Generous Thinking

Please do not take the following suggestion as being glib. Consider a thought experiment: what would a Generous Thinking board game look like, feel like?

I ask because play with stereotypes (how they are shaped and how they react with each other) is something that suggests itself in the shadow missions (The University paragraph 6) and paradigms (Paradigm Shift, paragraph 8).

I raise this because I am fond of exploring group dynamics and the plurality of roles. For some reason, after mulling the potential of the shadow-paradigm for fictional treatment, I find myself thinking about the Divergent Factions in the fictional universe created by Veronica Roth (see http://divergent.wikia.com/wiki/Factions) how they resemble the poses of the intellectual vis-a-vis society [Abnegation • Amity • Candor • Dauntless • Erudite • Factionless]. It’s a reach but not so much when I read this in a profile of Robert Morrison, an expert on De Quincey

“I once had a teacher who told me that the scholar has two roles,” says Morrison. “He [she] is both a monk and an actor. The monk is the scholar when [s]he’s doing research, the actor is when [s]he’s in the classroom, teaching.”

http://www.queensu.ca/research/humandimensions/morrison

Care of the self:
For soothing respite and a reminder of the “humane passion for pure and disinterested reading” indulge in Virginia Woolf’s “Hours in a Library.

It could be just my  mood tonight, but I’m wondering if we (in academia) can earn the right to be generous anymore. Not “can we be generous?” but will anyone trust the generosity we may try to extend?

This is very fuzzy in my head right now, but if the women of West Virginia can organize and win a teacher’s strike, everything seems possible. On the other hand, the recent record of higher ed’s embrace of ruthless, mindless competition and performative hand-wringing about adjunct exploitation without managing to do anything about it suddenly makes me wonder if we are capable of generosity, not to mention putting a generation in debt bondage, if we can shake off our elitism and reliance on claims of expertise and training and actually DO something brave like those women – I don’t know. Our record of generosity is not great lately. We have been shamefully timid. We mostly talk to ourselves and do very little listening.

I think a lot about the near universal love of public libraries in the US and their (admittedly unequally funded) persistence when nearly everything else requires membership fees and proof of  return on investment and I wonder how they have managed to practice generosity all these years. It’s something about being local and being literally free to all and being willing to let people love what they love without telling them they’re loving it wrong. It’s also a balance of community members owning the place and librarians negotiating their management of a common resource while (sometimes) insisting on values that may not align with local mores. It’s also just about the only public space where everyone can go, which means it seems fine and natural for librarians to be trained to administer Narcan because who else is going to do it? Where else can people go? It’s as if all the other cultural institutions locked their doors so let’s let library workers tackle all the social problems. (And the public schoolteachers. They’re expected to do it all, too, but with less love and more segregation.)

I’m also thinking about what Dorothea brought up early on. Culture is all around us and people have stories to tell and histories that matter to them and they’re making films with their phones and we’ve done a terrible job of even acknowledging these thriving communities of creativity that get schooled in capitalism by “free” surveillance platforms that assume it’s all about attention and marketing.

Sorry, sorry. This gloom doesn’t belong here, but maybe the question I want to raise is “how?” and “whose example should we be following, because ours has been pretty craptastic lately.”

There was generous thinking, grand thinking in the past. What could it look like now? How can it be inclusive and respectful and … the kind of big generosity we need now?

You are the best. And I will definitely be calling on you as things move forward.

ps:  I would be honored to help out in that task.

This is an extraordinarily learned, provocative and inspiring work and I feel privileged to have gotten the invitation to read it.  You have explored this terrain in a generous and direct way — a very difficult combination that proves the point you are making about listening and teaching.

I think that it might be useful not only to suggest how the community can move forward together but start the process.  You might do that by first inquiring of the associations of which you and others of us are a part to challenge them to collaborate  in the work of building a coalition that can enact the change that you have proven is needed.  So instead of you writing the conclusion, you are challenging us to work together and you will have already begun the task of organizing that change.