Leading Generously: The Liberal Arts and Tools for Transformation

At this hour of the world, beginning an essay about the profession with an invocation of crisis is hardly unusual. In fact, it veers dangerously into the territory of cliché, so expected as to say absolutely nothing. And yet, given recent events at my institution, Michigan State University—as well as events at all our institutions, not to mention the circumstances surrounding those of us without the privilege of institutional affiliation—to speak of the state of things without taking some time to dwell in the crisis feels all but impossible.

Many of the kinds of crises we talk about in academic life have been with us for quite some time, particularly those we experience in the shrinking corner of campus where the liberal arts seem to have been stuffed away. The enduring nature of these conditions and responses to them has been described by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon in Permanent Crisis, which traces the long history of the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities back to the establishment of the German university system. That system gave shape to much of the structure of research universities in the contemporary United States, and many of its fights have likewise come to be ours. Reitter and Wellmon, in digging into that lineage, argue that the existence of the humanities in the modern era is dependent on that sense of crisis:

For nearly a century and a half, claims about a “crisis of the humanities” have constituted a genre with remarkably consistent features: anxiety about modern agents of decay, the loss of authority and legitimacy, and invocations of “the human” in the face of forces that dehumanize and alienate humans from themselves, one another, and the world. These claims typically lead to the same, rather paradoxical conclusion: modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities. Without a sense of crisis, the humanities would have neither purpose nor direction. (132)

Whether this same sense of crisis and its causes can be extrapolated to include the entirety of the academy is of course an open question, and yet it’s easy to see the ways that contemporary agents of decay, the loss of intellectual authority, and a general process of dehumanization have been the enemy of higher education at large. Even at that scale it may be true that our sense of crisis, our sense of swimming against the cultural tides, has long given higher education its purpose.

However, there are some particularities to the situation of higher education today—the threats our institutions, our departments, our fields, and our researchers and instructors face—that are not simply rhetorical: the labor crisis, the economic crisis, and the political crisis.

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve watched as more and more good positions—with job security, adequate salaries, full benefits, and above all academic freedom—have been sucked into the gig economy. This ongoing adjunctification is happening across all fields on our campuses but is especially acute at the introductory levels, in those areas of the curriculum that are meant to prepare students for anything that they go on to study. The effects of this labor crisis are manifold. As fewer teaching faculty members have the ability to obtain tenure, fewer gain an influential voice in campus governance, and undergraduate instruction becomes increasingly devalued in favor of grant- and publication-producing research. Service responsibilities are divided among fewer and fewer faculty members, leaving them overburdened and at real risk of burnout. Worst of all, the hierarchical divides on campus—between tenured and untenured, permanent and contingent, faculty and support staff—become deeper and wider.

This of course works hand in hand with the economic crisis that our institutions are mired in. As public funding provides a smaller and smaller portion of university budgets, the costs of higher education have shifted radically from the state to individual students and their families. As those costs escalate, the pressure on students to think of higher education as a market exchange grows. If they’re going to sink tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into the purchase of a four-year degree, it’s not the least bit surprising that students would also face increasing pressure (whether internal or from their families or communities or the media) to select a degree program that seems to promise an obvious and lucrative career outcome. And thus majors that are named after jobs or industries grow, and those that aren’t shrink, and anything that seems the least bit impractical or, heaven forbid, critical becomes a luxury that our institutions, like our students, cannot afford.

And then there is the political crisis, which has been brewing for decades but has taken a particularly acute turn in the last few years. The attacks on critical race theory, the moves to ban books from libraries, the attempts to eradicate tenure, the direct interference in the curriculum—all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that higher education serves in the world.

There are myriad other crises, from the local to the global, that have surrounded all of us in recent years. Reitter and Wellmon’s sense that “modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity” may well be “a circular story” of the “salvation” project that rests at the heart of the humanities’ mission, but the threat and the work we have ahead are not rhetorical. They are instead very material, and they demand material responses.

I believe that we have at hand the means of responding to the external crises faced by our fields and our institutions and of improving our responses to the internal crises we experience. I believe that we can demonstrate through the ways we go about our work a better path for the future of our institutions. In Generous Thinking, I argued for stronger connections between our institutions and the many publics that we serve, since these connections might help facilitate a renewed sense of higher education as a public good. A range of forms of public scholarship, including community-engaged research and open publishing processes, might help us build those connections.

But this isn’t a simple proposition. Encouraging individual scholars to engage in more open, connected forms of scholarship requires deep institutional change, in order to ensure that the work they do is valued and supported. Our institutions need to transform the ways that they value and reward public work, create the policies that can help us account for and support public work, and adopt the processes and platforms that can bring public work to life. And, as I argue in the larger project, all of this requires us. Those of us who work for and care about our colleges and universities have to get active and organized on campus and begin developing the new structures that can enable our institutions to emerge from the current crises better than they were before.

Most important among those new structures is a new form of academic leadership. We need that new form of academic leadership because the crises we are mired in demonstrate that the current model is irreparably broken.

I want to be clear in what I’m saying here: there are some very good people doing the best work they possibly can in many of our campus leadership roles. It’s not the people that need replacing, or at least not all the people, and in fact the exercise of replacing them with new leaders with new visions has become a process of institutional deck chair rearranging while the ship continues to sink with the rest of us on board. The problem lies not with the people but with the systems within and through which they work. These systems form the model of academic leadership we need to contend with, a model with boards and presidents and innumerable vice presidents that comes to us directly from the hierarchical structures of corporate governance. Those structures are ill-suited to the operation of nonprofit entities in general, as is argued by many of the folks involved in reimagining nonprofit leadership today, including Michael Allison, Susan Misra, and Elissa Perry; Simon Mont; and Aja Couchois Duncan, Mark Leach, Elissa Perry, and Natasha Winegar, just to name a few. And those ill-suited structures are doing grave damage to the purposes of higher education.

This is why our mission statements die a little every time someone says that the university should be run more like a business: because all our institutions are already being run like businesses, and long have been. Of course, what that someone means when they say that the university should be run more like a business is that we should be keeping a closer eye on the bottom line, we should be relentless in our pursuit of innovation, we should be eliminating the product lines that aren’t producing sufficient revenue, we should be keeping our frontline labor in check, and so on. All of which we’ve been subjected to for decades now, and all of which has contributed to the sorry state we’re in.

Even worse, however, are the unspoken parts of “like a business”: the individualist, competitive models for success that are foundational to corporate structures. These reward structures are actively preventing our institutions from flourishing. This is true not just at the micro level, where each student and employee is required to compete for resources, but also at the macro level, where our institutions, instead of developing any of the cross-institutional collaborations that could lift the entire sector, square off in the marketplace and create rankings-driven lists of winners and losers.

This is the bottom line: universities are not meant to be profit centers, and they shouldn’t be run that way. They are shared infrastructures dedicated to a form of mutual aid, in which those who have—in this case, knowledge—support those who need, with the goal of producing a more just and equitable society.

Dean Spade describes mutual aid as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse.” And as Peter Kropotkin argued at the turn of the twentieth century, mutual aid, mutual protection, and mutually beneficial cooperation have been as important to the development of both animal and human societies as the Darwinian mode of competition for survival. In fact, though history focuses on the role of conflict in societies—it makes for a more thrilling narrative than does cooperation—Kropotkin indicates the significance of mutual aid for the ways we live and especially for the ways we learn:

[T]he practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in arts, industry, and science. (296)

The development, then, not just of the softer, more aesthetic subjects that we in the humanities study but of the broader forms of knowledge studied across our campuses, required mutual aid. And they still require mutual aid to continue developing. And the need for mutual aid should press us to consider that the ideal model for the university is not the corporation but the cooperative, in which every member has a stake in the successful outcome of the whole and is as a result committed to full participation in its processes.

In collective models such as the co-op, leadership is of necessity coalition-based rather than hierarchical. It is both built from relationships and built to sustain relationships. And this is a model that I would like to see us espouse for the future of academic leadership.

Coalition and leadership may not seem to go together well, I’ll acknowledge; our ideas about what it is to lead have largely come to us from the corporate universe, as filtered through our business schools. A leader in that model is a strong, visionary individual capable of seeing the future and pressing an institution toward it. But if you’ve been paying attention to the higher education press for the last several years, you might already have a sense of why, coming from the MSU perspective, I am somewhat less than sanguine about the transformative potential embodied in the folks that our campuses designate as leaders. In fact, referring to members of upper administration and boards as leadership is a profound misnomer. They are, more properly, management, charged with keeping the institution running in accordance with the status quo.

Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of creating change, and not only can that work be done anywhere within the organizational chart, but it’s most effective when it emerges through a grassroots process of coalition building rather than through a top-down mandate. It’s not incidental that John Kotter has argued that most organizations today are “over-managed and under-led” (37), and academia is no exception. In fact, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with—and, worse, an inability to create—change.

So how do we reorganize ourselves in ways that will enable us to create the change that our campuses so desperately need? For the last few years I’ve been working on a project focused on exactly that question, a question that I left wide open at the end of Generous Thinking. For this new project, I’ve conducted interviews with a number of people, mostly mid-level managers within their institutions, whom I consider to be leading the process of transformative change. Nearly all of them point to the need for collaboration, for listening, for mutual support, and so on, to create the ground on which transformation can grow. As Chris Bourg, the director of libraries at MIT, said to me, “The leadership skills for the future of higher education are 100% coalition-building and relationships.” This is true at every level throughout our institutions: our collective success at the department level, the college level, the university level, depends on our becoming and acting as a collective, on our developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear. And that process—determining what our shared goals are and should be and how we should go about realizing them—requires a kind of interrelation that is not merely personal but also, of necessity, political.

When I talk about politics in this context, I do not mean to point to any of the politician-driven shenanigans taking place in Washington, in our state capitols, and on many of our campuses. Rather, I mean to point to the definition of politics Iris Marion Young offers in Justice and the Politics of Difference, which she uses to describe “all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decisionmaking” (9), and in particular the ways that she suggests “the concept of justice coincides with the concept of the political,” arguing that every effort must be made to enhance collective evaluation and decision-making if we are to create the possibility for just institutions (34). Just institutions require political action, but the ways that collective evaluation and decision-making have been trammeled on our campuses by the erosion of shared governance into bureaucratic busywork have left most of us feeling less than enthusiastic about the prospects. And, in fact, that kind of depoliticization is a core principle of management: getting things done by minimizing input and eliminating controversy.

So to come back around to the key question behind this essay: How can the future of leadership on our campuses be shaped by the liberal arts and our ways of working? What I want to suggest is that the liberal arts, and the humanities in particular, are the areas on campus that are the most dependent on mutual aid in order to flourish and that have the most to gain from the full realization of mutual aid. Our fields and our colleagues have suffered enormously under the competitive corporate regimes to which we’ve been subjected. If there’s going to be change, it has to begin with us. This is not to say that we need more academic leaders to rise out of our fields, as we’ve all seen visionary colleagues whose transformative potential gets crushed by the structures of administration that subsume them. Rather, I would argue that our fields as we inhabit them on the ground might begin to model a new structure of cooperation that can serve as a starting point for the radical restructuring of academic hierarchies. We have the greatest opportunities—because of our training, because of our ways of working, because of our understanding of the always-already political, and in some ways because of our outsider status within our own institutions—to create an alternative to the failed model for academic leadership and its basis in the individualist principles of the corporate economy. We can work together to develop properly politicized cultures of mutual aid based on collective action within our departments. Similarly, we can ensure that our departments interact with one another guided by principles of mutual support. We can experiment with radical forms of collective governance and power sharing at the department level, and we can create a model that the rest of the institution might find persuasive.

This all sounds super pie in the sky, I recognize, and I’m willing to admit that my inner Pollyanna is running a bit wild. I hope, however, you’ll consider Dean Spade’s conviction that “crisis conditions require bold tactics” and that the boldest of these tactics is mutual aid. True cooperation and collective action might provide a path out of the crises that beset us and toward a liberal arts that can transform higher education as a whole.

Works Cited

Allison, Michael, et al. “Doing More with More: Putting Shared Leadership into Practice.” Nonprofit Quarterly, 25 June 2018, nonprofitquarterly.org/doing-more-with-more-putting-shared-leadership-into-practice/.

Bourg, Chris. Zoom interview with the author. 25 May 2021.

Duncan, Aja Couchois, et al. “Butterflies, Pads, and Pods: Interdependent Leadership for the World We Want.” Change Elemental, 15 Oct. 2021, changeelemental.org/resources/butterflies-pads-and-pods/.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Generous Thinking. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019.

Kotter, John P. “What Leaders Really Do.” HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership, Harvard Business Review Press, 2011, pp. 37–55.

Kropotkin, Peter Alekseevich. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. William Heineman, 1902.

Mont, Simon. “The Future of Nonprofit Leadership: Worker Self-Directed Organizations.” Nonprofit Quarterly, 31 Mar. 2017, nonprofitquarterly.org/future-nonprofit-leadership/.

Reitter, Paul, and Chad Wellmon. Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. U of Chicago P, 2021.

Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity during This Crisis (and the Next). Verso Books, 2020.

Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton UP, 2011.