Kathleen Fitzpatrick on Empowering Scholars and Leaders in Higher Ed

On this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the author of the books Generous Thinking and Leading Generously. We talk about the state of higher education, how a lens of generosity can make change in the academy, and much more.

Transcript

Rebecca Pope-Ruark (RPR): On this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the author of the book's, Generous Thinking and Leading Generously. We talk about the state of higher education, how a lens of generosity can make change in the academy, and much more. 

Welcome to the Agile Academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. In each episode, we tackle topics from career vitality to burnout and everything in between. Join me as I chat with inspiring women about their experiences pursuing purpose, making change, and driving culture in the academy and beyond. I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark. 

Hi Kathleen. Welcome to the show. 

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (KF): Hi. Thank you. Very happy to be here. 

RPR: So why don't you just take a second and introduce yourself to the audience. 

KF: That sounds great. I am Kathleen Fitzpatrick. In my day job, I am Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State University in the College of Arts and Letters, where I am also University Distinguished Professor of English and Digital Humanities. And I'm also project director of Knowledge Commons, which is a global network for knowledge creators of all stripes to collaborate, communicate, share their work and more. So that's where I'm coming to you from. 

RPR: Great to have you on the show today. It's a Friday afternoon as we record, so we're both like, let's see what happens.

KF: Exactly. It could be anything. 

RPR: I love it. Okay, so I always like to start with the question, what defines your purpose in or around higher education? 

KF: It's an excellent question, and I have to say that I've stared at this question and thought, wow, I wonder how I'm going to answer it. And so we'll find out. Now, my purpose I see in higher education really has to do with empowering scholars of all kinds to do their best work in the ways that they want to do it. And so some of that work comes down to smoothing a path for scholars to be able to do work in unusual ways, to be able to reach out to different audiences, to do work with different communities, to communicate with one another in non-traditional formats and to really think about their why in the work, which I think is really crucial. So I think that in some ways, if I were to try to boil my purpose down to something pithy, it would be to say that I'm really, I'm here to facilitate the work that others are trying to do and to help them figure out how they can best do it. 

RPR: How important is that today? Really, especially with things going on in the country and the state of research right now, being able to empower people to do the work that they love and they find meaning in is so important. 

KF: It's a lot right now. And I'm going to say, so as I said in my little introduction, I'm Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies last year, academic year, 2024-25. I was in the role on an interim basis, so I was interim associate dean and it was a very, very interesting year to be, first of all, interim. And secondly, really trying to wrap my arms around what this role was, what it was supposed to be, even as the thing kept shifting on me and transforming and changing and turning into one crisis after another. But on some level, all of those crises, as awful as they are for everyone involved, have been a little bit liberating in terms of being able to help folks think about, okay, I know this particular grant program that you rely on and that has been so important to the development of your work is now no more. But what is it you're trying to accomplish? Why do you want to do this work? And are there other ways that we can imagine thinking together about the possibilities for the work continuing, even if the kinds of funding that we have relied upon in the past aren't the same? 

So it is a moment, there is the transformation in the academy that we all want to create, and then there is the transformation that's being foisted upon us. And I think that I don't want to be too Pollyanna-ish about anything by suggesting that we have a great opportunity to take these transformations that are being forced on us and do good work instead. But some part of me still wants to believe that, to believe that we have opportunity even in the midst of crisis, and to really think about what the purpose of the work that we're all here for is. 

RPR: Yeah, I think we're thinking kind of transformation of higher education right now as something that is being, we're kind of being forced into it and how do we manage that process in a way that still is true to our values and to our goals and to the work that we want to do with students and the way we want to transform and improve the world as well. 

KF: Exactly. Exactly. And that holding onto those core principles at the moment of all of this flux is really even more crucial than it's ever been. And I think that for a lot of scholars, I don't know, some percentage of scholars who have been able to do the work and just get into the rhythm of the work that they're doing. Some of this crisis does provide that opportunity to step back and go, wait a second, okay, what are the circumstances that I'm now working in? What are the reasons I got into this in the first place? And are there better ways to get to those reasons and to get to the objectives, the goals, the ideals that I hold for my work rather than just doing things in the way that I am accustomed to be doing them. 

RPR: I do coaching and we tend to focus very much on values and we tend to focus very much on purpose, really connecting to those things that ground you in the things that you do, and realizing that there are typical ways that we have done certain things and there may be expanded ways or different ways or really alternative ways of accomplishing the same things that we deeply care about, but we really need, sometimes we don't have the opportunity to think about that when everything is just kind of flurrying along as a faculty member and you're just kind of going downstream as things. 

KF: Yeah, absolutely. 

RPR: Step forward, 

KF: Right. And I do think that for many of us, just the flow of the academic year is so intense that it can be really hard to get your, I mean, I'm now thinking about streams and being in the water flowing along. It can be really hard to get your feet under you well enough to say, wait a minute, what am I doing here in this rushing body of water? It can be really hard to steer, but it's really crucial to have a clear sense of those values and of that guiding star that is the thing that is the purpose of your work. So figuring that out I think is really crucial. 

RPR: Yeah, yeah. It's so hard to take a step back sometimes and just say, this is what I care most about, but what a powerful question to ask yourself and say, okay, is where I'm going. This is what I'm curious about. This is what drives me. 

KF: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

RPR: So we are both Hopkins authors, so I wanted to make sure that we touched on your work in Generous Thinking and Leading Generously. So tell us a little bit about that whole process of coming up with those really transformative ideas about higher education. 

KF: Well, one of the things that I think about in terms of Generous Thinking is that on some level, I tell several different origin stories for that book, where it came from in the course of the book, and really what's driving it for me, one of those origin stories, it's early in the book, is that moment in a graduate seminar of having presented an article to this group of incredibly smart cultural studies students that I wanted to discuss with them, discuss and opening the floor to initial responses and reactions and having three just withering takedowns come right in a row of all of the reasons why this author was completely wrong in their political approach and in their stance toward whatever it was that we were talking about. I don't even remember what the article was or what the subject of the day was, but I remember hearing that third take down and thinking, okay, something isn't here yet that we need to bring into the room. 

And I said, okay, totally hear you on all of these critiques, but I want to take a step back and just see if we can articulate why the author wrote this article, right? What's up in this article? What's important about it? What's its purpose? And there were crickets in the room and I realized that we spend so much of our time in the academy preparing students to critique, getting them ready to push back against the things that they're reading and to formulate their own original arguments absolutely crucial to the work that they do, but we don't spend a lot of time with really getting them to understand and articulate somebody else's argument and to figure out what's worth supporting in that argument. And that's where this idea of attempting to shift our perspective to thinking with a bit more generosity came from, was just starting to think about what graduate education would be like if we started out in the Peter Elbow doubting and believing game, if we gave just a bit more weight to believing before we leapt into doubting, and were able really to think more productively with one another. 

And that led me, that initial thought led me into this entire kind of a reevaluation of the world in which I was working, looking around and recognizing the ways in which the academy instills in each of us, whether we are aware of it or not, a deeply competitive, highly individualistic mode of understanding that if I am going to get work done, if I am going to be accomplished, if I am going to succeed, it's going to be me by myself and it's anybody else's success or accomplishment potentially takes something away from me. We operate in this zero sum game that's altogether unfortunate. It's deeply unhealthy for our relationships with our colleagues, with our fields, with all kinds of people around us, but it's also deeply unhealthy for ourselves and our self-understanding in this larger academic environment in which really the benefits of the work that we do are all about dialogue and they're all about collaboration and they're all about support for others as they're developing their work as well. 

And so figuring out how to rebuild an academy that could be that space where we prioritize collaboration and mutual support and the importance of dialogue and not just our speaking role in the dialogue, but our listening role in the dialogue and our support for what others are saying, trying to rebuild that academy would require not just individual transformation. I have read generous thinking and my view of the world is completely new and I really am a whole new person. It's not just that change of heart that's required. It's really a structural change within our institutions to figure out how our institutions can adequately support and reward that kind of collective collaborative work rather than always only providing rewards on an individual basis. And so that is sort of where I ended Generous Thinking, and that's what led me into Leading Generously, what kind of institution would be able to support that work, and what qualities would the leaders of that institution need to embody and really genuinely inhabit in order to build an institution capable of supporting a more collaborative, collegial, healthy mode of engagement with the work that we do and with one another. 

So that's where those two projects came from. 

RPR: Yeah, I love that. It's so interesting how just small experiences can lead to such big insights and to just big, just kind of change the way you think about your sector, your institution, your profession, all of those kinds of things. So it's wonderful to hear the impetus of that. And I mean, it's so accurate. I mean, I study and write a lot about burnout and a lot of what leads us into that spiral. It does come from that constant culture of critique, right? 

KF: Absolutely. 

RPR: Everything you do is judged by someone else or multiple people and often in a blind way. So you don't know, you're not having a dialogue with someone who's reading your manuscript or who is looking at your tenure portfolio, or it's a constant kind of secret critique behind the scenes that you're not even a part of that conversation. 

KF: And thinking about those two particular moments of critique, right? Peer review, like double anonymous peer review in which we're all going to be completely impartial and neutral in the ways that engage with one another as if that's a thing that human beings can do, which clearly we cannot. But in that moment and in the moment of tenure review, or even if we just want to say annual merit review, whatever that moment of personnel review is that folks are dealing with, similarly, we create policies and processes that are designed to make them as anonymous and as impartial as possible, but we misunderstand that anonymity and impartiality end up validating certain kinds of work that are more aligned with the status quo than others, and they end up affirming certain kinds of people as well. And because of that, really beginning to think about how we might take those processes, both of which are gatekeeping in a whole lot of ways, right? 

It's are you going to be allowed to publish your article in this journal or are you going to be allowed to continue your employment with this university instead of having processes that are always about are you in out that require this artificial impartiality? Could we imagine processes instead that are formative, that are designed in the case of peer review, to take the work that's being submitted for publication and make it absolutely as good as it can possibly be so that it can be published, right? Rather than understanding this as a review to determine whether it will be published. And similarly with personnel processes like the tenure review, can we think of those as not this upper out marker of you've been here for six years, did you do enough and instead understand that this review for tenure is attempting to figure out whether the past six years give us confidence that this person is going to continue to develop into an amazing scholar going forward. 

So it's still evaluative, but it might be evaluative in a different way and it might be a little less productive of terror if we didn't understand it as being that gatekeeping mode of review and instead thought of it in what Beronda Montgomery, I don't know if you've gotten to read her book, Lessons from Plants. Beronda was a colleague of ours here at MSU, she's now the Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Grinnell College and has this phenomenal book called Lessons From Plants that is ultimately all about mentoring and about the ways that plant life can teach us much more about human relationships and the ways that they can foster growth and opportunity. And she opposes the gatekeeping mode of understanding how we review and evaluate one another to what she calls the ground keeping mode. And groundskeeping really as a metaphor, allows her to think about the conditions under which over the course of the prior six years before that tenure review, we have cultivated a space in which the particular candidate can thrive, and that particular candidate is going to be very different from every other candidate. And so having a process in the end of evaluation that's completely impartial, that treats everyone as if they're exactly the same, ends up hurting everyone involved rather than having a process that might allow us to figure out what this candidate's goals have been, how they've been supported through the process of achieving those goals, and then think about the moment of evaluation as really a supportive and formative mode of saying, here are the things that we really want you to think about as you move forward. 

RPR: It makes it about the community, not just about the individual. Absolutely. Exactly right. How are we fostering each other in this space? How are we coaching each other, mentoring each other to become the best that we can be for our research and for our students? 

RPR: I mean, this is one of Montgomery's arguments is that when we have a plant that does not thrive, we don't ask ourselves what's wrong with the plant. We ask ourselves, what's wrong with the soil? What's wrong with the light? What's wrong with the water? Am I not providing it a good environment in which it can thrive, but about people? We always leap to what's wrong with this person? Why don't they fit here? Why aren't they doing what they need to do? And it somehow becomes their fault as opposed to the environment that hasn't nurtured them in the ways that it needs to. 

RPR: We'll be sure to link to that book in the show notes so that folks have access to that as well. I was having an earlier conversation for the show, for a show that will come out before this one with Katharine Stewart from NC State, and we were talking about the differences between, she was talking about kindness and education, and it is not antithetical to rigor that that you can be rigorous and still be kind, but also the idea that we need to be thinking about being critical in terms of discerning, not critical in terms of mean, and a lot of it has just gotten kind of mean. 

KF: I think that's exactly right. And it's a kind of positioning with respect to critique that many of us, at least most of us I hope, are able to embody when we are giving feedback to our students. I mean, I hope most of us are really invested in helping our students grow and in providing them with what they need in a way that they'll be able to hear. But somehow we feel like providing that same kind of nurturing feedback to a colleague through a peer review process is being soft or insufficiently rigorous, that if we're not on some level being super critical and mean we're not doing our jobs. And that just has always struck me as wrong and really, really, really in need of some thoughtful revision. 

RPR: I just did a project with women leaders and burnout in higher education and looking at how conditions have set them up for burnout in different ways, and I think it's a space where we can be thinking about how do we shift the institution? Obviously Leading Generously has some amazing ideas about collaborative leadership and collective leadership that helps move that forward. What are some of the ways that you talk about and leading generously that we can start shifting to that more collaborative collective space? 

KF: One of the things that I talk about in Generous Thinking has to do with the ways that we as scholars read and the ways that I should acknowledge that I'm coming to this from the perspective of literary studies, which is where my deep grounding in my home really lies. The ways that we as literary scholars separate ourselves from how general interest readers read, right general interest readers read for pleasure or they read superficially. We on the other hand read deeply and we read for critique and we read with deeper theoretical structures in mind. And all of that may be true, but that doesn't mean that the ways the general interest readers read is necessarily superficial, right? Or is meaningless or is just for pleasure. And I'm doing air quotes, which your listeners can't see. So I will say that instead, finding ways that we as scholars can begin to read with the public together across those borders between the academy and our surrounding communities is really crucial, not just for them to understand us better, which I think as we look around the academic landscape right now, we could really use general populace that understands the purpose of higher education and particularly in the humanities, a good bit better than it currently does. 

So I don't want to dismiss that, but I also think there's a lot that we don't understand about the ways that communities view us and the things that they really want out of education, why they're here. Many of our students we assume are just here for a credential in order to get a job, but in fact, a lot of them bring specific and really incredibly important communities for them with them into their educational processes. They're getting this education in order to be able to do something for that community, not just individually for themselves. And so really understanding communities that our students come from is fundamental to doing the work that we're trying to do. And some of that necessitates our being out there in those communities and working more actively with those communities in collaborative ways. That I think is one of the things that looping slowly back around to your question, that I would love to see change in our academic lives. 

I would also really love to see us rethink a lot of our processes of I, our processes on campus. And the ways that our reward structures that are built into them are designed because as I said earlier, our reward structures, by and large are individual and individualistic in nature in the ways that they encourage and support certain kinds of behavior among scholars. Part of what I'm thinking about is, again, coming back to the tenure process, we bring scholars in with this six year race that they feel like they're going to run and they want to know for all the obvious reasons, what does it take to get tenure at this institution? And because they know how institutions operate, they would like that information in quantified form, please, so that I can measure myself against that quantified form and say, have I published my six articles? Yes, I have published my six articles. Or did I publish that book? Yes, I have published that book and can kind of look at it and feel a little bit more secure about how this whole thing is going to go. 

What I would really love for us to be able to work toward in the academy is a mode of understanding that six years of assistant professorship as a process in which every year each scholar is asked to articulate their goals and to say, here is the reason why I am in this business. This is the work that I most want to accomplish. This is what success looks like to me. Have that documented and have it as the basis of a conversation for ongoing mentoring over the course of the year. How's it going? How is the work developing? What kinds of support do you need from the institution in order to be able to achieve the goals that you're working toward? 

And then in the end, have the tenure process be focused on, again, the success that the scholar has achieved in reaching those goals or in working toward those goals, recognizing that over the six years, the goals may change. They may reach some of them and realize that wasn't really the thing that I was after all, I need to change the directions of the work that I'm doing and not have that feel like a failure, right? Not have that produce the anxiety that, oh my gosh, I have to completely retool and now I only have two years left in which to achieve all of the things that I'm supposed to achieve. I mean, I would really love for us to find ways in these tenure and promotion processes. 

And quite frankly, I'm hearing myself now and recognizing that I need to stop talking about tenure and promotion because what a tiny percentage of our faculty actually ever and staff ever actually get to go through this. But I latch onto it because it's one of those things that feels so huge in the life of the institution in terms of who we are is determined by our tenured faculty. And if you are going to become one of them, here are the steps you must take. I would like those steps to be much friendlier to the faculty involved to support their goals rather than some abstracted notion of what a successful scholar looks like. And then if we can achieve that, I would really like us to step back and take a hard look at the rest of the institution, right? The folks who aren't on the tenure stream, the folks who aren't faculty with a capital laugh, and really recognize that everybody on this campus is part of the campus's mission and that everybody on the campus deserves similar forms of support and encouragement and goal setting and professional development and so on. 

And that if we can bring whatever we learn from really remaking a tenure process into something that's more supportive and productive for everyone involved, we might have a chance of looking at our employment categories differently and really thinking about what it would be. I mean, I am currently reading Kevin McClure's The Caring University. I'm just about done with it, and I am so incredibly moved by the ways in which he describes how, frankly, not all that huge changes in the ways we understand employment on our campuses could make those campuses really good places to work, which in many cases, they're just not now. 

RPR: And it comes down to really thinking about higher education as a workplace, right? We are people at a workplace as empowering and amazing as an institution of higher education is it is still a workplace. So how do we make sure that we are nurturing people in that space while those people nurture our students as well? Absolutely. And you've said in your books too, that institutions can't love you back, but we can build institutions where we love each other and we care for each other in those spaces. 

KF: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, what would it be to find ourselves in an institution in which we didn't have to worry about whether the institution loved us back because we understood really that the institution is made up of individuals and those individuals do care so that we could collectively build the structures that make for a more caring university. As Kevin says, if we were able to recognize that institutions, my former colleague, bill Hart Davidson, it's actually his role that I am now in used to say that institutions were made up primarily of three things, buildings which change only very rarely, and with massive, massive investment. People who have shorter careers than buildings do and who come and go with a bit more ease, but who are the heart really of the institution? And then documents and the documents guide everything that the people are able to do in the various buildings of the institution. 

We have a tendency to look at those documents and to think that they've been carved in stone, but they're just paper and not even paper these days, right? They're digital and somebody somewhere on campus owns those documents and is able to think about what would it be to take this document and change it, and what would the effects of those changes be in the ways that the people can interact with one another and can embrace their collective life on campus together? And that's a big part. I mean, documents are boring and revising documents. You always think we're going to spend all this time on revising our bylaws, and they're just going to be put into a drawer and nobody's going to care. But in fact, revising those documents can be this massive collective exercise in envisioning a better future and laying the groundwork and creating the policies and the processes to make that future better. 

RPR: Yeah, it's powerful to think about what we could possibly do when we come together to realize what kind of community we want our institutions to really be and how we want to nurture each other and be there for each other as human beings, not just as minds on sticks. 

KF: Exactly. Exactly. 

RPR: So as we start to wrap up our conversation, I'm wondering what about higher ed brings you the most joy? 

KF: I think what brings me the most joy really, is the people that I get to work with and the opportunities that working with those people presents every single day for something new and unexpected and creative to happen. People are hard, don't get wrong. People present challenges as well, but I have the most amazing colleagues across the college who are doing absolutely incredible work. And every day I get to go into the office and ask some faculty member with whom I haven't gotten to have a conversation before to tell me what their work is and why they care about it. And then to help think with them about how they might be able to pursue that project. And those conversations feel to me like such a privilege to be able to be there as folks think about what they care most about and what excites them most. So I find a lot of my joy in those moments of getting to feel like I can help somebody else do their work better. 

RPR: One last question. I always like to end with this one question. What's one thing you wish all women associated with higher education, new or practiced? 

RPR: That is a really excellent question. I spent 12 years at a really amazing small liberal arts college and started as an assistant professor. I had this sort of idyllic beginning to my career, got tenure, went through the post-tenure process, got promoted to full, and then ended up leaving that position and leaving the academy, frankly, and walked away from tenure and went to work for the Modern Language Association. And in that job, oh my goodness, it was such a change, right? I went from a professor with a tremendous amount of freedom and a tremendous amount of flexibility in my life, and yet an overwhelming number of demands and feeling like work never ended and all of that. I walked into this environment in which I had, for the first time in my postgraduate school career, I had an actual boss, like a real boss who I had to report to and who had to know where I was at all hours of the day. 

It was a 12-month job. So around the entire calendar, there were no summers. It was Monday to Friday, nine to five. There was a dress code I was expected to be in my office. I make this sound very corporate, but it was very corporate in a whole lot of ways. And it made me remember that first of all, this is the way the vast majority of people in the world work. They don't work like the academy does. They work in these much more structured roles. But the thing that I discovered about those structured roles is that there is this thing called the Weekend, and they come every week. And because I was in this very intense 12-month, nine-to-five job, when I walked out of the office, I walked out of the office and I closed the door on Friday. My time was mine. 

And it's been really astonishing coming back into, I've now been at MSU for eight years, and I've managed to hold on to that to some extent. That's recognition that in fact, if I let work come into my evenings, if I let work come into my weekends, that's my choice. I've made that decision that I am actually going to do this thing because it really needs to be done. But I don't let that happen without thought. And so I've managed, by and large to preserve nights and weekends for myself, and I really would love more women in higher education and around higher education to be able to look at the demands on their schedules and to recognize that while the demands don't go away, they can put up guardrails to protect parts of their schedules and to protect their own time for the rest of their lives, and to think about those things called weekends as their very own. 

RPR: Well, thank you so much for this deep conversation, Kathleen. It was lovely to talk to you. 

KF: Oh, it's great talking with you too, Rebecca. Thank you so much. 

RPR: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Agile Academic podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode a transcript and show notes theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.