 Welcome everybody to the spring 2019 CNI member meeting. We have a great turnout this year and I'm delighted to see you all here and to welcome you or in some cases welcome you back to St. Louis. Some longtime attendees will remember that we did in fact meet at this very hotel about five or six years ago and it's nice to be back here. So let me add a special welcome to our international attendees. That is not getting any easier but it's wonderful that you all were able to make it here and join us. It's been quite a morning so far. I'll note we've had two rounds of our executive round table one yesterday afternoon and one this morning look at institutional strategies for migration to the cloud and we'll be producing a report of that hopefully in the next month or two and I think you'll find that very interesting reading based on our conversations over the last two days. With that I want to get on to why we're really all here and it's a tremendous pleasure for me to be able to welcome Kathleen Fitzpatrick. I got to know her back when she was at the Modern Language Association where she undertook the monumental and monumentally difficult task of trying to genuinely get the MLA to grapple with the fact that scholarly communication is transitioning into a digital world with all that that implies. Just being willing to step up and say I'm going to take that on is a pretty breathtaking undertaking that I can see she's laughing a little bit but anybody willing to take that on has my unmitigated admiration. She is now a professor of English and the director of digital humanities at Michigan State University and she's very recently published a lovely book which you may have read some about in the Higher Education Press with the beautiful title of Generous Thinking. It's worth noting by the way in one of these interesting coincidences that it's published by John Hopkins University Press which is itself a CNI member separate from Johns Hopkins University and they are actually raffling off a couple of copies of the book and there's stuff on Twitter about that if you're interested but just the sort of closed circle there is kind of wonderful. I'm not going to try and describe Generous Thinking because Kathleen will do that far more competently than I can other than to note that it feels like sometimes there are ideas that are just finding their time and one of them is this idea of collective and collaborative action as a way to deal with problems that seem to be intractable when you're dealing with them from narrow individual or institutional advantage perspectives and I think that the recognition of that spirit at that time is very much part of what I believe Kathleen is going to talk to us about today and with that please join me in welcoming Kathleen. Thank you so much. I want to start today by thanking Cliff and the rest of the CNI team for inviting me to talk with you today and for getting me here. I'm really looking forward as always to the conversations that we'll develop over the next course of today and tomorrow. So much of the talk ahead does grow out of the work that I did in my recent book Generous Thinking, a radical approach to saving the university. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require re-grounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as generous thinking, focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity, both on campus and across our campus borders. Now the radical approach part of the book's subtitle grows out of my increasing sense that this necessary change is a huge one, that it can't be made incrementally and that instead it requires, as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of The Great Mistake, a paradigm shift because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can get us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan-Cottum has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today, this is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product, this requires politics. Now the problem after all begins with politics. The American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal arts based education broadly available has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability, but an increasing threat to its very public orientation. As rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good, a broadly educated public, to the production of market oriented individual benefit. And all the while we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period. And this falling confidence cannot simply be dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life, though of course without doubt that too. But rather must be understood as evidence that as I argue in the last chapter of generous thinking, higher education has for several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms. On the one hand an older paradigm largely operative within the academic community in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge. And on the other hand a more recent one in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market oriented credentials. Now the crisis in higher education today stems both from the incommensurability of these two paradigms and from the fact that both of them are failing if in different ways. Now as Thomas Kuhn noted in the structure of scientific revolutions the failure of a scientific paradigm as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the period of pronounced professional insecurity that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift. The cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. And my argument is that we are precisely in need of such a paradigm shift if higher education as we want it to be is to survive. So generous thinking explores this problem from a number of different angles. I'm asking all of us who care about the future of higher education. Faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit grounded in all of the competition and structures that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education to instead focus on the university's role in building community. So some of my thoughts here today grow out of this aspect of generous thinking, but some stem more pragmatically from my work over the last few years working on Humanities Commons, which is a nonprofit community developed and governed network serving humanity scholars and organizations. Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of generous thinking. First, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what it is that we do. And second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them. Restoring service to the public good, not just to their mission statements, but to their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation, even among those institutions that we call private, can allow us to build the kind of community that can sustain them. And part of resisting privatization, both for scholars and for their institutions, involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent. And instead, reserving our investments and our labor for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. We need collectively to turn our attention to the shared publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing. Modes that might help higher education return to its mission of public service. But developing this form of community supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it and the work that will be necessary So the stories that I'm about to tell are ones with which all of you are much too familiar. And in many cases with which you are far more intimately familiar than I am. I hope you'll forgive this. My usual audiences when I'm talking about this stuff are scholars and administrators who don't always have a clear sense of why community supported infrastructure might matter. In the examples that I'm about to cite help make that importance clear, right? So little moment of preaching to the choir and then I'll move on. Though the issues that I'm discussing of course long predate this particular moment that came into stark visibility in August 2017 when B-Press announced that it had been purchased by the Relics Group the multinational parent company of publishing Behemoth Elsevier. Now B-Press had of course been founded in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. So B-Press grew out of the academy and it was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at heart. As the B-Press website notes over 500 institutions have purchased B-Press services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly accessible ways. And in one fell swoop those 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing Behemoths such as Elsevier. So what had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure built and run by academics for the academic community appeared to have been turned on that community. I mean it's not as though anyone had been unaware that B-Press was a commercial service all along but they were one of the good guys and the costs of outsourcing infrastructural needs to them had been balanced against the often impossible task of maintaining locally hosted repository and publishing systems. So B-Press provided what many saw as best of breed functionality at a reasonable price and it supported library's desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world. But the acquisition of B-Press by Relics not only put libraries in the position of unintentionally supporting a growing corporate control not just of scholarly publishing but of the entirety of the research workflow from discovery through production to communication. And it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely in promoting greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. So as a result serious conversations have since focused on means of supporting open source academy owned and controlled infrastructure. This is not an impossible move by any stretch but it's harder than it might sound. Longstanding open access open infrastructure projects like archive might suggest some possible areas of concern. By every reasonable measure archive has been exemplary in its uptake its independence and in the ways that it has helped to transform the fields that it serves. But in some crucial ways archive has experienced what can only be called catastrophic success. A crucial paradigm shifting project whose growing annual operating costs and mounting infrastructural requirements have demanded increasingly creative mechanisms for the platform's support. So in 2010 the archive team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource. But our institutions as we unfortunately know are largely unaccustomed to this work of cross institutional collaboration. For one thing they're far more prone to understand a resource like this as terrain for competition and for another the community building required becomes yet another form of labor added on top of maintaining the resources themselves. Now I do not know the extent to which such difficulties may have played a role in archives recent move from the library to Cornell Computing and Information Science. It's entirely likely that the move is a matter of infrastructural pragmatics but even so challenges of maintaining the kinds of cross institutional coalition necessary to sustain such a crucial resource remain. Another project with a different narrative might be found in the Sam Vera project. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories today rely developers at a number of institutions come together to create a collective solution as the proverb and their website have it if you want to go far go together. But this distributed developer community like all such communities has faced some challenges in coordination challenges that have caused it as the proverb also reminds us to go more slowly than it might. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers involved in the project but of the institutions for which the developers actually work is not an easy matter. So the foundation of the challenges that archive and Sam Vera have faced is the same challenge faced by any number of other projects and programs and initiatives sustainability. Now this is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late as my colleagues and I have been working to make sure that humanity's commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And these attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point. They too would like to see the network thrive but they can't support it indefinitely. We need they reasonably suggest a plan for demonstrating that the network will at some point be able to thrive. Now sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models in business plans in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a nonprofit entity forever tied to the kinds of economic concerns that are often very divergent from if not at odds with the nonprofit's primary mission. And as a result those nonprofits remain forever precarious. One small population can make the difference between survival and collapse. But sustainability broadly understood extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed or waste produced then can be developed or managed in the near term. There's technological sustainability in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects future stability and growth. And all of these forms of sustainability are important to varying degrees to providing for the future of nonprofit and open source projects. But there's another form that I think gets a good bit less attention and that I increasingly believe precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability and the social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project but to the determination of those people to support their groupness. Not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together but their commitment to the concept of together in the first place. And ensuring those commitments are sustained is I increasingly think a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward. So this notion of the role of community in community supported software and of the best ways of building and sustaining it raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. As Miranda Joseph argues in against the romance of community, the concept is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life. A set of ostensibly organic felt relationships that harken back to a mythical pre-modern moment in which people lived and worked in direct connection with one another without the mediating forces of capitalism. Now community is in this sense, in Benedict Anderson's sense, an imagined relationship and even an imaginary one as its invocation is designed to yoke together bodies whose existence as a group is largely constructed. It's a concept often used both idealistically and as a form of discipline. A claim of unity that smooths over and thus suppresses internal difference and disagreement. And as Joseph points out the notion of community is often deployed as if the relationships that it describes could provide an antidote to or an escape from the problems created by contemporary political and economic life. But this suggestion serves to distract us, she says, from the supplementary role that community in fact actually serves with respect to capitalism, sort of filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network-based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises rather than demanding universal healthcare and elementary school bake sales rather than asking for education. So community becomes in this sense an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibility, pardon me, responsibilities. So it's important to be careful in issuing calls to build community. Calls like these issued uncritically not only run the risk of enabling the institutions that structure contemporary life to absolve disabilities for public care, but they also risk essentializing a highly complex and intersectional set of social relations. So treating those relations as if they were a single simple thing. But at the same time, there are some important uses for the notion of community that remain. Uses that might benefit from an analogy to Gayatri Spivak's strategic essentialism. And in these uses we might simultaneously recognize that our calls to community are flawed and in fact impossible, but nonetheless useful as organizing tools. We might thus begin to think of the call to community not as an invocation of some kind of organic unity, but instead as a form of coalition building, a developing solidarity. Now, solidarity itself is a challenged concept of course. There are some important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom and for whom. Women of color, for instance, have noted the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests. Leading author Mickey Kendall to establish the Twitter hashtag Solidarity is for white women. So I don't want to make it sound as though solidarity can serve as an unproblematic substitute for community, but I remain convinced that there are stronger forms of solidarity to be found. Forms that do not demand that individuals seeking redress for institutionalized injustices drop their issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those individuals are all of our issues too and that we must stand together and support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this is the form of solidarity that I'm seeking. A form that I am convinced is a necessary prerequisite for successful sustainable development of nonprofit, open source, community-owned networks and platforms. So what's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Eleanor Ostrom. So Ostrom was not just as the UBS Nobel Perspectives website has it, the first female Nobel Laureate in economics. She remains to date the only female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common pool resource management. She argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was in inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place. So it's important to focus just a bit on what's meant by the notion of common pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable, whether individuals can be prevented from using them, and whether they are rivalrous, whether one individual's use precludes another's. So public goods are those resources that are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, meaning no one can be prevented from using them, and no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous. They can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability for another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but non-rivalrous, right? Those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are excludable — I'm sorry — goods that are non-excludable but rivalrous are often referred to as common pool resources, and it is those resources to which the tragedy of the commons, the overuse of shared natural resources, can apply. Now at the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the free rider problem, which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. And as the number of free riders grows, the resources are prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. So the only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons before Ostrom was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization. But as Ostrom argues in her 1990 book, Governing the Commons, The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, this model, like other such models like the prisoner's dilemma, was based on a particular and particularly pessimistic view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor. So what makes these models so dangerous, she argued, when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy, is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken as faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them. I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than merciless tragedies. So Ostrom's work explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources such as fisheries, the problems that she described and the potential solutions she explored have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the nonprofit community-developed autonomy-owned software projects like Archive, like Sam Vera, like Humanities Commons, on which they should be able to rely. There are lots of examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem. There's often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence. Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic, eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the Commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is in many cases the problem that community developed projects were developed in order to evade. So as with Ostrom's phishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving. So last summer, Brett Bobley tweeted a question about sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Kalis, noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining these projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in generous thinking, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable. And those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor, but most challengingly, that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements. Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions. And they need to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment. How, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability. But getting institutions to stop competing with one another and to start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. And the privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market- oriented, competition-based approach to everything that the institution does. And making the argument that this approach must be set aside is a huge part of what I've tried to do in generous thinking. And it's equally a part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons. So a brief side note on Humanities Commons for those of you who may not be fully familiar with the project. The MLA is the largest scholarly society in the humanities, representing about 25,000 members across North America and around the world. Members who teach and study a very wide range of languages, literatures, and cultures. And as Cliff mentioned, my former employer with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 in order to provide our members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at the annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with folks who were in other areas of the humanities. And so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields. So with further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and then developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons spaces developed for the members of the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and the College Art Association. But beyond working with those partners, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work. And so we decided to open the Network's hub to anyone who wants to join across the disciplines and around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership. All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the Network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites and they can deposit and share their work in the Network's open access repository. And this future of the, I'm sorry, this fusion of the social network with the library quality repository means that not only is stuff being put into the repository and not only can the stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used as there's a community there that is actively sharing stuff in it. So while opening the Commons hub to free participation by any interested member or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use. A little over two years later, we have over 17,000 members. It's created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the Network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. And it's understandable as they need to provide their members with such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms humanity's Commons from a common pool resource into a club good. One whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the Network, if it were an exclusive service, see the openness of the hub as diminishing the Network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the Network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests. So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the Network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the Network, but that the Network belongs to them and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a working revenue model, but far more importantly, a compelling governance model. One that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the Network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the Network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success. So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure and for the academy itself lies. My arguments to this end probably needless to say have a tough road ahead of them. I'm asking the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, fully aligning its internal reward structures with the public mission that it claims to espouse. And this is where the need for a paradigm shift, for politics, arises. This conclusion reached by a study entitled how significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion and tenure documents. The answer, not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, quote, institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work towards systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized. When we've all doubt got stories to tell that would support this conclusion. Stories that illustrate the ways that the kinds of collaborative work that might best support the university's need for a more open publicly oriented future goes on or under rewarded. Here's mine. Right around the time I began sketching the outline for this book, I attended a day long workshop on new models for open scholarly communication for which the provost at a large state research university had been invited to give the keynote address. And the keynote was extremely powerful. The provost described his campus's efforts to embrace a renewed model of, or mission of public service. And he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty's work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university's singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self interested. Can opening our work up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems that it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or I should say it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised. And then it was like somebody had dimmed the lights. We heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest quality venues, conventionally understood. So frustrated by this shift, I asked the provost during the Q&A what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible public research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good, to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus from the provost through the deans, the chairs, the faculty in a collective project of revisiting. I mean really imagining all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good. What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university's core service mission? The provost's response was more or less that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness in its institutional cohort. Now to say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was, if nothing else, honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched, unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually organized today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated missions and values may mean that those institutions have not, in fact, fully embraced those missions or values. Or perhaps it's that there is a shadow mission, competition that excludes the possibility of that full alignment. The worst of it and the single fact that generous thinking is most driven by is that that provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher engineering is, I'm sorry, higher education is engineered from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies and higher education press to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. And any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. So what Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to compete all the time forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it possible for them to take any other approach. So what I'm arguing, both directly in generous thinking and indirectly through humanities commons is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not other institutions of higher education. Not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather it's the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. So we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university. We're going to have to do it as a sector acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward both the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community supported infrastructure we have to become and genuinely act as a community. None of this will be easy but the alternatives which we have seen building over the last few years which will be far worse. And with that cheery note I'm going to say thanks. So we've got a bit of time for questions and I see that there are microphones in the aisles sort of though I can't quite see them. So if you have them please approach a microphone so that we can get that audible to everyone including me. I feel like I should address you as Elijah or something as I feel like you're a prophet in the wilderness. It occurs to me that part of the challenge in achieving what you're suggesting is that the institutions that are most prestigious are the ones that are most likely to be influential in a change but the irony of that is that they're also the ones that are currently winning by the current game and the current rules of the game. I wondered if you would comment on that in particular have you had any better luck in success with those who are not that level. Absolutely. I think that's a crucial point to make and it's one that's equally operative within campuses as well as across them trying to get the senior faculty of an institution to revisit policies and transform them can be quite difficult because they succeeded just fine at them. It really requires folks who are willing to step back and take a look at hierarchies on campus at the ways that resources are distributed who are willing to say maybe supporting the collective is more important than the fact that we have succeeded at this model. It's entirely likely you're correct that at this kind of cross institutional collaboration there is more to be gained from working with institutions that aren't at the peak of the rankings that aren't in the most elite budget strata of higher education. I do think that there are some consortia coming now as a member of the Big Ten Academic Alliance I think there's a lot of work to be done among state R1 institutions that are not of that top budgetary tier to really come together and think about what we can do collectively that none of us can afford to do alone. But I also hope that there's room in these kinds of collaborations for collaboration across layers of the institutional hierarchy for the state flagship R1 institution to bring the R2s, the regional comprehensives, the community colleges along in these collaborations because again there's a phenomenal amount of energy and goodness knows a phenomenal number of students being served as you start looking at these other kinds of institutions that we really need to support much better than we're doing. So, you know, part of what I'm hoping is to be able to appeal to some of those institutions that don't really have to collaborate because in fact they can do things pardon me, things by themselves to say yes but if you do look at how much of this you can help and if you help all of us you help yourself by sustaining the sector as a whole. Sorry, the lights are a little intense so I am having to see if there are other people standing up. Hi. Thank you. I feel like a lot of people have questions and maybe I'll ask one that's on people's mind or put out a thought. My name is Dale Askin with the University of Alberta and a lot of what you've talked about is universal but some of it applies specifically to the United States but with the one place for all of us globally collider in these rankings and I feel like the provost answer everything goes on the hill of tenure and promotion to die but really at the end of the day the rankings, we all make fun of them provost and president and private will roll their eyes about them but they are absolutely beholden to them and as long as they are in place and as long as the model behind those is driven by a single publisher who controls most of the data which controls the largest chunk of those rankings are we kind of just running up against an obelisk there? I'm curious what you think about the rankings I mean obviously not much I do think that the beholdenness of our higher administrations to those rankings is a really serious problem I mean insofar as there is good news on this side of the Atlantic is that we're not quite as beholden to them as they are right now in the UK things are even more intense there though I will say that I have this week a piece coming out in Times Higher Ed saying give up your rankings so we'll see if that does any good whatsoever I'm not holding my breath exactly but I do think that we need to start having some really hard conversations about what exactly these rankings are telling us and why we care about them so much which percentage of that ranking has to do with weird statistics like the acceptance rate among students applying to the institution which means that you climb the rankings not based on how well you serve the students that you admit but on how many you cannot serve so the more you reject the better off you are that's a real problem that we're valuing those kinds of metrics over other kinds of metrics that actually reflect on the values that we have and the mission that we have is a real issue at the individual faculty assessment level there's a project that my Dean Chris Long and a whole host of his collaborators have been working on Humetrix which is seeking humane metrics for the humanities and social sciences to say that we need to stop counting things just because they can be counted and instead really start assessing our work based on the actual values that we hold it's a heavy lift to try and figure out first what those values are secondly are they shared and third how then do you measure things based on values but it's only in undertaking that lift and really being to work on that incredibly thorny problem that we might get past the horrifying quantification of productivity in faculty life these days and I firmly believe this for institutions too that unless institutions come together and say you know what the things that we really value are how well we're serving the community around us the things that we really value have to do with our students and their personal but also social success out in the world after they leave us and that you know this is the point at which I sputter into ultimately saying we really need to find ways to have that conversation about leaving those rankings behind and finding some other way to do an assessment that might actually matter so I think there might be time for one more if there is one more there seems to be one more okay I'll take it that was fantastic thank you so this idea that one institution alone can't make the wholesale change that needs to be to solve what is a network and a collective problem I think it's really important and individuals can't solve it so I want to get your thoughts on what do you think about that middle layer is department or discipline specific networks and collaborations so what if not a random example departments took it at one school I don't know pick an R1 somewhere on the east coast were to actually be charged with creating plans for how to value the open impact of their scholars right and they did that planning in conjunction with departments across the country from all kinds of schools would that move us further than the top down or the bottoms up I don't know I hope it will I think it might I think there's something to be said in this and I think getting those departments to recognize the level of power they have in this matter is extremely important I've had this conversation not just with my dean but with other deans as well and with provost for that matter who have said that there's this perception among the faculty and including among department chairs that for instance on the matter of tenure and promotion standards you know whatever the department wants to promote that's great but once things hit the college level or the university level they won't support it in fact the deans and the provosts that I've talked to have said we really don't care that much we want to know what your standards are and we want to know that you're employing them well and fairly and rigorously but beyond that what your field values as scholarship that's awesome because deans and provosts are used to promoting architects right and they're used to promoting people teaching dance and they're used to promoting a whole range of things that has nothing to do with books and journal articles so if a department were able to come together and say you know what the form that this work takes we are way less concerned about than the impact that it has so for us what most matters is X Y and Z that has to do with the public impact that this work is having and they pass that up to the dean it is very likely that a conversation could ensue that could then have effects on the rest of that college so my hope is that yeah I mean I would love to hear more about this project at that hypothetical R1 institution on the east coast because I do think that this is one of those places where we could actually get some traction on some problems like these alright have a lovely conference thank you I couldn't ask for a better start to our discussions over the next day and a half thank you so much