The Book
Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 260 pages.
The Author(s)
Kathleen Fitzpatrick.
In an era flooded by unremitting cascades of loquacious arrogance, there is an urgent civic need for scholars of the humanities to advance still more constructive reflection on their obligations to communities off campus. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, begins her candid look at the challenges facing higher education in the United States with an illuminative recollection of “what has come to feel like an emblematic moment of university life” (1). A number of years ago, Professor Fitzpatrick assigned an article to her graduate students in anticipation of an upcoming seminar. Upon opening the chosen day of conversation, she was greeted with a punishing barrage of “fairly merciless takedowns, pointing out the essay’s critical failures and ideological blindspots. Some of those readings were justified, but at least a couple of them seemed, frankly, to have missed the point” (2). What follows would be laughable for its sheer gracelessness, if it were not ultimately so bleak in its implications. Upon asking her students to slow down and offer her first a summary of the author’s argument and goal for the work at hand – certainly a reasonable request – Professor Fitzpatrick was met with a confounded silence (2).
Is her anecdote the opening of so much tiresome grumbling about a younger generation of adults? Not at all. On the contrary, Fitzpatrick’s original reaction to this bizarre scene was to blame herself: “my initial response to the silence was to start wondering whether I’d asked a stupid question … It only gradually became clear to me that the question was … oddly unfamiliar, that everything in their educations to that point had prepared them for interrogating and unpacking, demystifying and subverting … but too little emphasis had been placed on … central acts of paying attention, of listening, of reading with rather than reading against” (2). Here, we have a perplexing challenge. The professor, attentive and self-aware, has done her work admirably. Her students, diligent and sincere, have prepared for class as best they know how. What, then, is to blame for this breakdown of communication and understanding in a room full of sophisticated readers?
Those whose experiences in similar settings resonate with the insights of Rita Felski in her monograph, The Limits of Critique, or of Lisa Ruddick in her essay for The Point, “When Nothing is Cool,” will find much to enjoy in Generous Thinking, as the preceding quotations reveal. Fitzpatrick references both authors – and, of course, many others – while shaping her unique argument in the introduction. With engaging and straightforward style, Fitzpatrick starts in the graduate seminar and moves outward, contributing to a vigorous literature on the importance of the humanities – indeed, all of liberal education – to democracy itself. Most importantly, Fitzpatrick contends that the “university has been undermined by the withdrawal of public support for its functions, but that public support has been undermined by the university’s own betrayals of the public trust” (xi). Her goal in this book is therefore to “provide one pathway toward renewing that trust” by elaborating on her “desire to see universities and those who work in and around them – faculty members and administrators, in particular, but also staff members, students, parents, trustees, legislators, and the many other people who affect or are concerned about the futures of our institutions of higher education – develop more responsive, more open, more positive relationships that reach across the borders of our campuses” (xi-3). Indispensable to the achievement of this aspiration is the willingness “to cultivate a greater disposition toward … ‘generous thinking,’ a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, collaboration over competition, and lingering with the ideas that are in front of us rather than continually pressing forward to where we want to go” (3-4). This book does not come up short on ambition with regard to its audience and objectives; as such, “it doesn’t carry with it the scholar’s usual desire for completeness” (xiii). Rather than aiming presumptuously to offer the last word in an ever-changing landscape of debate, Fitzpatrick instead strives to shape a conversation about how universities might carry out their work more transparently – and thus, more sustainably – in an age of social and political tumult. That the frequently opaque internal dynamics of university life contribute to its precarious civic status at this particular moment is no surprise to Fitzpatrick: “there’s a widespread [mis]conception about what we do … we waste taxpayer resources by developing, disseminating, and filling our students’ heads with useless knowledge that will not lead to a productive career path, and – this part is true, but for reasons that the university alone cannot control – we leave them in massive debt in the process. And nowhere is this misconception more focused than on the humanities” (15-16). Change is in order. Where to start?
Fitzpatrick’s title, Generous Thinking, comes from a talk given by David Scobey, former dean of the New School for Public Engagement, “but with one key revision” gained from her instructive experience in that fatefully awkward graduate seminar: “Rather than critical thinking, the dark opposite of generous thinking, that which has in fact created an imbalance in scholarly work … is competitive thinking, thinking that is compelled by what sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen called ‘invidious comparison’ … What kinds of new discussions, new relationships, new projects might be possible if our critical thinking practices eschewed competition and were instead grounded in generosity?” (32-33). This question captures the imagination just a few short pages after we encounter Fitzpatrick’s point of view on what really happened to her students that day: “the need to stake out their own individual, distinctive positions within the seminar room left them unable to articulate in any positive sense what the article was trying to accomplish because that articulation would have left their own readings somehow indistinguishable from those of the author. So they – we – reject, dismiss, critique. We outradicalize, but in the service of a highly individualistic form of competition” (29). Contrary to platitudes about bitter academic disputes emerging from risibly minuscule stakes, Fitzpatrick evokes a more consequential possibility in the mind’s eye: “however much this mode of reading has done to advance our fields and their social commitments … competitive engagement like this too often looks to the many readers just outside our scholarly circles, including students, parents, administrators, and policymakers, like pure negativity … which might well lead them to ask what is to be gained from supporting a field, or an institution, that seems intent on self-dismantling” (29). With shrewd perceptiveness, Fitzpatrick demonstrates that myopic complacence toward this problem – a consuming lust for status, pursued abstrusely at the expense of public purpose – would prove a foolish gamble for the academic humanities.
However, Fitzpatrick makes it clear that the endless quest for blinkered forms of distinction does not begin and end with the humanities. Rather, this problem affects the whole of postsecondary learning: “As currently structured, the entire system of higher education is engineered – from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies, and the higher education press – to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige … It leads, as numerous higher education researchers have explored at length, to an academic enterprise that defines itself based not on those whom it gathers in, but on the masses that it excludes” (183-184). Such a model, therefore, is not nearly as responsive to public needs as it ought to be, especially at a foreboding moment of populist discontent.
In other words, the benefits that scholarship receives from public support should not be taken for granted amid a broader societal context in which heated class resentments often attach themselves to discussions about higher education in an increasingly unequal country: “Such competitiveness … feeds the rejection of expertise as well as the dismissal of the popular, and it … builds a wall between the scholarly and the ‘common’ reader, one that functions much like the empathy wall that Arlie Russell Hochschild argues exists between the Right and the Left in the United States today” (108-109). Far from overwrought, Fitzpatrick’s valuable comparison to Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land ought to engender still more serious reflection about what it will take to strengthen the bonds of reciprocity that must exist between scholars and their fellow citizens in a healthy republic, if liberal education is to have a broadly accessible future throughout the land. That these bonds require deliberate, mindful tending by scholars themselves might be a perennial reality of American life: “As Kelly Susan Bradbury has explored, traditional academics’ exclusion of certain kinds of education and certain kinds of work from the category of the ‘intellectual’ profoundly affects nonacademics’ willingness to understand themselves as part of that category, and the rampant anti-intellectualism in American culture may well be a result, a defensive reaction against what is felt to be a prior exclusion. That is to say, academics’ presumed authority over who gets to be an intellectual comes with a profound cost” (7). While maintaining core ethical commitments to evidence-based analysis and grounded social criticism, Fitzpatrick’s perspective is extremely useful for those who not only care about scholarship in the humanities, but who also seek to move beyond fatalistic, irresponsible tropes about the supposedly unsophisticated attitudes of a dismissive, leery, or even hostile public, monolithically construed.
Readers of this blog with an interest in consulting Fitzpatrick should take heart in the fact that historians have anticipated some of her insights, which she recognizes: “Ronald Grele argued as far back as 1981 that the work of the public historian should focus less on instructing the public about history than on enabling the public to do their own history. So with public literary criticism … it is through such participation that we can begin to demonstrate the importance of the academy to the entirety of the social enterprise” (112-113). The value of public history scholarship to Fitzpatrick’s mission does not stop here. At least two additional books would nicely suit her heterogenous bibliography.
First among them is Denise Meringolo’s Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). In an exploration of historical and sociological factors behind today’s gulf between scholarly reading and other ways of engaging with literature, Fitzpatrick draws on “Anne Gere’s study of the literacy practices of late-nineteeth- and early-twentieth-century women’s clubs” to explain that “the academic study of literature established its professional status in large part by creating a disdain for the pragmatic, affective, and even spiritual modes of interpretation that the common reader brought to books” (88). Similarly, Meringolo finds that while “women’s preservation societies were increasing in number and cultural influence, men were working to formalize historical study and establish its disciplinary boundaries” (31). When the American Historical Association was created in 1884, its “founding members emphasized the scientific nature of their work, establishing emotional detachment and the objective analysis of data as the difference between the ‘hard’ work of history and the ‘soft’ work of preservation … the effort to collect, protect, and interpret the landscapes, artifacts, and documents of regional and local history … was more often gendered as feminine” (31-32). No study as enterprising as Fitzpatrick’s could possibly cover everything that it might. However, the inclusion of Meringolo’s work alongside that of Gere might have been beneficial, if only to highlight further the lingering problematic consequences of those shifts to professionalization more than a century ago.
Additionally, Fitzpatrick’s research could benefit from comparison with an important study by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, titled The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (Columbia University Press, 1998). Fitzpatrick warns scholars not to content themselves with simplistic or dismissive conclusions about the reading practices of curious minds outside the academy: “such readers often have more sophisticated understandings of their own practices than we might assume” (101). She proceeds to explain some of the most exciting possibilities to which this insight might lead her fellow scholars: “we need to think not just about the public’s potential consumption of the work that is done by the university, but also about potential new modes of co-production that involve the surrounding communities in the work of the university. These rich, ongoing collaborations might serve as a style of work that our universities can fruitfully model for the rest of our culture: new modes of interaction, new forms of public engagement, and new kinds of writing not just for, but with the world” (138). Fitzpatrick’s position is reminiscent of the conclusion reached by Thelen at the end of his project with Rosenzweig more than two decades ago: “Precisely because the props of professional history have been knocked out, it is crucial at this time that we not create an essentialized dichotomy between ‘historians’ and ‘people’ and that we interrogate and explore common ground from which to use the past to reshape the civic arena according to popular concerns” (203). While these arguments are inspiring, matters of execution are where things truly become interesting, and difficult, especially given the relationship of educational attainment to contemporary polarization.
Luckily, Fitzpatrick has much to say about what specific forms a commitment to her vision of “generous thinking” might take in today’s academy. As just one example among many, she voices considerable support for open access to scholarship in a digital age. A former director of scholarly communication for the Modern Language Association, she grounds her support in an admirable respect for the capabilities and interests of those individuals whose lives and livelihoods do not unfold from day to day on college campuses: “Closing our work away from nonscholarly readers and keeping our conversations private might protect us from public criticism, but it cannot protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous in the current economic and political environment … We do not create knowledge in order to hoard it” (150-151). Indeed, Fitzpatrick argues further that hoarded knowledge is not really knowledge at all: “It is only in giving that work away, in making it available to the publics around us, that we produce knowledge. Only in escaping the confines of our individual selves and sharing our thinking with others can we pay forward what we have been so generously given” (154). These memorable passages occur within an excellent discussion of many challenges that continue to inhibit progress toward robust open access in the humanities, among them funding hurdles and the prestige-oriented realities of certain tenure and promotion processes (139-157). Surprisingly, a well-intentioned and otherwise promising article published in the January 2020 issue of Perspectives on History, “Research Access and Scholarly Equity,” does not once mention advocacy for the sustainable development of open-access publishing as a long-term strategic component in removing the barriers that separate too many historians from the intellectual resources they need to do their best work. Given the diverse occupational circumstances of its current members and other potential stakeholders, the American Historical Association might learn a great deal from Fitzpatrick’s aspirations in charting a responsible course for the future of scholarship.
Challenges and all, Fitzpatrick sets a worthy example by remaining undeterred: “a large-scale transition of scholarly communication to an emphasis on public access wouldn’t be easy. It would, however, be … a powerful demonstration of the commitment of our institutions of higher education to the public good … Generous thinking requires us not to give up in the face of the seemingly insurmountable financial and institutional obstacles to open access and challenges us instead to start figuring out what it will take to get around them” (148). Her example would resonate even more powerfully if Generous Thinking itself were an open-access title, though Fitzpatrick did make a draft available online for “community review and feedback” at http://generousthinking.hcommons.org (236). Here, it is very important to note that the platform on which this draft was released – Humanities Commons – owes much to Fitzpatrick’s work; she currently serves as its project director, and has served also as an advisory board member for the Open Library of Humanities. Her thoughts about improving public access to scholarship are available, with more detail than this review can include, in a thought-provoking address given at the April 2019 membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information.
On the whole, Generous Thinking offers a refreshing and imaginative point of view from which to consider the responsibility of universities in strengthening the public trust which enables them to function. Fitzpatrick’s work compels her readers to consider the long-term consequences for scholars – especially those in the humanities – of a troubling gap between academia’s ostensible dedication to public service and the often exclusive, intensely hierarchical norms and structures through which it presently operates. Generosity, as Fitzpatrick has defined it, is an indispensable part of the way forward.
About the Reviewer
Scott Richard St. Louis is a student with interests in scholarly communication and public history, among other areas of research and practice. His peer-reviewed scholarship has appeared in The Michigan Historical Review, and he has presented his work at conferences of the American Historical Association, the National Council on Public History, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and other organizations.
4 Thoughts on this Post
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Scott: You state: “Readers of this blog with an interest in consulting Fitzpatrick should take heart in the fact that historians have anticipated some of her insights, which she recognizes: “Ronald Grele argued as far back as 1981 that the work of the public historian should focus less on instructing the public about history than on enabling the public to do their own history. ‘
“take heart…”? Your state give me “heart burn”. There is a presumptive arrogance I the idea that historians should be “enabling the public to do their own history”. First, how do you suppose this “enabling” is to take place? And how do you know that most members of the public even want “to do their own history”.
And then there is this: You state that the work of public historians should focus less on “instructing”. I am not sure where you are going with this “instructing” idea. From what I can tell, historians have been less interested in “instructing” than in “telling stories”. Some of these stories are true, some not so true; some important; some ; many boring…. and many fictitious Myth of the Lost Cause Being one of the big fictions.
With regards to the Lost Cause, how would your “enabling” theory work? My interest in the Lost Cause came about in exploring how that tenets of that mythology were promoted in South Dakota through that epic film Birth of a Nation. And I had the occasion to make a two hour presentation on the subject and its relationship to the efforts taking place to remove those monuments throughout the South erected explicitly to honor that cause. My two-hour presentation was public (and I should note that I consider myself a “public historian” — but perhaps not the “enabling” kind).
My strategy was not to “instruct”, but rather to raise questions… the primary question was what should be done (what do you believe should be done) with those monuments honoring leaders of the Confederacy — and particularly Robert E. Lee. And I suggested that the way we might begin to answer this question is to explore the rational for the movement and how that rationale was connected to the monuments movement. I assume that you would not be in favor of my public history approach since it is not intended to promote the idea of enabling those who attended my presentation to “due their own history”. It did have “an enabling” function however which was to help those who attended develop a better understand of how to separate historical fact from fiction. From your comments which I quoted above, I assume that you are not in favor of my strategy. Yes? No?
What an interesting–and challenging—riposte to the review, particularly to the populist mode of public history developed in the left-leaning quarters of the academy among social historians such as Grele, Rosenzweig, Frisch, and others.
It speaks to one of the current (indeed long-running?) debates in public history about whether the goal is to facilitate the capacity of everyday people to “make” history all on their own or to challenge them to rethink their assumptions (and sometimes their overt ideologies) about the American past. Is the job of the public historian to share in authority, in the sense of Frisch’s famous book, or is it to share authority, as in to offer one’s expertise brought to bear on a broader public (or a specific public’s) knowledge and awareness? Of course, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. And it pivots on the question of who the public is, exactly, and what the history is being publicized.
Another point to explore is whether Fitzpatrick is really correct in drawing upon Kelly Susan Bradbury’s anti-Hofstadterian argument that anti-intellectualism in America is a defensive reaction against scholarly and educational efforts to place boundaries around who gets to count as an intellectual. Maybe. But what if the anti-intellectualism springs from some other source? Is it merely a defensive reaction or is it doing some other kind of ideological work. I’d love to hear Tim Lacy on this question, or Kelly Susan Bradbury, or Kathleen Fitzpatrick herself!
While the main issues raised by the review (and preceding comments) concern academics’ relation to the public, the author’s contrast between “generous” and “competitive” thinking also raises issues about how academics interact with each other in various contexts (as the opening anecdote about that graduate seminar suggests).
Writing in a blog comment box on a phone it’s impossible to get into these matters in detail, but I’ll throw out a couple of thoughts. The norms of the academy put a premium on saying something distinctive and original, esp. for younger scholars looking to advance their careers. So an element of competition is built in from the start, perhaps esp. in the humanities and some of the social sciences.
But maybe in those fields the norms could be nudged in the direction not just of collaboration but also of “cumulation” (albeit not necessarily in a positivistic sense). So, for instance, graduate students in the social sciences could be told that a dissertation does not necessarily have to “fill a gap in the literature” or make a startlingly original argument so long as it advances things in some way — that it’s ok to begin a piece not in an adversarial way but, for instance, with “building on and extending the insights of x, y and z, I argue that [such and such].” To be sure, some pieces do open in this way and the methods handbooks tell grad students that it’s perfectly fine, but the rhetorical norms remain, I think, somewhat adversarial.
On the other hand, much of the interest of history as a scholarly enterprise lies precisely in the clash of interpretations. So perhaps the issue for academics becomes how to retain the benefits and the interest of scholarly debate while appearing to the public (and each other) to be doing more than just engaging in an unending process of tearing down each other’s work. Again, more of an emphasis on “cumulation” might help, while emphasizing or acknowledging that it’s not exactly the same kind of cumulation that the natural sciences aspire to (and sometimes achieve).
Of course there are already quite a few examples of works in history and the social sciences that take this approach, both collaborative and perhaps “cumulative”. One could go back to some classics here, but instead I’ll mention a recent edited volume, _Upending American Politics_, which includes a number of essays that originated as undergraduate theses (my knowledge of this book comes mostly from listening to a podcast with one of the editors).
Thanks so much, Scott, for this review. The book and your review hit on lots of areas of interest for me—deep arenas that have kept me in higher education, as a staffer and instructor, even when higher ed hasn’t treated me so well. I value higher education precisely because it helps us sort out what we should value. It helps us see meaning where we hadn’t seen it before, and to make meaning where it hadn’t existed. When higher ed is functioning properly, we buy this “generosity” with our tuition dollars as a lasting investment in our minds, future families, work, and personal enrichment.
Fitzpatrick’s focus on generous thinking is spot on. It is countercultural, even, in a larger environment that has elevated cancellation as the supreme act of justice. I agree that competitiveness is the dark opposite of generous thinking. To me, the best critical thinking is about thinking with—understanding the context and conditions that create a text or work of art. And I’ve long argued that good historical thinking is good critical thinking.
I see envy and oneupmanship as products of the some structural circumstances that foster hyper-competitiveness. On the other hand, that desire for distinction also goes along with the desire for *recognition* by populations new to the academy. Those new perspectives, as noted above, crave and deserve to be seen as intellectual. So a little competitiveness and hostility were always going to be in play as the academy opened up. There has been a need to destroy old idols of thought. The trick is to gain recognition without succumbing to negativity (the unhealthy kind that destroys individuals and the institution itself).
The desire for recognition extends into public history, and the public’s acceptance of certain kinds of presentations of “history.” The idea of “we,” to invoke David Hollinger, had to open up. The older whiter consumers of history had to be open to public presentations of history that involved non-white oppressed populations—the kind being recognized in graduate programs that had opened up. But white consumers have had trouble accepting these newer revisionist or revolutionary *stories* (to build on Stephen’s point about what we offer, or sell).
Glad to see Fitzpatrick’s nod toward open-access scholarship. But public access won’t solve the problem of some Americans as seeing themselves as more human and American than others.
To Stephen: What about Carl Becker’s 1931 AHA presidential address, titled “Everyman His Own Historian”? (At this link). I think that doing one’s own history refers to being in a partnership, between citizens and historians. It’s a heartburn-inducing anti-intellectualism of regular citizens regarding the work of professionals, but rather about trying to get the two parties closer together. Presumably this would prevent countercultural anti-intellectual formations like myths of black Confederates, and preemptive rebuttals of Holocaust deniers, and other sad examples of bad historical thinking.
Michael: I confess to knowing nothing about Kelly Susan Bradbury’s work. Enlighten me! Otherwise it is true that anti-intellectualism springs from many sources: religion, democratic politics, business people, and, finally, to me, the structure and ideology of capitalism itself (its pursuit of novelty, embrace of creative destruction, the paramount of material profit).
On Louis: I think my comment above, about recognition, plays into your addition about the grad seminar desire (implicit and sometimes explicit) for creativity and originality. There’s a volatile mix there. And I think, in some cases, that volatility is by design in relation to the “marketplace of ideas” (or, in your phrase, the “clash of interpretations”). Stir them together, some think, and something will surely win or rise above, as convincing or evidence-based or stirring.
Thanks to Michael for calling me into this comments section—for compelling me to read Scott’s review. – TL