Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University

by Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Can the university solve the social and political crisis in America? Higher education occupies a difficult place in twenty-first-century American culture. Universities―the institutions that bear so much responsibility for the future health of our nation―are at odds with the very publics they are intended to serve. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick asserts, it is imperative that we re-center the mission of the university to rebuild that lost trust. Critical thinking―the heart of what academics do―can today often negate, refuse, and reject new ideas. In an age characterized by rampant anti-intellectualism, Fitzpatrick charges the academy with thinking constructively rather than competitively, building new ideas rather than tearing old ones down. She urges us to rethink how we teach the humanities and to refocus our attention on the very human ends―the desire for community and connection―that the humanities can best serve. One key aspect of that transformation involves fostering an atmosphere of what Fitzpatrick dubs "generous thinking," a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaboration over competition. Fitzpatrick proposes ways that anyone who cares about the future of higher education can work to build better relationships between our colleges and universities and the public, thereby transforming the way our society functions. She encourages interested stakeholders to listen to and engage openly with one another's concerns by reading and exploring ideas together; by creating collective projects focused around common interests; and by ensuring that our institutions of higher education are structured to support and promote work toward the public good. Meditating on how and why we teach the humanities, Generous Thinking is an audacious book that privileges the ability to empathize and build rather than simply tear apart.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Teaching, Academia

280 pages, Hardcover

First published February 12, 2019

About the author

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming this role in 2017, she served as Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, where she was Managing Editor of PMLA and other MLA publications. During that time, she also held an appointment as Visiting Research Professor of English at NYU. She is author of Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming), as well as Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011) and of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006). She is project director of Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 16,000 scholars and practitioners in the humanities.

Reviews

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very powerful, thoughtful, and moving call to rethink higher education, Generous Thinking is a must-read for anyone interested in academia's future. Or its present.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick begins by suggesting academics working at public universities attend more carefully and seriously to the rest of the country. She then develops this point with painstaking, exquisite nuance, touching on pedagogy, curricula, national politics, university structures, and a lot of theory concerning humanity and society. At every point the author's attention to detail - and to people - shines through.

Fitzpatrick composed Generous Thinking in part by subjecting the draft to web-based feedback. In the published text she engages with many commentators, providing a richer and unusual experience. You can find the web text, including comments, here.

At the same time the book is very accessible. The author writes with a minimum of jargon, and reduced the normal scholarly bibliography to a more manageable size.

I would like to see more. For example, I'd like to see further development of technology. Does Fitzpatrick think open educational resources (OER) and open access in scholarly publication would serve her strategy of renewed generosity? What is the role of faculty and staff at private colleges and universities, which educate perhaps 35-40% of students? Do STEM faculty have a different roles than humanists? Naturally, one sign of a successful book is leaving the reader demanding more, please.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly great book! This is the main argument: facing a decline in support for higher education, universities need to turn away from privatization, efficiency, competition, prestige, and individualism and turn toward building more responsive, more open, more positive relationships that reach across the borders of our campuses. We can do so by cultivating “generous thinking,” a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, collaboration over competition, and lingering with the ideas in front of us rather than continually pressing forward where we want to go.

My favorite chapter is chapter two on "reading together" which encourages scholars to read and engage with texts in a way that focuses less on mastery and more on connection (86). Showing more enthusiasm and finding ways to show what we love about our work may help us demonstrate what is important about our work without requiring us to do so through competition (130).

[Geoffrey Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thoughtful approach to both the work we do within higher education and in relation to the larger publics we should be in more dialogue, conversation and collaboration with. Fitzpatrick's central argument about transforming our competitive academic environments (with its obsession on prestige) is sound, as is her desire for universities to be better engaged (and more mutually receptive and responsive) with the communities and publics external to our campuses is one I share. At times, I felt less like this was a new argument, but I think that has a lot to do with our different contexts. She's at large, land-grant public university, while my role at a small, liberal arts, Jesuit university has allowed me (and my colleagues) to be more attuned to this kind of work. Still, a good read.

[Kinho Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The core tenets of generous thinking are:

- Listening over speaking
- Community over individualism
- Collaboration over competition

These ideas resonate with me. The vision for a community-oriented higher education built on the foundation of generous thinking is both exciting and daunting. This book is well-researched. The ideas are thoroughly-vetted and clearly presented. However, I am not sure the author has done enough here to convince the skeptics about higher education being a public good. The authors also acknowledged and discussed many of substantial obstacles for this approach to higher education.

"Recent events do not give me hope, but they do give me purpose."

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this in 2025 feels almost like a quaint elegy for the problem solving of a bygone era: higher ed is exponentially more reviled now and the sciences have joined the humanities in general scorn. But “generous thinking” is attractive nonetheless.

[Erin Whitteck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking book about re-orienting priorities in Universities towards the public good.

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Felt the substantive elements could have been presented in a brief article. It also felt a bit like a who's-who's of major topics in academia, but at a very rudimentary presentation and joined together by the generous/common good perspective. The abundant name dropping was distracting - I'd say pick references or the literature review approach to allow readers to separate the wheat from the chaff. I couldn't decide who the audience for this was - public or academic; I feel like it failed on both.

[Ginny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I chose to read this book as part of a project for my HIED 801: College and University Leadership course. I wasn't sure if I would enjoy this book because sometimes I'm a fan of "radical approaches" and sometimes they scare me to death. But, I was pleasantly surprised with this book. Kathleen Fitzpatrick made me think deeply about higher education reform in a way that very few higher education books ever have.

In the Introduction, Fitzpatrick breaks down some issues with the competitive nature of higher education, both within and outside of the institutions. She promotes "generous thinking" as a way to collaborate rather than compete with the general public and with each other, both on an institutional and individual level. She acknowledges that this requires a complete rethinking of how higher education operates and interacts with people, and she promises to take us through how that rethinking might occur.

Chapter 1, On Generosity, is all about how education can be generous through our acts, our values, our feelings, and our practices. Fitzpatrick spends quite a bit of time at the end of the chapter discussing the importance of listening. She argues that we don't listen enough in higher education (true) and encourages us to rethink why that is and how to be better listeners to each other and to the public.

In Chapter 2 (by far my favorite), Fitzpatrick dissects the processes and practices of reading within the academy and within the public. She argues that higher education has long used reading to create divides and discusses how we can instead use it to create community and collaboration. As an English teacher turned higher education professional, this chapter was like a song to me. Fitzpatrick's use of reading as an allegory for higher education's relationship with the public is nothing short of genius in my opinion, and she executes it wonderfully accessible way.

Chapter 3 delves into working within and among the public. Fitzpatrick talks a lot about open access journals and how to engage the public in the work of the academy. When she talks about engagement, she's referring to deep, relational, consistent, and purposeful engagement. She is not referring to short-term partnerships or an exchange of money or services. This was the chapter where I really started to think. Fitzpatrick starts to get practical in this chapter, and some of her proposals completely buck traditional norms in higher education - which, for the record, I am completely on board with.

The practicality continues in Chapter 4, when Fitzpatrick digs deeply into the paradigm shifts that must occur within the university in order to make these changes and shift toward generosity and empathy rather than privatization and competition. She is not afraid to think big and push the envelope, which I appreciated and enjoyed. I found myself shaking my head during this chapter quite a bit.

Fitzpatrick concludes with a call to action - to engage in conversation around these issues, not to be afraid to think big, to collaborate with our community members, and to work for the good of the public. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to everyone who works in higher education in any form, anyone who lives in or near a town with a university, and really anyone who cares about education in the United States at all.

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came in cold to this and yet found myself startlingly impressed in the opening pages. There are a number of welcome admissions, such as the recognition that critique has triumphed over tradition and that the humanities have lost much ground in the university, which is transforming before our eyes. Or, to use Fitzpatrick's words,

One of the key things that hasn't worked is the impassioned plea on behalf of humanities fields: a welter of defences of the humanities from both inside and outside the academy has been published in recent years, each of which has seemed slightly more defensive than the last, and none of which has had the desired effect. [...] As the unsuccessful defences proliferate, the public view of the humanities becomes all the worst.

So it goes.
In her "radical approach to sav[e] the university", Fitzpatrick turns to the firmament on which the university is build: that the university provides an essential public good that can be found nowhere else, and that its public goods must be defended and reinvested in. So far, I agree, but in the pages that follow I find Generous Thinking merely another pliable acceptance of market-based consumption that is served by the humanities as a mark of individual successes and pleasures.

Here's an idea: instead of assuming that the market sorts out the best humanities perspectives that emerge from a set of researchers who pursue self-interested projects that they must then popularize against a seemingly overwhelming tide of societal neglect, what if researchers applied their power and tenacity to public issues identified through a return to public valuation of subjects? I don't know, it's rough and it's flawed, but I can't stand another book by an English professor who feels that better marketing is a radical approach to getting everyone to understand their ideas, which will change the world.

[Denny Corvetto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fitzpatrick's book might be able to save us. As you well know, Trump and his medieval wealth co-hort came into power after their stints as slum lords and subjects for Robin Leech's "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"in the 80s and after Ivanka told us to call him "The Donald" and after the 11th bankruptcy and the job on WWF/WWE and the "Apprentice" and the 3rd marriage. This is a cohort of profoundly unread people and the people like them. What they like and what their supporters like, all the way down to the housekeepers at the Pennelville Red Roof Inn, we readers find embarrassing and threatening and toxic. This on a political and ecological and characterological level. Im NOT condescending. Its just that OUR university-industry was a useful foil by which to motivate NON-readers into a powerful political, world threatening (Fuck the Paris Protocols!) force. Prof Fitzpatrick goes into this binary schism, those who read, the lettered, the unlettered, the comix and graphic novel fans, the black and the white, the gay and the straight, to show how WE might stand united against our non-reading nemesis. Be tuff. Go on offense. Be passionate in your presentation. Hunt and fish and wear crappy clothes and tuff guy jackets and you girls leather boots and read Jane Austen and Percivel Everett and Alan Moore and Lou Reed and that new authoress from North Africa and S.Korea. (has S America produced any women authors of note in the last deacde?). Get your fucking book clubs together so we can destroy this anti-reading malevolency that Trump and his cohort have mobilized to further enrich, AT OUR ATMOSPHERE's, OUR CHILDREN'S EXPENSE, their last 18 years of life on the planet.

[Katherine Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has long been a proponent of altering the fundamental values of higher education and university infrastructure. What she's proposing is a values-based structure as opposed to the competitive, political jockeying for everything (funding, students, prestige) in a univsersity setting. It's risky to propose throwing out the status quo for faculty -- because faculty in all public universities have a say in the university through shared governance. If we can change that outlook from the faculty on up (instead of top down), we'll have a system that can articulate the needs for curricular shifts and move the needle on the anti-education thread that seems to be running through our country. Ed tech is not going to save the university system. Vocational training is not going to save the university system, nor the U.S. need for engaged citizens.

Her writing is accessible at all levels. Though it refers to the existing university infrastructure, it's plausible that an interested reader will understand that the current system isn't working. It's not meant as a roadmap. Kathleen never pretends to provide a universal salve. Instead, this is an invitation to think differently and take that to your committees to ask other faculty to join in that exploration of values in order to solve some of the university's issues.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have much admiration for the spirit behind this book, particularly its desire to do away with the competitiveness that surrounds all aspects of academia and renew our commitment to thinking of all education as a public service. For the most part, I also found all of Fitzpatrick's ideas compelling and smart. However, I didn't feel like the book succeeded in achieving what she suggested she wanted: a book that would be easily read and understood by those outside academia. I could be wrong about this. Fitzpatrick rightfully points out that many of these people have been educated and trained by us, and are more sophisticated and critical readers and thinkers than we might imagine them to be. But it wasn't the tone or jargon in Fitzpatrick's book that made me think it might be a touch too inaccessible to most outside academia. It was the presumed knowledge that I couldn't quite imagine would be familiar to even academics outside of the humanities and social sciences. All of this said, I'd recommend this to anyone in academia. It's an incredibly important subject. One that far more of us should be grappling with.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I waffled on this book while reading. At times I thought it was brilliant and thought with outrage about the ways in which my own colleagues and I compete for raises (we don’t receive cost of living or merit raises and instead work overtime to compete for a few teaching awards that come with a salary bump) through arguments we make about being a better teacher while service awards carry less monetary value and there are only two for the entire university - service has real value, just as community writing and work does, and they aren’t valued within the U. Much of what she says about generous thinking rings true.

However, I found myself repeatedly frustrated by understanding how it was me and my peers that this additional work fell to. And yet, even if administrators are a better audience for whet she says, it’s the administrators who primarily benefit from both the market-driven model and the prestige-driven model. So, yes, more work for faculty. And innovation and new ways of thinking and a public who needs to be moved in a political climate where they’re moving the other way. In the end, I feel simultaneously generous and defeated.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Generous Thinking makes an appeal towards open scholarship and rethinking the role of higher education in todays world. As someone in this industry I am a firm believer that we are in a crossroads of the role of the university in the United States, but this book does nothing to propose any solutions and is a combination of various blog ideas put into a book calling for more discussion. I found the author to be fairly pedantic and her audience was very much intended to be university professors which is great as that is where change is going to come from but not much for mass appeal to the average reader or even those outside of academia in higher education. Hopefully this will be a starting point for a discussion, but this is not where you are going to find any answers. If you want to look at some of the transformative areas of higher ed today look at the various books on guided pathways and the way in which curriculum is being looked at to serve working adults and convey the needed components of education today.

[Brett Waytuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

As others have noted, an interesting call for the overhaul and realignment of advanced education based on community rather than personality. What was lacking was a sense of the way forward in any practical terms -- there were a lot of descriptions of dedicated but non-professional community building, followed by statements that the point was not to de-professionalize the academy; but then, no real ideas of how this could be effectively put into practice until the last chapter. In the last chapter there was also a detailed look at the Wisconsin experience and history, but precious little on how that failed in a few short years with myopic Republicans in charge and how it could ever be effectively re-established. There was also nothing that convinced me that the political right and libertarians were ever going to be swayed or engage in meaningful conversations around community -- Fitzgerald did not convince me that doing good (through generosity) was going to sway that vocal, ideological minority that controls government funding and policy.

[Luke V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appreciated this book... it's a very thoughtful reflection on and proposal for addressing some of the primary challenges facing higher education. And as a librarian, in a field known for sharing, it speaks to me. Universities can't cloister themselves and expect their communities to value them beyond the transactional degree-for-job that strips much of the richness away from the work the university does. The author's answer is openness and collaboration. I love the calls for public humanities and open access, an opening of the scholarly community.

[Vivian Halloran · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading for anyone who works in the academy. A smart, accessible, and hopeful diagnosis of the state of higher education today, grounded in a firm historical understanding of how we got to where we are, with bold suggestions for how to change our own approach to teaching, learning, producing knowledge, making community, and preserving the commons. Highly enjoyable read. Thought-provoking.

[Aimee Knupsky (bookchantment) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chapters on generosity and reading are 5 stars. Excellent discussions.

[Gerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The vocational direction of universities needs to be rethought and focus on research for profits same should be curtailed while blue skies research must be encouraged.

[Josh Nudell]

I wrote about Generous Thinking

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author does a great job of articulating the need for a more constructive orientation in higher education. This book is even more relevant now than when it was written.

[Andrea Bearman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Thought provoking and motivational

[Glori Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

An informed discussion about the importance of liberal arts and community collaboration in universities, as well as a look at some of the less productive aspects of university culture.