Generous Thinking

Totally agree

I guess the good thing of teaching business classes is that we always let students to do projects that look into people’s needs and then come up with ideas that can help the community.

Maybe ask students to articulate both what they agree and disagree with the reading?

[demanding that we behave according to my understanding of civility runs the risk of reinforcing inequities between those who already get to speak and those who are expected to sit respectfully and listen passively.]

This is an excellent point — one that is so important in the present moment, when young people in particular are addressing long-standing inequalities and are facing the criticism that they are not practicing civility!

I love this point. It is so important that universities and departments “credit” public work appropriately, particularly at a time of shrinking budgets. If we wish to make a case to taxpayers that they should support their universities, and to private donors that their funding will be used for the greater good, we need to be present in the community and offer many opportunities for community education and community dialogue with faculty — locally and globally. However, this takes so much time and faculty are already overburdened, especially at public institutions. It seems to me that establishing “ready-made” opportunities for faculty-community dialogue, administered regularly and consistently by university staff, would be very helpful — that way faculty do not have to initiate, plan, organize and fund outreach activities alone, reinventing the wheel each time.

[If we are to correct course, if we are to restore public support for our institutions and our fields, we must find ways to communicate and to make clear the public goals that our fields have, and the public good that our institutions serve.]

This is a wonderful point, though it assumes goodwill and sincere engagement by critics. I think many of the groups and individuals criticizing liberal arts/humanities education are precisely concerned about the relational knowledge, the generous thinking, that the author promotes. So I am interested in how this political problem will be addressed in this text.

so,  we, in order to exist we need this institution- the university

in the way universities are structured faculty are labor force, the point is what is the secondary benefit, this means what makes happy these workers? well, a good investment in egos. We get a status which has great recognition, as social quo.

then we need the institution in order to exist, in order to research and perhaps to teach.

The Covid-19 pandemic may raise the same question to us as educators that is it too much individualism that we have advocated?

This chapter makes me think about scholarly conferences in the humanities—a forum where we gather as a discourse community to speak in a specialized language that you argue we can and should use with one another. But I’ve always marveled at the way humanists (particularly English professors) read aloud “papers” written in recondite prose, usually at a fast clip to stay nominally close to their time limits. My colleagues in the sciences and social sciences are astounded that we tolerate such dry, inaccessible styles of oral delivery. We would never get away with doing so in the classroom, so why do we subject each other to it? It may be that our most sophisticated arguments about literary language depend on very precise, complex language to express them. But sometimes that specialized language seems more a form of self-protection and a marker of prestige than a mode of effective communication.

In this chapter, you talk about scholars code switching to communicate their ideas to various publics in writing. What if we also reimagined the scholarly conference as a forum in which we speak not only to each other but also seek to reach broader publics who reside in the cities where we typically gather?

There are other good models for sharing scholarship, from David Earle’s now defunct 1925 Virtual Newstand, to Amanda Visconti’s now archived Infinite Ulysses (http://infiniteulysses.com/), to William Maxwell’s FBEyes digital archives http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/.

When we as scholars think beyond the print formats of the scholarly monograph, article, or conference paper, we may be able to more readily imagine and realize forms of knowledge sharing that various publics will want to engage with and participate in.