to put it into practice. And then there’s stories. There’s a collection of stories about some of these leaders that you were talking about, that you spoke with. So it’s really a great those. First is the grounding. And then we need to do something different. And then here are tools about how you can put that into practice. You want to say anything. I mean, we don’t want to go through all 12 of those, but any of those, but any of those that you want to highlight that feel particularly salient

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
in this moment? Oh, so many of them. I think I’m the one that I’m going to pick on right now is transparency, because my campus, like I imagine, pretty much every campus right now, and particularly every campus that has been at all dependent on federal dollars to get work done is in a process of budget cutting that’s pretty painful, and so I’m again thinking about that question from 2019 like, how do we stay generous in an environment in which We’re cutting budgets? One of the ways, is through this kind of transparency in which the folks who are going to be affected are brought into the conversation about the need for the budget cuts, why we have to do this, are brought into the principles and helping to set the principles through which these cuts will be made, and are able to help, kind of tell the story of the work that they’re doing in the spaces that they’re doing it, in a way that the entirety of the area for which the budget is going to be Cut can hear and understand, ultimately, in in a transparent process. I mean, the the goal is not so much to have collective decision making, right? Because budget budget cutting by committee would be really super painful, having been involved in budget cutting processes for quite a while now, but it is to make the principles and the needs as transparent and clear as possible, and to keep open communication as as much as possible, such that when decisions are made, they they don’t they don’t feel vindictive, they don’t feel directed at particular units. They don’t feel as though they’ve come out of nowhere, but instead, the community that’s experiencing these difficult decisions has is able to feel like they’ve had a voice in the process, and might have the possibility of understanding why the decisions ultimately came down in that regard, this is not to say that everybody’s going to like the decisions or Like the way that things turn out. I mean, because there are many choices that ultimately turn out not to be very good or very supportive or like all of the problems that we face whenever we have to cut stuff, but it it does at least help us feel like the values that we came into this process with still stand, even after we’ve had to do this hard work of letting parts of our budget go.

Keith Edwards
You use the word feel over and over again, and I think that’s really important. I think one of the things I’m often talking about with senior leaders, particularly presidents and chancellors, is people say I’m not listening, but I am, and they can recount all the things that were said. And I was like, Yeah, but you’re real fast. You’re a fast processor, and you hear everything they’re saying, and then you jump to the solution, and you jump to your disagreement, and you jump to what they don’t know. They’re not feeling scared, yes, and what you described is people feeling seen and heard feeling like this. And I find that’s really key. Is making sure people feel seen and heard is a very different thing than seeing and hearing them, which is transactional, transformational, is making them feel that way again. As you point out, not everybody’s gonna like the decision or be happy about it, no, but they might be willing to understand it and might be willing to engage with it a little bit differently. Yeah.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
I mean, when you talk about this, about about ensuring that everyone feels seen and heard, I my brain immediately leaps to Arlie Russell hochschild’s book, strangers in their own land, which is a remarkable book if you haven’t read it, nothing to do with our topic at hand here, except that it really is about the political divide in the US and the ability, the utter inability of one side to talk to the other at this point, and the damage that that’s doing in our culture. And as a sociologist, I mean, of course, her method is to be out there talking to people and finding out what’s going on. And she, she, in the book, describes this method in in just extraordinary depth. She moved for 10 years to a small town in southwestern Louisiana. China, and I started reading the book in because of its I mean, I’m from Louisiana, and from Southeast Louisiana, and I wanted to read what she was writing about this area of the country, but she’s there, basically investigating why a community that has been environmentally devastated by the oil industry is fighting the EPA rather than fighting the oil industry right? What leads this to be a tea party stronghold at this moment, and her method in this book is is to sit down at kitchen tables and to talk with the people in this community, and not just to hear them and go, like, yeah, yeah, got it and leave, but instead to hear their story and say, okay, so what I’m hearing is this, and to tell the story back to them, is this what you think about what’s happening? And they say, No, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. That’s not it at all. Here’s the important thing that you’re missing, and to keep that conversation going and keep retelling the story until they feel like she has really adequately heard them. And in the course of this, she builds phenomenal amounts of trust in a community that should have no trust whatsoever for a sociologist from Berkeley, right? So it’s a remarkable book and a really, I think, important description of the ways that we ought to be working with one another on campus. Well and listening

Keith Edwards
is one of your tools. Yes, indeed. Well, you talked about how publishing, talking about sharing, discussing generous thinking led to leading generously. Well, it’s not been four years, but it has been a limited time since leading generously was released into the world. And I’m sure that’s not the first conversation you’ve had about the book. So since you published it and you started talking about it and hearing from people and questions like you were asked, What has kind of emerged for you since?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Well, it I mean having published leading generously, or, sorry, generous thinking in 2019 and then covid comes along, I published leading generously the last week of October, 2024 and the world changed very quickly after that by a lot. The day after the election in November, I was I traveled to the University of Virginia to go give my first talk about the book, and was suddenly in a place in which all of these ideas about what generosity could do to transform leadership within the academy had run into what had just happened in this last election, and so, I mean, it’s been, it’s been a really hard process of articulating the the continued need for generosity, for listening, for thoughtfulness, for transparency in a moment in which we as a sector feel under attack and that that we really need, you know, just thinking about that difficulty has reminded me over and over again of the ways in which I describe these tools and this idea of generosity itself not as being like a one and done thing, right? I listened to you. I heard you. I know what you think, and I’m moving on, or like I have now done the generous thing by supporting this community, and I’m done, and I’m moving on, but really, instead understanding all of these things as being practices. In the sense that meditation is a practice, right, something that you have to return to over and over again to remind yourself that this is, is why you were doing this work. And I think that we are at a moment at which we all really need to practice our values and our best selves over and over again in order to make sure that we are building a community that can really be sustainable and resilient in in profoundly difficult times. The other thing that that I’m thinking about a lot since, since the book came out, is, quite frankly, the cognitive dissonance involved in having published two books about generosity, only to find ourselves in this moment, which strikes me as one of the most profoundly ungenerous times that I have experienced in my life, the the ways that we are returning to an understanding of otherness as being something to be dismissed and fought rather than or, you know, torture day. Kicked out of the country, rather than embraced as diversity, as being a positive and something that we want to work toward. And so I’m now really attempting to work through the through that cognitive dissonance of recognizing that, you know, whatever my idealistic notions of how our institutions ought to work, maybe they’re still grounded in a profoundly ungenerous world and thinking about how we need to work together again, right? That that all of us, individually, on campus, units on campus, and individual campuses in connection with one another have have much, much more to gain from collaboration and connection and through mutual support than we have to lose.

Keith Edwards
Well, you’re reminding me, one of the things I really loved and tried to highlight in my PDF that you shared with me was this notion about individual agency versus systems and structures and the both end of that being so critical, which is a thing I’ve ranted about many times, but to say these things as you’re pointing to, our structural, our societal, our systemic, is true that can undermine our individual agency, but we have to sort of recognize that as the truth, and also those are all just made up of people, of individuals doing these things, and so we don’t Want to give up our agency. You’re reminding me Adrian Marie Brown, who’s someone who you referenced, an emergent strategy talking about fractals is, you know, if you want to change the world, change this conversation. And you know, I don’t want to dismiss or make light of or make small the challenges that you’re pointing to, because you’re absolutely true and absolutely right. And I think what will shift that is me leading a meeting in a slightly different, more collaborative, less individualistic, competitive way than you teaching your class or structuring your syllabus, and maybe a department or maybe a division or maybe an institution. And we certainly need more collaboration, less competition around students, around families, around budgets, around governance, around how we push back around things that is contrary to the values of not just you and to me, but of Education, of learning, of knowledge.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Yeah, absolutely, it’s one of the things that I think I’m really trying to push for in the book, is, is that reclaiming of individual agency and collective agency right to recognize and anywhere within the org chart of the institution where you happen to have a little bit of control over a space or a way of working, or the relationship between a few people making that little bit better, can have ripple effects. Another department can see that your department is suddenly having more productive department meetings, and people are happier working in the department, and they’re getting along, and productivity is going well, and all of that, and that department wants to find out, how did you do it? What’s different? You know, how can I replicate that positive structure within my space? And being able to have a space in which we’re, we’re, we’re making something local better can then have those impacts on the larger environment.

Keith Edwards
Well, if we want to be transformational, or thinking about how we use our dollars and our resources rather than incremental and well, maybe we can move this 3% to 2% maybe. But if we really want to be transformational, we do need people to be thinking generously and to be thinking transformationally And the fear and scarcity based mindset is completely understandable. I get why people are there, and it won’t help us lead towards something different along the way. I love both of these books. I think the I think about them in terms of the approach, and then the strategy, the approach, is a mindset. It’s a way of engaging with the world. Is a way about seeing things. But then the strategy is very tactical, about how we lead meetings and how the tools that you have here, and so it is a new way of thinking about our work. It’s also very practical and pragmatic and something that people can put into action. So, so thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we are running out of time, as we knew we would, and we are this podcast is called Student Affairs now, we always like to end with what is with you now might be related to this conversation or something that is just on your head or your heart as we’re having this conversation. So if you’d like to share that, and then. Also, if folks would like to connect with you, where is a good place for them to do that?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Absolutely, I’m gonna say that, that you know what, what is in my head, in my heart right now comes back to that idea of cognitive dissonance and of really attempting to reconcile the days when things are going well, right? Like I got positive news on a piece of funding that I was looking for, I got and something good happened. You know, my family is happy. Things are great, and at the same time the world is terrible and has all of these things that are wrong with it. How can I ensure that I can celebrate what’s still good and celebrate the things that are happening positively and be as supportive as possible for the folks who need support right now, and for and and do the work of protests where I need to protest, trying to maintain those two positions and in some kind of balance is, I think what’s sort of been weighing on me a bit so that’s, that’s sort of where I am. But if folks want to reach out I am, let’s see, where do I want to start? I my email address. I’m just going to put it out there as Keith, it@msu.edu’s and I’m happy to hear from folks. I’m also available on blue sky at Keith. It’s dot info. I have a website at Keith, Keith, it’s dot info. I have an account on mastodon. My my project Knowledge Commons runs a mastodon server, additionally called H Commons dot social, if academics want to come join us, that is a very friendly academic space for conversation. And I am, shockingly enough, Keith, it’s at hcommons dot social, so folks can find me there as well.

Keith Edwards
Excellent, excellent. I do want to share you were reminding me that that duality of good news and also despair. The marginalian, which used to be brain pickings, Maria Popova, the one she wrote, was a defense of joy and just the opening paragraph, one of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for Despair is a countercultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it, not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive, but because of it, because joy, like music, like love, is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that gives meaning to the survival with its bright allegiance To the most alive part of us isn’t that a great we’ll put that in the show notes for folks who want to get some more there. Thank you so much for joining us in conversation, for thinking generously, for leaning generously, and for all the things that you’re offering. It’s really great for your leadership, and it’s connecting with so many other things we’re having conversations on, and I think people are just deeply, deeply yearning for things to be different, not always quite sure how to go about that. And both of these resources are really helpful in doing that. So thanks for your leadership in this space. Thank you so much. I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode evolve and Huron evolve helps senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership. This is a program I lead, along with doctors, Brian Rao and Don Lee. We offer a personalized experience with high value impact, the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions, maximize your learning and growth with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for social change. And Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo. Huron promotes institutional resilience and higher education. For more information, please visit. Please visit. go.hcg.com/now. And as always, a huge shout out to our producer, Nat Ambrosey, who makes all of us look and sound good, and we always want to. Thank you our audience, your help is incredibly important to getting these conversations to a wider audience. You can help us by subscribing on YouTube to the podcast and to our newsletter and also leaving a review in any of those places really helps these conversations reach even more folks. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks to our fabulous guest today, Dr Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and to everyone who is watching and listening make it a great week.

Reimagining the Study of Higher Education: Generous Thinking, Chaos, and Order in a Low Consensus Field by Kris Renn

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/761662/pdf

A Defense of Joy

A Defense of Joy

Connected to the Maria Popova piece – I immediately thought of Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, as well as Mariame Kaba’s argument that hope is not an emotion, but a practice…

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land

Finally, my new headshot is here: https://cal.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/sites/62/2025/06/Kathleen-Fitzpatrick-at-Beaumont.jpg